During this past week, I ‘ve visited Woodlands and Astral Gardens in the U.K.,  watered and revived Bellis Lycaena in Arizona, and spotted Water Dragons, Lovebirds and Golden Dragons in Auckland. I added properties to my city portfolio, including a theatre and a furniture store and collected rents on my extensive housing stock. Phew! An exhausting schedule – and this is on top of running my successful restaurant, Andrea’s Emporium, which currently has a top buzz rating. Impressed? You should be, especially considering I haven’t once left my sofa to experience these achievements!

Obviously, on top of my full-time day job, this would be impossible without the existence of that cornerstone of modern society, the internet. When I arrive home from an intensely stimulating but exhausting day of teaching secondary school English, it’s relaxing to water plants in virtual gardens in Fairyland, cook exotic dishes in Cafe World and discover new creatures (not to mention friends) on the various applications available through Facebook. It’s certainly easier and quicker than tending to the malicious weeds in the real garden or cooking actual food in my real kitchen, which might necessitate loading the dishwasher too!   Thanks to the internet and the sociodigital entrepreneurs who created Facebook and applications including Cafe World, My City Life and Fairyland, we can broaden our horizons and experience all these virtual worlds at the click of a mouse.

And, believe me, I’m not alone in this. I have work colleagues who become Cafe World colleagues at night and part of my virtual garden network in Fairyland. What is the attraction? Having discussed it at length with other application addicts, there have been various theories: it offers a safe world where you can control your environment, allows a short escape from the problems of reality, rewards your efforts with a sense of achievement when you see your level go up to the ringing sounds of cheers and digital messages of congratulations. Most importantly, it can be done within the same four walls…

Which leads me to the question: are we expanding our worlds or simply narrowing them down when we play on these applcations? Like my ten-year-old son, I find myself living life through a screen and a keypad, wired to my own personal matrix of experience. Instead of going out to walk my westie, Toby, I stay comfortably seated; instead of making the effort to cook something nutritious and sit down as a family to eat it, I expand my virtual eating emporium; instead of making the time to see real friends in the flesh I chat to friends on Facebook. I’m going to make a confession here: I haven’t had a face-to-face conversation with my next-door neighbour for weeks, but we have chatted on Facebook. Sadly, I don’t think it’s particularly unusual in our four-walled electronic culture.

I’ve recently re-joined a local spa and health club in an attempt to exercise my ‘real’ body (as opposed to my online avatar) and I’ve invested in some comfortable boots for walking Toby (in preference to trying to find a Griffin in my friends’ gardens). I will experience real life first-hand. I will not become a prisoner of a virtual world within the same four walls… I may even take a one-week break from my cafe, like my friend Lynne who found her blood pressure rising when her cafe stopped co-operating and she ‘spoiled’ all her Dino-eggs and King Crab Bisque. But first, I have to serve my Chicken Pot Pies – they’ve been cooking for two days and it would be criminal to waste that virtual investment.

Are these applications offering a valuable source of relaxing entertainment, or – as I increasingly suspect – are we wasting our time in a world that’s made up of pixels on a screen? Send me your thoughts and anecdotes – please add your comments below.