If you’re running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner (IT) thinks you might want to make sure your employees’ avatars aren’t dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.

“Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments,” a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report “Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success” explained.

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Google (GOOG) has shut down Lively, a service where people log on to chat and explore 3D virtual spaces, after a few short months. The MBAs of Silicon Valley have a pat phrase for the arrival of a competitor on the scene: They say it “validates their space.” What does it say, then, that Lively is gone? It means that Second Life, the best known of these unreal universes, is doomed, too.

The notion of a metaverse has long fascinated geeks. The idea of “avatars”–three-dimensional representations of the self rendered in pixels, often fantastical or surreal in nature–wandering through a computer-generated environment has been explored in the science fiction novels of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, among others. The Matrix trilogy introduced the idea at multiplexes from coast to coast.

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