Exactly! Our physical world was here before people... There is one
primary contiguous object (the earth) populated by sub-objects (sub-realms
someone called them) that are our cities, houses, rooms, and people.
This isn't the case in a virtual environment. There is no pre-existent
world for our individual points of consciousness to populate. The
individual entities _are_ the virtual world. There is no need to create
a virtual Earth... and who would create it? Certainly there needs to
be some standard means of connecting these entities, but it doesn't need
to be a highway or a landscape or a bright beam of light shooting from
one entity to another... Also, a means of indexing these entities (realms)
must exist in order for one to find anything, but that index doesn't
need to be the underlying organizational structure for a virtual world.
Clay