I just thought I might add, for those that do not look a the world of virtual worlds too often, that rituals such as funeral's and marriages are common within virtual spaces, so much so that they are now part of the tradition and in part an element of the service that is offered (in fact I've met at least one researcher specializing in ritual in virtual spaces). I'm thinking here of the Events Team on Sony Online Entertainment's Star Wars Galaxies who created a Wedding Guide: http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/en_US/players/content.vm? page=Wedding%20Guide%20Intro&resource=features and who, on request, would do things like create Storm Trooper guard's of honor at Imperial events. There is some discussion about the validity of such event as they break the notion of virtual worlds as separate spaces. While many events can be integrated into the fiction of a world i.e. marrages and deaths of warriors etc occur within the fiction of most virtual spaces; there are issues when physical world events are commemorated in world e.g. 911 or when players 'game' the who notion of the real / physical divide such as in the case of 'Who Killed Miss Norway' (see some discussion of this here http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/ 2004/03/sacred_spaces.html). Something that I have not seen that much discussion of in respect of current virtual world technology is what one does with the avatar of someone that has died and in what way the person might live on virtually. We had a brief discssion on this topic on TerraNova earlier this year: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/07/ after_me_after_.html. ren terranova.blogs.com www.renreynolds.com