Times are changing fast enough that it’s hard to know where to start unspooling the question of modern identity. Questions to answer are breeding on the way to that question. But then one evening, as is typical when our filters tune to particular riddles, a colleague across a table from me tossed the end of the topic’s thread.This colleague – we’ll call him Dmitri – explained over a drink that he’d been up late the night before as he spent all his spare time living a second life in an online multiplayer role-playing game. He lived that parallel life as an avatar identity, one who owned a cache of military-grade virtual weapons – bought for real cash – as well as a tugboat in which he went fishing. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. A cloud passed over his brow as he told me there were growing tensions between his real and his virtual lives. Specifically,
