Category Archives: Second Life

Second Life To Add Red Light District. No, Really, This Is Not A Joke.

Official notice. Short version: a new category of content (currently there is only two, “PG” and “Mature”) will be added, and users will have to verify they are an adult to access it.

Wagner James Au’s article (with interview with Linden Lab officials) amusingly denotes that most of what you or I would consider X-Rated isn’t, really.

I gave a specific example to Cyn and Roberts. One of the more popular roleplaying groups in SL is “Dark Den RP Group”, which by its own description, offers “Kidnap, auction and slavery RP”. Would that be designated as Adult? Surprisingly, both suggested it wouldn’t, since the wording is “not about sex and violence.”

How about “Capture” roleplay, generally associated with S/M sexuality? Again, they suggested, if sex wasn’t explicitly mentioned, it wouldn’t be defined as sexual.

Meanwhile, the official support page on the subject implies that most Resident skins (which include [NSFW LINK] photo-realistic nudity because, well, you know) would be flagged “Adult” under the new system. Responses from Linden Lab representatives on message boards have been, not surprisingly, contradictory on that point.

Which means that what this is really all about is corporate CYA. Linden Lab has to date made quite a tidy business off of creating a virtual world that has a squeaky clean public face and, thanks to a combination of libertarian lack of content filtering and the ability to create literally anything, a private face that, well, has people parsing what “capture roleplay” means. Or, as a commenter on the Massively coverage put it,

If you can’t find adult content in Second Life, your Internet must be out of pixels.

Considering that Linden Lab has been making mutterings about revamping adult content flagging for what seems like years now, it may be a while before any of this comes to fruition. Or, it could happen immediately!

Mainstream Media Mistress Cruel, Harsh, But Not In A Way That Earns You L$

Valleywag doomcasts Second Life for the sin of no longer being trendy.

Those who can’t do, teach. Second Life, the most overhyped virtual world, has been abandoned even by its most fervent journalistic promoters, like Reuters and Wired. It’s now pitching itself as an online schoolhouse.

The article goes on to bemoan Linden Lab actually having a profitable business model for Second Life (server rentals, currency arbitrage) that doesn’t include parties for bloggers. Valleywag’s been doomcasting Second Life for at least two years now, so it’s understandable that they’re a bit nervous Second Life may survive Valleywag/Gawker.

The best summary comes from, oddly enough, my guild leader in World of Warcraft, who sent me this story with the note:

Seems like Second Life doesn’t encourage sanity in those discussing it.

Next Week, On A Very Special Episode Of "Diff'rent Strokes"…

Hollywood is ‘crafting’ a movie based around the mindblowing spectre that MMOs may be bad for you.

The story focuses on a married man who spends as many as twenty hours a day on a computer, existing through an avatar who is a thriving, musclebound entrepreneur. In reality, he is a diabetic, chain-smoking 53-year-old.

The movie is based on this article from last year about Second Life marital hijinks, so I fully expect a caring, nuanced portrayal of pixelated nudity.

Second Life Users Furious Over Barely Understandable Controversy

WARNING: BY READING THIS BLOG POST YOU WILL LEARN A LOT ABOUT SECOND LIFE. VERY LITTLE OF IT INVOLVES SEX.

So. What do you do in Second Life? BESIDES that (I *warned* you there was very little sex involved here).  You build stuff.

To build stuff, you need a place for your stuff (George Carlin taught us this). Linden Labs, the people who run Second Life, make most of their money off selling server space. It’s their revenue model, since the vast majority of SL “residents” do not pay a monthly fee.

Some folks do in fact pay a monthly fee to lease space directly from Linden – this space, called the “mainland”, until recently looked much like you’d expect reality to look like if zoning laws encouraged spammers to build 700 foot high rotating billboards every 30 feet. People who didn’t particularly like living next to pulsating advertising for penis enlargement, even virtually, fled to “the islands” – servers that were rented en masse from Linden by land resellers (this blog’s occasional bête noire, Prokofy Neva, is one of these). Casual users pay resellers a small fee, usually in in-game currency or L$ instead of RL cash, to lease a portion of this land. The users get the benefits of living in a “walled garden” community away from the free-range chaos of the mainland and the convienence of renting from another user directly in world (and through L$, which for users that try to use as little RL currency as possible can be important) and the land resellers hopefully make a small profit through land rentals.

However, “islands”, or server farms are expensive: monthly fees, or “tier” for a full island is a cool $295 a month and $1000 sign-up fee, which, while well within the norm for renting rackspace for a server that *isn’t* running Second Life, is beyond the reach of all but the most dedicated virtual land speculator.

The currency of servers are “prims”. Prims, short for primitives, measure the stuff that you build. The more stuff you put on a server, the more it’s stressed (since objects in SL can be and usually are highly scriptable). So, some sort of clamp on what you can pour into a server is kind of required from a technical standpoint, and also nicely encourages users (who never have enough room for their stuff) to pony up more money for more stuff-space.

An island has a prim allowance of 15,000, which is large enough for nearly anything, and thus why it’s easy to carve up islands for rental. Renting a chunk of land from the mainland will get you a varying prim allowance based on how much you’re paying a month. Most rentals from private island owners have comparable fees; here’s an average rental – $16 a month for a 468 prim allowance, or $1 a month more than an identical prim allowance from Linden’s mainland (and on a private server which has a restricted “land covenant“, or neighborhood association, basically).

So. Now that you know everything there is to know about virtual land speculation, let’s mix things up a bit! Enter “Openspaces”. Openspaces were intended to be, well, open. Forests, oceans, etc. In a paradigm where everything is measured on how much stuff you can cram into a given space, openspaces were created as space where there was, well, less. To quote Linden,

We figured that if Governor Linden can have ocean and green spaces, we should let private estate owners do the same.

Specifically, an openspace island gives you the same virtual space, but only 1/4th the prim allowance, and 1/4th the montly “tier” or rental fee. This put islands far closer financially within the reach of the average SL power user, and since even 1/4th the prim allowance of a full island is well enough stuff for most, thus became really popular.

So popular, in fact, that openspaces became not that open, really. Not too surprisingly, there was a run on openspaces as opposed to the standard server. People bought openspaces, built high-traffic clubs and stores there, and the openspace servers (which, not coincidentally if you were following along with the prim allowance and tier fee, were running on… you guessed it… 1/4th of the rack space) started to cry. A lot.

So, Linden announced that, um, maybe you shouldn’t be using openspace sims for your average everyday SL putting-stuff-in-your-place usage. And to encourage that, pricing for openspace was going up, and people would no longer be able to resell openspace land.

In response, there was rioting, panic in the streets, wailing and rending of garments, and in the true sign of an incipient apocalypse, one of the most reasonable voices on the controversy was, um, Prokofy Neva.

From my viewpoint, the rioting and panic is a sign of a badly handled community, but the actual action taken is necessary. It’s pretty clear that the usage policy for openspace sims wasn’t thought out too well, and something had to be done to encourage heavy SL users to pull their own weight. But telling your most avid (and most financially contributing users) “hey you’re all a bunch of deadbeats dragging us down” isn’t that popular. And especially not when an open-source alternative is in the process of rolling out.

How will this all shake out? Well, mainstream media sources straining to tie this to the RL housing market crash notwithstanding, it’s not really that clear. Currently most of the vocal Openspace users burned by this are insisting that they are moving to the open source SL-equivalent, but it’s not really ready for prime time as of yet.

So – signs point to continued OMGZDRAMA and eventually everyone will revert to complaining about crashes due to overloaded server infrastructure.

Stop Second Life, For The Children!

Rep. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) blasts Second Life as a haven for child predators and a “new, scary, uncharted territory”.

The dark side of the Internet site quickly became evident when one of his aides created an account last week, Kirk said.

Within half an hour, the aide said, she was perusing pornography and roaming in “virtual rape rooms” and drug dens.

Chris Hansen had no comment, though Ars Technica, CNET, and Valleywag did. But what do they know. Also, I have heard unsourced rumors that you can actually download pornography on the Interweb. SAVE US, CONGRESS!

Baby Jesus Cries

sl-congress.jpgYour tax dollars at work.

International financial markets are in turmoil, gas is pushing $4 a gallon and a recession looms. But don’t worry, folks: The House Energy and Commerce Committee is on the case.

Yesterday, in unwitting observance of April Fools’ Day, the telecommunications subcommittee held a hearing on “online virtual worlds” and the use of cartoon-like characters called avatars.

Surely this, one of the, if not THE first appearances of MMO/VWs before a Congressional committee, was newsworthy and serious.

[Chairman Edward] Markey looked across the room at a jumbo computer screen showing his cartoonish avatar, named EdMarkey Alter. “My avatar actually looks like he’s been working out,” Markey noted approvingly.

Surely, it wasn’t simply an excuse for a public relations exercise.

The lawmakers covered the potential downsides of virtual worlds (recruiting for terrorists, child pornography, human isolation) but much of the hearing served as an infomercial for Second Life. “Virtual worlds,” boasted Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, are “changing the nature of communication itself.” The chairman even allowed him to play a promotional video.

Surely, they had SOME LOGICAL REASON for all this.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) told Markey her suspicion that “the real reason we’re here is so that you can get some pointers on how to get past the seventh level of the World of Warcraft.”

Oh, OK, then.

In case you aren’t already crying along with our infant lord and savior, Terra Nova has the entire thing available. I didn’t post about this yesterday, because, well. You know. No one would have believed it.

I Can Has Ur Market?

In most of the MMO industry, most of us hew to what I like to call the “gentleman’s agreement.” It’s basically that you don’t trash your competition in public. Partially because we’re all in the same boat in terms of the challenges we face in bringing these beasts to market, partially because chances are good thanks to the general mobility of people within MMO/VW companies that you may be working tomorrow with the person you’re talking about today, but mainly because talking smack is just not terribly professional conduct in general.

Corey Bridges of Multiverse apparently didn’t get the memo.

In other words, in Bridges’ opinion, Rosedale’s resignation is “an acknowledgment that [Second Life] is not suitable for mainstream users and corporate customers — neither the culture within Second Life, nor the tech underpinning it, is suitable for either.”

Continues Bridges, “I think with Second Life, he [Phillip Rosedale] and Cory Ondrejka built something that got a lot of attention. It didn’t ever quite go mainstream, but certainly it got a lot of companies — big consumer brands, enterprise companies, to sort of examine this new phenomenon of virtual worlds, and got them to dip their toe in the water, which has been great. To some degree, I guess — to mix water metaphors — ‘the rising tide lifts all boats,’ and that’s been true for the past couple years.”

“That turned a corner last year, however, as the sort of completely wild, inappropriate expectations got way too far past what that particular world could actually deliver,” notes Bridges. “What a lot of these big companies have found is that yeah, this is a useful new medium, or at least a method to engage with folks. But then, after they got that experience, they said, ‘OK, what we really need is to build a virtual space where we have more control, where there are no flying penises, where our brand is not underneath somebody else’s brand.’”

And what would be his suggestion?

“I do honestly sincerely think we all owe Philip a thank you for bringing attention to the industry. Now it’s just time for the real technology to step in,” Bridges says.

You don’t say.