hello r and sj, and everyone, i think the puppet/avatar analogy may very well serve the urgent purpose of applied ethical analysis from the pragmatic point of view of dealing with IRBs today, and i may well use it myself :) at some point. however, there is another consideration for the long term which I think will eventually undermine the analogy. consider this: puppets are controlled by puppeteer(s), and can be considered within the world of the direct representations of the puppeteer: with this expressionistic model of the pup/pup'teer relationship the ethical considerations would be similar to anyone studying RL social interactions in a dramaturgical theoretical framework however, puppets don't interact with other puppets avatars do interact with other avatars, and because of this process and 'extra' layer of social meaning, the human operater of the avatar ceases to be analogous to a puppeteer. the puppeteer has to deal with the ethical demands of her audience and other puppeteers. the avatar operator has to deal with the ethical demands of those same constituents (except in this case not a RL-public audience but only other avatar operators in SL since human beings in RL don't interact in SL except via the medium of avatars). But ALSO the avatar operator has to deal with the ethical demands of avatars that he or she is not controlling (ie. controlled by a different avatar operator). here there could be two divergent directions in which one could interpret the consequences of this added ethical dimension: a) interpret avatar-to-avatar interaction as human-operator-to-human- operator interaction, but since the consequences of these interactions have no ethically-portentous bearing on the human operators in their RL-public-domain context (ie. insofar as what happens in SL stays in SL - i know this is not always the case but it very often is a norm for SL users), which would lead us to b) interpret avatar-to-avatar interaction as a process that constructs a sui generis kind of subjectivity that can potentially involve harm from one avatar to another avatar; the problem with this approach (b) is that IRBs truly are not ready for it, I would presume, but I think we need to educate the public and eventually IRBs about this emergent reality David Toews, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Windsor, Ontario