Dusan Writer has an excellent essay on alts in Second Life and I am reminded that I promised someone an essay on identity some time ago and have never gotten around to writing it. It’s probably too early in the morning to write anything coherent, but suffice to say, my Second Life alt experiments have been a dismal failure for anything other than functional purposes since I can’t share friends lists, inventory, or permissions in any meaningful way, and without my friends, my stuff, and access to my builds, it holds no appeal for me except when I need to do research or work on something completely undisturbed.
Still, Dusan Writer’s essay The Place of Alts in Virtual Worlds and Second Life: Possession or Expression is worth the read and sometime when I’m more awake I might get around to that long overdue essay myself.