And no, your computer won't explode, heat management and all that is the same. Due to a variety of technologies that exist, virtual machines offer quite good performance when compared to their actual physical counterparts, and can be used for gaming with relatively hit to performance. Parallels uses a technology called virtualization to run another OS–in this case, Windows–using a combination of hardware and software to create a 'virtual machine' that acts like a computer. No, your computer will be fine, and performance will be fine, but there's a little fun involved.
