Amy has pointed me in the direction of a Guardian blog post by Keith Stuart which highlighted the extent to which online gaming behaviour generally bears the same habitualised and routine patterns as the real world.
he cites research from Northeastern University in Boston,
MA, that – thru tracking the movements of 100,000 people
using mobile phone signals – demonstrated that:
"Human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial
regularity, each individual being characterised by a time-independent
characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return
to a few highly frequented locations" source
Stuart observes that the same is often true in video games (such as the hotly-awaited Spore in the image above); in his post he comments that:
"It would be interesting, within a realm like WoW or Second Life, or
even one of the larger CoD IV maps, to track player movement and match
this data to the real-life research. I think there would be
correlations. People often make the mistake of thinking games are about complete escapism, but they're not."
I think as comms planners we're guilty of being nervous of planning in the online space because we assume that consumers will adopt a completely new set of motivations and behaviours. the reality is that they don't. what's true for Arnie in Total Recall (the title quote of this post) is true of consumers when interacting with brands in the online space.
the internet's greatest asset is also it's greatest challenge – the fact that the canvas is so big and blank… from ARGs to branded content via character blogs and gaming, there's a world of potential consumer engagement to explore and create. our media planning experience makes us more qualified than most to
integrate online experiences into schedules and communications plans.
Stuart's post reminds me that we shouldn't forget what we've learned about consumer motivations, desires and behaviours and translate them to the online space… the canvas has changed but the fundamental rules haven't. online is not a media channel and it shouldn't equal display and search as default lines on schedules. brands should go create with the confidence that they're able to more confidently predict online audience behaviour than they may think.
MEDIATION 
This is interesting.
Its fairly obvious, but I think the way we move – and the places we go are a direct result of physical and mental restrictions (as well no doubt as loads of other stuff).
In Victorian times people would clearly have had a much more limited sphere of influence, than modern folks – the local pub and maybe the village over the hill.
Digital (in this case online) behaiviour may be similar to 1st life (ho ho) movement, but in the case of digital the playground keeps growing and more fundementally the rules of how we interact with the space change.
Now I like hanging out in sandpits. Always have done. And most people are creatures of habit. Find somthing within your set of restrictions and stick with it, afterall it works. Problem is with all these digital changes going on, this same comfortable area probably won’t work as well as it does now all the time.
One of the big differences with cyber space is that information is not restricted in the same way as movement is. Movement has to be linear – one page, blog whatever at a time. You move from one to the next consuming what you need. But at the same time information is coming in from all angles. In this case its Chris reacting to an article and writing a blog. Next thing you know I’m reading his blog.
So the point is. Worlds/environments that mimic real world limitations will have similar movement patterns to the real world. Areas based on other dynamics will result in a wholly different geography.