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The FORK in the ROAD...
Is SL a game or not? If it is only a game, then Linden Labs' TOS should be sufficient to deal with contingencies during gameplay. There are rules in games, right? There are definite ways to win and lose a game.
If SL is ONLY a game, what are the rules, and how do you win? Does the one who makes the most Lindens win? Does the resident who extracts the most US$ win? Does the newbie who griefs the most people win? If this is a game, the rules haven't been written very well. If it's not a game, but what they call a "metaverse", a form of DIGITAL CIVILISATION, then there have to be some kind of LAWS, as there are in any other civilisation. No civilsation, no COMMUNITY, can be run on the basis of a business' Terms of Service agreement, no matter how many clauses that TOS contains.
Linden Labs is trying very hard to turn SECOND LIFE, their digital community, into a 3D platform for marketing, advertising, and online business transactions. The target market for this development will be the users of SL, the residents and citizens of this digital civilisation, which Linden Labs happily touts as being USER-CREATED. However, the users have no say in how this civilisation is being developed for the benefit of corporate businesses.
One of the steps in making SL a more open community (read: more targets for the advertising sponsors and corporate businesses like AMAZON) was to open up registration, eliminating any requirement for a credit card, and also eliminating any way to verify the age of a new member. Unfortunately, this has opened up a can of worms which has already created unfortunate consequences in SL itself, and will create more down the line, not just for SL resident, but for Linden Labs itself.
The first consequence was an immediate surge in the incidents of griefing on the Main Grid. We already had griefers, but with a limited ability to create alts for themselves, their capability was also limited. Now there are no limits on the number of accounts anyone can create, ergo the griefers have run completely amok.
The 2nd consequence was that the number of Trojan teens passing as adults on the MG skyrocketed. We now have children under 16 acting as paid "escorts" (ie: whores) in sex clubs, gambling in the casinos, and buying BDSM sex toys. On the heels of the teenyboppers will be the real trojans, the pedophiles and NAMBLA creeps. We've already had one wave of scandal over what is called "age play" - someone wearing a child avatar and pretending to take part in sex games with adults (even seriously sick torture/slavery). Many SL residents came into SL from other online "worlds" (like Active Worlds) specifically because there was a separate teen grid and NO TEENS ON THE ADULT GRID (and those teens found on the MG were removed fairly swiftly).
Last September, when I joined, I could be fairly certain that the guy I was dancing with at a hot nightclub was, at the very least, old enough to have graduated from high school; now I can't be sure he's over 10, much less 18. The guy that takes his avatar into one of the SL sex clubs to watch some hot female avies dance in skimpy outfits may ask for a dancer to "play" in a private room with him, but has no idea if the person at the keyboard operating the dancer avatar is of legal age -- and the club owners who employ these "escorts" have no way to verify whether or not the employees they hire for these VERY MATURE jobs are of legal age. This may be considered a legal loophole by the legal eagles on LL's retainer ("hey, we didn't know - the birthdate in the registration log said she was 19!"), but I call it deceptive and irresponsible. The very fact that we are now FLOODED with teens is proof that the credit card requirement DID serve as a very functional brake on the number of teens on the main grid and that removing that requirement was a VERY BAD IDEA.
There is a major difference between MYSPACE.COM and SECOND LIFE, however -- MYSPACE.COM is a data-hosting and networking service, basically, where SL is not only user-inhabited, but USER-CREATED, as LL so fondly likes to crow in their advertising. The people who have terraformed the land, who created the buildings, the shops, the homes, the clothing, the scripts, and the inworld attractions for themselves and other residents have created this world TO GET AWAY FROM THE REAL WORLD, and, in many cases, to get away from the teenagers in other MMPORGs like the SIMS or ActiveWorlds.
The "digital economy", furthermore, is only a virtual economy, which has some features of a real economy, and lacks others. There is monetary inflation/deflation (as witness the bleatings of those who whine about the value of the Linden going up or down(; there is not the type of catastrophic inflation found in RL, which occurs due to a monetary system being tied to a commodity or to commodity MARKETS. As SL goods are virtual, there is no real commodity market -- anything created is at least potentially unlimited in supply. SL residents can sell their virtual creations, accumulate Lindens in their accounts, and exchange those Linden dollars for US dollars; those residents with capital, creativity, and a modicum of business sense can make real money in SL. There are, admittedly, very few who do (or who will admit to it -- it is unclear how you go about declaring an income from an SL business on a tax return, and it's a good question how the IRS would attempt to track anyone's income from SL if someone failed to declare such income).
Now that there are things like box offices (which one can pay for a ticket to a limited-attendance attraction), live music performances, and video-streaming capability in SL, the corporate marketeers want in on the pie. Linden Labs, using the excuse that they wanted to enable web search functions in SL (though why SL residents need it when SL already had a search function built-in is a good question, and anyone sitting in front of their computer is already one click away from the SL Wiki), has enabled web-browser functions in SL. This also enables browser extensions like FLASH -- and we'll be hit with continuous FLASH advertising on billboards as soon as the marketeers can figure out how to do it.
This is Linden Lab's fork in the road: is SL a game or is it a community, a digital civilisation?
If it's a game that Linden Labs owns IN TOTO, then the users have no rights, all of LL's self-congratulatory rhetoric about IP rights and user amenities is bullshit.
SL residents built this phantom, virtual, digital world for their own use, not for that of corporate advertisers. We think we a reasonable right to protection from unreasonable risks, like griefers, teenagers passing themselves off as virtual prostitutes, browser hackers, and corporate advertising.
If SL is a digital civilisation, the users have certain reasonable expectations (if not actual adjudicable rights), which should be addressed by Linden Labs -- IE: If it's NOT a game, but a digital civilisation, then the people who "govern" it should run it by civilized rules, and some consideration for the expectations of the residents who have CREATED the civilisation.
Do the weapons makers and scripters who benefit from things like chat loggers and surveillance gadgets (which are, in fact, concrete, direct violations of SL's TOS) have more right to make money from their customers than all the other creative producers in SL?
Do the weapons users (including both gamerz and griefers) have more rights than the landowners and other residents of SL?
Don't peaceul residents who don't want to be hassled and harassed by griefers, panhandlers, and extortionist newbies have rights, particularly when we have paid for our accounts and for land in SL?
LL encourages residents to set up and operate businesses in SL -- they have enabled residents to operature ADULT-ORIENTED businesses by clearly designating specific sims as either PG (for the benefit of those residents who do not want bare tits and erect phalluses flaunted in their face constantly) or M, for those who operate Mature-rated businesses or play adult-type games in private. Those who own land in or frequent the M-rated sims have the right to expect that people they encounter there or hire for certain adult-activity jobs are of verifiable age. The customers of these businesses also have the right to expect not to be blindsided by an accusation of playing sex games with an underage teen. Either hiring a teen to work in an adult-oriented business or dealing with the employee of such a business as a client can open up the business owner or the customer to accusations of child endangerment, pedophilia, sexual grooming, or child pornography. That SL has willingly opened up this can of worms on the heels of the MYSPACE.COM scandal is unconscionable.
Do the Lindens have the right to subject the owners of M-rated land (who previously had a reasonable expectation they were dealing with adults) to the risk of possible accusations, investigations, and civil and/or criminal lawsuits due to LL's change in registration policy?
Do new teen residents have the right to endanger adult members of the SL community in this manner simply because they don't want to be stuck on the TG?
Do the griefers who set up multiple accounts for their griefing runs have more rights than the people who have paid for their accounts for month after month, and who have paid for land in SL in order to more fully participate as a producing member of the community/civilisation?
Then there are the possibilities of foreign terrorists using SL as a convenient "hideout" for their organizational meetings online -- with no credit card required, registration is open to anyone with access to a broadband account, whether at a library, a university, or a cybercafe. Websites, internet or web-based IRQ chat can be tracked -- how is the FBI going to interpret an email that mentions something like "CLEARWING 201.44.23" -- which looks alot like a phone number with one of the old named exchanges (before phone numbers went completely numerical). There's sections of SL named for RL localities -- how is the NSA supposed to know what they're hearing in a phone conversation they intercept?
Linden Labs has come to a fork in the road -- do they want their paying customers, whom they freely admit have built their metaverse for them, or do they want the teenyboppers, the griefers, the undercover FBI agents and state cops trolling for NAMBLA members, the inevitable scandal in the press about underage kids being groomed by pedophiles, and the CIA and FBI trolling for foreign terrorists? They can "go for the gold" (mega-corporate status like GOOGLE) or they can settle for "silver" -- running a reasonable-sized online community that keeps them in business without getting their asses sued to kingdom come. |
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