It’s useful to recognize that we probably lie on the continuum somewhere between the intent to immersion or augmentation. If my intention tends towards immersion, I can be highly offended by someone who asks questions about my real life. If I’m there because I’m augmenting RL interests, then I’m very likely to share e-mails, Facebook profiles, and other information about myself.

There’s no question the two blur. Using these categories are nice reminders in our interactions with others that their intent may not be the same as our own, and in particular this might be useful to a newcomer to synthetic worlds.

For myself, I’m with you – immersion gave way to augmentation gave way to different touch-points of immersion, and who can tell the difference anymore.

But the virtual and real aren’t that much different – I can be immersed in reading a book or going to a movie, and my life is always augmented by my actions and thoughts. Increasingly, these distinctions won’t need to be articulated they’ll be as second-nature (pardon the pun) as our real lives. I wouldn’t label myself a realist vs. an escapist, I’m both.

Arriving in SL, newcomers might find the labels useful to help focus their journey, although they’ll probably discover that however narrow they wish their focus to be, that there’s such a wealth of experiences that they’ll end up breaking through the boundaries of the intent because it will just be too interesting not to.

I think you have wonderfully resumed the experience of disorientation and later, either discouragement or exhilaration when one discovers Second Life to be less a game than a new world. I hope your advice is heard.

One thing I have difficulties finding myself in is the Augmentationists vs. Immersionists debate. With all due respect for Gwyneth Lewellyn’s categorization, I find both mixed instead of distinct. My SL activities are based on RL interests and behaviour (though going far beyond what I am willing to put into practice IRL) ; but immersion in the social and virtual space where I have the opportunity to live them, and the communities therein, including abiding to rules and practices making little sense from a RL viewpoint, is the key to the whole experience. I’d say both augmentation and immersion melt into a hybrid, one probably balanced differently form person to person, rather than that they are two separate approaches to the new world.