Years ago I was involved in a virtual reality computer program called Alpha World (which has since evolved into www.activeworlds.com) that was open to the world at large but the vast majority of users were english speaking because the software was made in america and it's just that english speaking people heard about it first.

Now to explain this I have to define Ground Zero for those of you not familiar with A.W. Ground Zero was where you first literally "fall in" to this virtual reality world. Whenever you first loaded up the A.W. program, you'd appear on the screen as an avatar falling from the sky and you'd land in the middle of this big virtual world at coordinates zero north and zero west. You hit the ground, which was zero elevation. There you have it. Ground Zero. The starting point for all A.W. adventures.

The problem was few people who used the A.W. software ever actually ventured anywhere.

Ground Zero (GZ) was where the vast majority of people loitered about because this fantastic experimental interactive software program which was designed to allow people to build majestic virtual landscapes and work together to solve the world's problems is basically used for little more than a glorified chat program.

Within about six months to a year of its inception, A.W. started attracting individuals on more than a national scale. Very often I'd fall into GZ and be subjected to a barrage of what (to my uneducated eye/virtual ears) read like random garbage or babytalk. I soon learned this was french, or spanish, or german, or italian. It was really rather fascinating actually. I'd be standing there in a virtual world listening to people from all over the planet, and in this sea of words I'd be trying to carry on a conversation with an englishman and someone from jamaica while failing to complete renovations on my virtual house due to incessant builder errors.

However, this caused a series of arguments and political coal rakings in the AW community because some english speaking individuals were less polite and civil to 'foreigners' than others, and the feeling was often mutual. Especially with the french, who I recall being particularly easily annoyed and confrontational. They were also allegedly very good at hacking, although that was largely unprovable.

Eventually it was decided that a separate world needed to be created especially for certain nonenglish speaking peoples. And soon after that practically every language on the planet had their own virtual world.

And english troublemakers would try to go into these nonenglish speaking worlds and be generally rowdy, but the nonenglish speaking people would just kickbutt them out of their worlds and everybody was happy.

Before I left A.W. for the last time, the one single world had multiplied into hundreds. However, the world breakdown was something like this. The vast majority of worlds had anywhere from zero to ten people in them. In each world, one or two people would be builders, and the others would be individuals wandering from world to world being bored and looking for something to do.

Approximately 10 to 20 people would be in each of the foreign language worlds, depending on how popular A.W. was in a given country. The vast majority of regular users of A.W. would be located either in a world called ''The Gate'' or in the original Alpha World¹ and you want to know what they were doing in those two worlds?

Building? No. Working together to solve the world's problems? Not hardly. Standin right on top of Ground Zero as dozens of others fell onto the same coordinates and treating this massive computer program like it was Internet Relay Chatwiff pictures??? Most certaintly.

I barely escaped Active Worlds with all my brain cells still intact. I fear for those still trapped within.