It is a fine, sunny day in this unfamiliar city. Some mixture of pollution and magic makes the air shimmer above the skyline. The granite building at my back is flanked by two large statues of winged women who stare up at the strange weather. I'm new here, and these not-yet-landmarks make me acutely aware of how lost I am. And in case I wasn't disoriented enough, a well-dressed man just sprinted past me, followed by a woman in a bathing suit.

The woman has a tail. The man is on fire.

I pause and think to follow them. But then I remember that I am an enormous, lumbering cyborg with no hope of catching up. Besides, I'm here on business.

My first day in City of Heroes would have been much stranger if I didn't know that it is actually located on the servers of NCSoft, the company behind this massive online computer game. The digital city is populated by people like the odd couple that just ran past me: real individuals who have crafted superhero alter-egos. Given the power to create and inhabit any kind of character, it's not surprising to see familiar faces. I see a few clear - but mostly strained - nods to popular comic book characters, movie stars, and other cultural references. My friend Fred recently wrote about why this has Marvel Comics plotting to take over their world.

In the real world, I am sitting in the brick offices of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit law firm in San Francisco. We work at the intersection of technology and civil liberties, so our cases range from questions about Internet surveillance to the appropriate role of copyright in the digital world. Cases like the one Marvel just brought are interesting to us, so today I'm people-watching in CoH. This makes two things clear: I need to go to State of Play, and I love my job.