Avatars at Work and Play brings together contributions from leading social scientists and computer scientists who have done research on virtual environments used for collaboration and online gaming. They present well-rounded and state-of-the-art overview of current applications of multi-user virtual environment, starting from a very deep virtual reality system for Internet-based virtual environments on personal computers. It also includes online gaming in a virtual environment, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of users and presents an opportunity to learn a myriad of social problems. Avatars at Work and Play will be required reading for computer scientists and social scientists researching and developing virtual worlds.