The virtual community can also provide an environment for social experimentation.

The idea of a social “sandbox”, where we can try out new models of society, has excited sociologists and anthropologists. In effect, the virtual community is a partial “moratorium”, a place where our actions are to some extent divorced from our responsibilities. Taken further, the online world can be a place where we can vent our frustrations, or experiment with the consequences of actions without damaging real people or objects (similar to the idea of the paraspace, a common thread in many Science Fiction stories, see [Bukatman1993]).

We can also experiment with the laws of reality themselves. What would it be like to live in a world of four or five spatial dimensions? Or no gravity? Virtual worlds can be used to play with our concept and experience of reality in the most basic sense.