Previous essays: 3: My Man in Belorussia 2: A New Renaissance 1: In the Beginning

One curious parallel to consider is between the rise in popularity of mythology in Renaissance art and the growth of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs. Really — bear with me.

In the Dark Ages before the Renaissance, artworks had primarily dealt with Christian themes. Paintings would depict stories from the Bible, for example, or from the lives of the saints. The key thing to remember here is that these stories were considered true. At the time, a painting of an apostle was a true representation of something that actually happened. That it was a painting, that it was art, didn't matter as much: the story it represented was fact, not fiction.

But by the late 1400s, a new fashion was emerging. In addition to the churches, rich merchants began commissioning artworks, and their new craze was ancient mythology. Botticelli's 1477 painting, the "Primavera," is a good example of this. (Click here to see it). The painting shows characters from mythology, rather than the Bible. The girl in the middle, for example, is the Roman goddess Flora.

This was a new paradigm. Not only were pagan subjects a new idea in painting at the time, but the mythologies themselves were changing the way people thought. Until this time, cultural objects were considered to show the truth — even if not as literal representations, then as metaphors based in truth. The Bible may have been a story, but woe betide those who considered it fictional.

Mythology on the other hand, was acknowledged both to be false — the Roman gods didn't exist like the Christian God was considered to — but also to be curiously true. For the first time, a fictional world was created that existed in a third place, neither entirely true or entirely false. Paintings like the "Primavera" re-introduced wholly formed worlds that didn't exist, but which were common to a great many people.

It's from this growth of Western culture we can trace fantasies of all forms. It was a whole new way of thinking, and one taken to a zenith today by the internet and MMORPGs.

The virtual worlds of the internet, from the one-dimensional realms of mailing lists to the ultra-complexities of War of Warcraft, Second Life or Eve Online, have become similar "third places" to the mythologies within Renaissance painting. They don't really exist, but are places we can all refer to as if they were real. Indeed, at some point this line blurs, and a good deal of the online is more real, more immediate, and more meaningful than real life — just as the best art is more real than reality itself.

Admittedly, these virtual worlds are currently nothing but games. If that bothers you, take solace in that it's more a matter of the limitations of the community from which they arise than a failing of the idea itself. Saying today that virtual worlds will never be anything but toys is like sitting in pre-Renaissance Florence and declaring painting as nothing but religious decoration — that their patrons only wanted Christian scenes doesn't mean the artists couldn't draw anything else. Indeed, virtual worlds are already being requisitioned as experimental playpens by social scientists and economists, excited by the potential of a wholly contained universe to play with. Today's games designers are looking to Botticelli, who took some stories and some paint and made a whole new universe for us to revel in. Botticelli's painting led to fiction and fantasy and imagination. What will today's virtual worlds bring?

Geek extraordinaire, open source icon, and Guardian correspondent Ben Hammersley will entertain Technica readers each month with various musings from the world of science and technology. Click here to visit his website.