As much as we at Jossip love TV (especially reality TV and most especially Laguna Beach), every now and then a new advance in media comes around that freaks the crap out of us. The era of virtual reality reality television is upon us. We're not even sure where that would lie on the reality chart (or if it would even make it on there) but somehow we feel like it would lie somewhere near Bret Easton Ellis.

MTV is taking Laguna Beach into the virtual world, where fans of the show can play a Sims-like game of being a high schooler in the most ridiculous existence imaginable in real life.

This week, MTV will introduce Virtual Laguna Beach, an online service in which fans of the program can immerse themselves — or at least can immerse digitized, three-dimensional characters, called avatars, that they control — in virtual versions of the show’s familiar seaside hangouts.

“You can not only watch TV, but now you can actually live it,” Van Toffler, the president of the MTV Networks Music, Film and Logo Group, said in an interview.

So now you can live out your fantasy of hooking up with Stephen or finally having Alex and Jessica beat the living shit out of each other. Sigh. And you thought MySpace was taking your life a step in the "I have no actual substance or sense of reality in my life" direction.

Not in the Real World Anymore [Richard Siklos, New York Times]