You could blame Neal Stephen son. His 1992 cult novel, Snow Crash, envisioned the Metaverse, a three-dimensional realm of cyberspace in which people of the near future could walk, talk, fight, make love, all while wearing online "bodies" called avatars. Though the real world in Snow Crash was a living hell, the Metaverse summed up a lot of readers' hopes of where the wired world was heading.

Fact is, the Metaverse is already here. Sort of. Three currently accessible "virtual chat" worlds offer a rudimentary version of Stephenson's vision, and Bill Gates is readying a fourth. At the very least, these efforts represent a graphic improvement over the text-based chat seen on such services as America Online or in Internet Relay Chat (irc). Now you can plug your modem into vast realms, take on the visual persona of whoever or whatever you would like to be, and talk to people around the planet via cartoon word balloons. It sounds suspiciously like the death of intimacy, until you notice something: nobody has much to say just yet.

The Palace (software available at http://www.thepalace.com) may be the most elastic of the virtual-chat (vc) worlds in terms of what you can look like and where you can go (the proprietary software, like this magazine, is owned by Time Warner). Once you install the software and pay a $20 fee, you enter the main Palace site and are handed a generic smiley-face avatar. But since you can also scan in any image and change your look at a whim, a lot of the action involves people trading "faces" and discussing avatar-building techniques. In effect, it's a water cooler for design geeks.

The many rooms in the main palace, static though they are, are gorgeous to behold, and it's nice that you can build your own palace universe if your computer is powerful enough (the Website listed above has links to, among others, Cybertown's and the Fox network's palace sites). But actual discussion, so far, has taken a back seat to rude-boy attitude and visual showboating. It's like being at a raucous party peopled by Japanese comic-book characters and women in lingerie.

By contrast, WorldsAway (CompuServe, Go Away; software available at http://www.worldsaway.com) is as sober as the morning after a party. You need to be a CompuServe subscriber to play here, and like that service, WorldsAway has lots of rules and not much flexibility. Visually, WorldsAway's fantasy city, Kymer, is a series of pastel dreamscapes that flip by like backgrounds on a diorama; while you have a fairly wide choice of heads and bodies from which to construct an avatar, they all have a creepy, Barbie-doll quality.

Worse, it takes forever to get anyplace. But at least Kymer resembles a functioning society, with shops, a monetary system, its own newspaper, bingo games and--the true mark of civilization--muggers. It seems hacker thugs have taken to stealing the heads of innocent avatars, which makes me wonder whether cyberinsurance policies aren't far behind. Oh, one other thing WorldsAway has: Germans. Lots of Germans. It turns out that CompuServe is the No. 1 online service in Deutschland, so you may want to dust off your Berlitz tapes before you log on.

Then there's the PC-only Worlds Chat (http://www.kaworlds.com), the easiest vc universe to navigate and, yes, the most sex crazed. Cruising around is an unsettlingly fluid experience: it's very much like Doom, without weapons. The various avatars are three-dimensional as well (you can design your own, but the process is not as easy as with The Palace), and as you bop around psychedelic space-station hallways, you may feel as though you have entered an unhinged Star Wars sequel.

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You may also notice that nobody's talking, at least publicly. Like all chat software, Worlds Chat lets you send confidential messages, but it also enables you to talk in private groups, so there's no real impetus for public discourse. Besides, most here have one thing on their minds, and it ain't table tennis. The typical experience is stumbling into a room, seeing two avatars nose to nose over in the corner and realizing--just as you would at any cocktail party--that three's a crowd. Bizarre? Sure. Sick? Maybe. A sign of modern alienation? Unquestionably. Yet in a way it's a relief to know that even in this newest of mediums, there is a place for the oldest of urges. --From ENTERTAINMENT