Merging Teen and Adult Grids??
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009On 19th January, Philip Rosedale (founder of Second Life™) gave an interview to Metanomics. You can read the transcript to that here. There are also links to the video files there too.
The part of that interview I think I find most interesting is his reference to the Teen Grid. When it was put to him by a former teen grid member that there is little happening over there and that the Lindens seem to be paying it little attention, Rosedale had the following to say;
“Generally, I think that the future of Second Life needs to be one where people of all ages can use Second Life together, and that’s the direction that we’re taking in our planning and our work. I think that the educational opportunities for Second Life are so great for all ages that we need to make it as available as we possibly can to people. If you look at what we’ve done with the Teen Grid, I think we’ve done a good job, as a small company, of being inclusive and creating an environment in which teenagers were able to use Second Life, I think, perhaps earlier than, I don’t know, we might have been able to. We pushed hard to get that working.
But, if you look at the problems with having a teenage area, which is itself so isolated from the rest of the World, they’re substantial. There’s an inability for educators to easily interact with people in there because we’ve made it an exclusively teen only area. Parents can’t join their kids in Second Life so problems like that are ones that we think are pretty fundamental and need to be fixed. We need to stop creating isolated areas that are age specific and, instead, look at how we can make the overall experience appropriately safe and controlled for everybody. So that’s the general direction that we’re taking there.”
Now, there seems to be an implication there of adopting a There.com style of play whereby anyone over the age of 13 can be on the same grid. This is really a dangerous approach, it has to be said. While I can appreciate that there are a LOT of very talented teen designers who, the teen grid being so isolated, are unable to have their work seen by many, how can we really ensure maximum safety for minors on the main grid? Age verification is a painless procedure… I age verified myself some time back. If the main grid was going to be opened up to teens too, surely age verification would have to become completely compulsory and mature regions restricted to adult only access? Making age verification compulsory is something I am sure would not go down well with many of the residents of Second Life who see it as a violation of their right to some privacy. And certainly not a popular choice with those underagers who are already on the main grid!
However, in an environment where ageplay is overly rife as it is, surely giving the undesireables around the opportunity to take this to another level with ‘RL’ minors is something that is going to be entirely questionable and a very controversial decision.
My personal opinion (which, whether you care or not, I am going to share) is that there needs to be limited access to the main grid for designers who wish to sell their items there. How this would work, I am not sure. However, as for merging the grids completely, I think there are too many dangerous possibilities opened up.
Anyway, this was all a bit serious. Tomorrow I should write a poem about pixel gangstas again maybe.
