Design is the intent to compose opposition to nature. At the origin of our ability to produce designed artifacts, this is obvious in the form of stone tools and fire, etc. Today, our sophisticated and refined products are meant to conquer nature, even that of the artificial kind (the frontier of the economic landscape). The economic landscape, in fact, is the articulated pinnacle of human processing of nature. All things, even the most abstract, like bond trading and the economies of social networking like Facebook, can be traced back to materialism: energy, raw materials and people orchestrating them.

Shifting to VR / RW comparison, especially when considering the immersive environments of video game worlds. Certainly there is immersion with certain types of simulation - but these are always for the training towards real world (RW) implementation. Video games, on the other hand, may have some sort of unintended exhaust that relates back to the RW, but for the most part, COTS games are not concerned with this. What does it mean when we replace our RW experience, prepared to engage with cognitive tools honed through millions of years of evolution, with a simulated VR space?

A person in a hunter/gatherer scenario (A) through evolutionary adaptation could use tools to fashion a house (C) and to tame animals (B) and to overcome dangerous obstacles presented in nature (D) and (E). The obstacles presented to the person through nature are random and emergent - they are the non-living things (except where living things compete against one another) resultant from the big-bang, through the formation of Earth. 

With a VR world, the embodied player/character is also presented with a World. But this world is not emergent from accidental and random elements of the universe, they are designed by people, with specific goals in mind for how they want to guide the player. What guides a human in the RW is defined by our innate biology, as well as learned social behavior. And some of this, by necessity, translates into the game world; because we are always a human living in the world, even if we are momentarily escaping into an imaginary one. 

What we have developed through natural selection, up through technology (until the past 100 years or so) has always assisted with how we and our progeny can respond to nature: to claim it and make it support life (food), or tame it and keep it from killing us (a flood wall).

Immersive world games tap-into our sensibilities and adaptations for the RW, and redirect them towards a reasonable semblance of vertigo, and risk/reward scenarios and goal establishment, in a sophisticated, rich tapestry for interaction. The only problem is, the results of these interactions can only have meager effects brought back to the RW (except for perhaps educational games and serious games - I'm mainly talking about COTS games here). People easily slide into these interaction scenarious because they are 'real' enough to take advantage of our directed desires. Bascially, it is like the real world without the risk and danger, and sped up so we can zoom past all of the boring bits, and also outfit our avatar/character with super-human powers that our most primordial biology probably dreams and aspires towards.