The Government will regulate the going-ons in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft pragmatically and 'with kid gloves', said Attorney General's Chambers principal senior state counsel Charles Lim.

Mr Lim was on a panel of regulators and law experts discussing how such worlds should be regulated at the State of Play conference at the end of last month.

Governments, he said, 'should not rush to legislate if (they) don't understand this virtual world phenomenon in response to public outcry and concern, because this may stifle creativity and innovation'.

So far, he noted, Singapore has not formulated any specific regulations to deal with virtual worlds like Second Life.

The virtual game has more than 5,000 Singapore users, while others like World of Warcraft count more than 50,000 Singapore players.

Instead of passing laws, the Government will allow users to 'do what you want,' as long as their activities do not affect the 'fabric of society'; for instance, using an online character to incite religious hatred.

Besides not 'regulating what we don't understand,' said Mr Lim, the Government is also realistic enough not to try and 'regulate the un-regulate-able'.

He did not elaborate on what this would mean in virtual worlds, but gave the analogy of how the Government recognised it would not be possible to ban all pornographic websites. So, it included only a few of the more prominent ones within its list of 100 banned websites as a 'symbolic' gesture.

The Institute of Policy Studies director Arun Mahizhnan, who also attended the event, noted that some tech-savvy communities may realise that 'while the Government claims that its laws apply equally to virtual world and real world, in practice they don't'.

This, he explained, is because the Government believes that the 'impact of the virtual world violations on the real world is very low and partly because it knows it can't succeed'.

This 'schizophrenic situation in implementing legislation', he said, could prompt tech-savvy individuals and even communities to 'use the virtual world to push their agendas' in ways they would not be able to do in the real world.

Meanwhile, said Indiana University law professor Joshua Fairfield, common law or existing real world laws are beginning to be applied to virtual world cases where sufficient parallels exist.

South Korean courts, for instance, 'routinely' treat the theft of online properties as seriously as physical theft, although he acknowledged that this was still the exception rather than the norm.

But Temple Law School professor David Post believes governments should leave virtual worlds to make up their own set of laws. Laws made and supported by the community should be respected over real world laws, he argued.

However, Prof Post acknowledged that this was unlikely to happen anytime soon, since most communities are simply too immature to treat their virtual world as anything more than a mere game or past-time.