Virtual environments such as massive multi-player online games and virtual worlds areexpected to have an increasing impact on peoples' lives. These virtual environments arenot mere play, but are hosting virtual societies and communities. From this perspective, itseems pertinent to ask, what is the degree of freedom that users are experiencing in thesevirtual environments? In this paper, we try to analyze this question with the help of fourlenses|social, ethical, technical, and legal|that expose dierent viewpoints from whichthis matter can be looked at. We focus our discussion on two stakeholders|the operatorsof virtual environments and its users|and look at the distribution of power between them.While our analysis is only a rst step towards understanding this question, we believe thatour lenses are a useful approach to structure the discussion.