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Welcome to the world of Everquest and of online gaming.
    In an ordinary video game, the players are in control. They can switch the game on or off. In an online game, players can enter or leave. But the game goes on without them.
    In games like Everquest, players adopt characters and try to develop skills. They use a virtual currency to start businesses and get rich. They make friends and enemies. They fight wars, start revolutions and sometimes even get married to other characters.
    Everquest has 60,000 players, according to its manufacturers: They estimate that 12,000 of these spend most of their time in the Everquest world. The real world is just the place they eat and sleep.
    The next stage, say game designers, is to produce a virtual world with a real currency, so that people can move their work away from reality as well. Some scientists believe that there are parallel universes existing at the same time in different places. This seems to be the future of video games—hundreds of different versions of the present, where anything is possible.
    Perhaps one of them will have a museum of real life, where players can find out what existence was like when we only had one world to live in.