A 20-page essay explaining why thinking of “Virtual Worlds” as opposed to “the real World” causes problems from a design and analysis perspective. Instead, it suggests, we should think of them as Anselm Strauss’s social worlds (Strauss, 1978). IMHO, this fits closely with the good parts of mainstream thinking on non-online games, e.g. James Gee’s view of individual games as being or being comprised of Semiotic Domains.