Virtual, possible, other worlds

This post is not really about narrative as such. But as my husband has got into exploring second life I thought I better put something about it here. In narrative theory, the trope of the world has become increasingly explored, with text world theory, possible world theory, storyworlds and so on. Why is this? What is it about the notion of a 'world' that is so attractive and topical? In part, the narrative work is clearly a reflection of the interdisciplinary influence of artificial intelligence, philosophy and computer science, it is part of the 'cognitive turn' in narratology, and more broadly the increasingly diffuse contextualisation of narrative. But maybe it is all the more salient because of the new media technologies where gaming, virtual realities and the mutliplicities of hypertextual narratives (or at least some of them) encourage us to conceptualise this as part of our 'everyday' 'real world' environments. Well, that's my thought for today.