video game developer and expert in online sex games, has been looking into the question. She has seen some users log on to experience sexual acts impossible in the real world, like having sex while lying in the clouds. Of one thing she is certain. There is no substitute for the thrill of the physical. “It’s as if someone put 20 pictures of lasagna on my desk,” she said. “It still wouldn’t replace even one of the real thing.”

Brathwaite worked in video games for two decades before she began focusing on sex games. She was hired in 2003 as a developer on “Playboy: The Mansion," a simulation game released in 2005 in which the player assumes the role of Hugh Hefner. Intrigued by the growing field, she’s held a Sex in Games roundtable in 2005, chaired the first Sex in Games Conference in San Francisco last June and written a book on the subject, "Sex in Video Games," to be published by Charles River Media this fall.

While virtual sex happens in designated “mature” spaces in Second Life, it is only part of the larger constellation of relationships formed within the virtual world. Braithwaite has known couples in Second Life who adopt virtual children through the game when they can’t conceive in real life.

Catherine Smith, the marketing director for Linden Lab, explains: “Second Life is a social environment, it's a creative playground, a place to try new things risk free.” She says one of the largest, most active groups in the virtual world is called the “Furry Community,” since the members create animal avatars with human-like physical and personality traits.  It’s the next step in “furry fandom,” a genre of literature, comic books and role-playing. Within the larger Second Life community, there are Forrest Furries, Naughty Furries and some 50 other groups with 1,400 members.

Among them is Rebekah Gatian, a 23-year-old from Kansas, who has been a furry artist for years, most recently recreating a sketch of a feminine feline in her avatar, K’Sharra Manimal, a Naughty Furry.

Online, K’Sharra met Fallen Vaughan, a handsome tiger created by Chris Manifold, a 20-year-old prep cook from British Columbia, Canada. 

And like Farrant and Roden, Gatian and Manifold decided to meet in person last February after three months of online conversation. They have been dating ever since. Gatian plans to move to Canada to be with her beau as soon as she finishes massage therapy school this fall. But for now their relationship is confined to the online world, interactions over Web cam and the fantasy artwork she draws, erotic depictions of two tigers at play.

“My avatar is a representation of the ideal me,” Gatian wrote in an interview conducted via instant messenger, “sexy, exotic, tough, and independent. Qualities of a tiger.”

Gatian describes herself as “a bit heavyset but well proportioned.” At 5’5’’ and 200 pounds, her svelte and sexy tigress avatar has positively affected her in real life, she said. “It’s given me an ideal to

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