To insist in the face of all this that Second Life is not a game is to miss out on the way it illuminates what’s becoming of that impulse. Yes, Second Life lacks points, built-in goals, and other features we have long thought definitive of games. But ever since Dungeons and Dragons introduced us to the hitherto unheard-of concept of a game that never ends, we have been living in an era that requires us to constantly revise our definitions. The evolution of video games has been a furious and ceaseless reinvention of the form. We have games now being woven into otherwise utilitarian aspects of social life, like Foursquare, and games like FarmVille that straddle the line between work and play. The future of play has never looked more open-ended, protean, and complex—or, to put it another way, more like Second Life.