Tapioca tells me she’s been a Second Life citizen since October 15, 2004. “I used to play The Sims online, but it started to get boring,” she recalls. Stizzy’s, her skater product line, started accidentally. “I was just messing around with the building tools and decided to make a bike.” That innovation led her to tinker not only with virtual skateboards, but with real-life ones as well, through the customizable Canadian Maple decks site, Board Pusher.

What does her real-life family think of all this? “My parents actually play too,” she informs me, though she won’t reveal their SL identities. “They don’t tell people their real age . . . and if people knew they had an 18-year-old daughter, their cover would be blown.” Falco agrees to ask if they’d be willing to meet me in-world; less than a minute later she announces, “My dad is coming here now.” And then — poof! — a male figure whose avatar-moniker I promised not to disclose appears.

Tapioca’s father explains that he’s at home on a Tuesday afternoon because he works at night; his real-world name is Anthony. He’s admittedly “impressed by [my daughter’s] ability to build and create,” he says. But he has no personal interest in busting his ass for imaginary stuff. “Work is a real-life function for myself,” he texts.

Of course, real-world Anthony could be Tapioca’s “alt,” an alternate avatar account, or a friend Tapioca IM’d and rounded up to sustain the parental ruse. (For what it’s worth, the two characters typed simultaneously and spoke in different tones.) But the who-really-is-that dilemma is one of SL’s major complexities: real-world anonymity is not only an intrinsic feature of the imaginary realm, but a Linden-upheld guarantee.

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VIRTUAL WORLD, ACTUAL GRIEF: Earlier this month, Second Life residents held a wake for Adam Curry's mother.

Yet Rosedale must have partly intended, obscurity can be a great equalizer. “I have this big Tiki house [in SL],” says Milford-based C.C. Chapman, a digital marketer at Babson College who also hosts the music podcast Accident Hash . “The other night we did a strategy session [in the house] talking about digital marketing. I knew who these people were from talking with them before, but everyone else there didn’t,” he says. “This guy over here was a CEO and this woman over here is a stay-at-home mom trying to start her own business. But here they’re on a level playing field — they don’t know the difference — and that’s cool. The medium empowers people to be whatever they want to be.”

Such freedom can also be a conundrum, as when real-world writer Wagner James Au spent three years reporting on SL as his counterpart Hamlet Linden. SL, he theorizes, “demands new ethical [journalistic] standards because, really, in Second Life, you don’t want to violate people’s anonymity.” So in researching a story, “I would ask people questions that, based on my knowledge, would work, and demand a detailed explanation,” explains the San Francisco–based reporter who dons a white suit in honor of journalist Tom Wolfe — as does his avatar. (Au’s actually been recognized at his local Trader Joe’s, thanks to his real-world resemblance to his avatar.)

Au emphasizes that he also looks for “consistency” in stitching together real-world tales. For example, Au cites avatar Catherine Omega. In 2003, Omega claimed that she’d found herself temporarily homeless in real-life British Columbia. Still, she logged on to SL by stealing Internet access with an old laptop, went dumpster-diving for the necessary video components, and tapped into a live wire for power in the place where she’d been holed up. “She said she was a girl in her 20s squatting in a burnt-out apartment, but she could be a 50-year-old fat guy living in Milwaukee,” Au explains, pointing out that three years later Omega is still an SL resident and her biography hasn’t been debunked. “She could’ve been making this all up, but even then that is really fascinating: the level of detail that she has put into this role-playing — it’s almost as important as it being true or not.”