More than 3.6 million Koreans have avatars, or virtual selves, representing them in chat rooms and e-mail.

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For example, meetings our virtual selves called would show up in our calendars.

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Blizzard, then, failed in both tasks once users began losing control of their virtual selves or the goods they had earned.

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This proved to be an especially sensitive issue as our virtual selves developed radically different personal relationships than we had and it was not uncommon for strange, overly personal, sometimes offensive, often simply bizarre emails to arrive in our in-boxes.

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Avatar Kinect allows Xbox Live users to record their avatars in different settings chatting together in a virtual space, even if their real selves are elsewhere.

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She'd gossip about the doings in the virtual office, taking special care to note whenever our simulated selves had done something surprising atypical of their real world counterparts.

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