The Second Life Teen Grid – An Insider’s Report
by Pixeleen Mistral on 02/07/07 at 11:30 pm
by Calade Lamington, Teen Grid resident
Hello SL Herald readers!
My name is Calade Lamington and I will be writing to you about the teen grid of Second Life. I contacted Pixeleen via e-mail a while ago about writing stories of Teen SL for the Herald and – here I am. So, I come from an European country called Finland, which most of you haven’t probably even heard of. Completely unremarkable things such as IRC, Linux and Nokia come from this faraway place. Enough introductions, let’s get down to business. I thought writing an overview of the teen grid would be a nice idea for my first article here. As far as I have seen and understood, not many of the main grid residents get here, so they probably don’t know much about the place. Except if they have kids “playing” here or so.
Calade Lamington in his office
So, what is this strange placed called the teen grid? I have… erm… heard all kinds of things about the MG. Massive amounts of both private and Linden sims, massive amounts of people, events and so on. Everything is smaller on TG, which is not really a surprise. Here are a couple of examples: The highest classified listing at the moment I’m writing placed by a teen resident is 650L$. Two upcoming events can be found in Search at the moment, and they are just different versions of the same event. There are about 80 Linden-owned sims here, including sandboxes and such special sims. 10 sims owned by teen residents and around 30 educational sims owned by adults. Oh yea, and 3 sims owned by Global Kids. (http://www.holymeatballs.org)
A volcano on a Global Kids sim
Most of the groups in the teen grid are probably armies. The biggest one is called “New Rome”. According to a newspaper here called Second Life Journal, they have over 600 members.
Most of them are probably inactive, but that still is quite a lot in the teen grid scale. There are quite a lot of companies here, too. Some are bigger than others but again, probably nothing compared to the main grid. There are a lot of furries here, but at least I haven’t seen too many anti-furries. Also a lot of different anime-based avatars can be spotted.
A recruit of New Rome
The business here doesn’t probably involve nearly as much money as the business on MG does. There are a couple of reasons I can think of. First of all, teen residents can’t use as much money to SL as adult residents, so stores are smaller and so on. Also, certain business types such as casinos and you-know-what clubs and you-know-what cinemas aren’t allowed here. Land rentals/sales and clothing stores are probably the biggest money holes here. Also, there are a couple of popular stores with all kinds of gadgets. I’ve heard that land prices there can be something like 20L$/sqm. Here the highest prices are around 7L$/sqm. The withdrawing and depositing of money from and to Second Life works in the same way on both grids.
Dernier Cri, a sim dedicated to clothing stores
Some sort of a curse here are new players who don’t bother reading the rules. They sell freebies and other new people buy them. They shoot, trap and orbit people on no-combat zones. These are slowly moving to the Weapons Testing Sandbox, thou. Most buildings here are quite awful, too. Uneven edges, wrong/misused textures, not-so-beautiful designs… They really ruin views. These can be mostly found in the Linden sims. Private sims look quite pretty.
A non-so pretty view
The people who want to unite TG and MG aren’t completely wrong, I suppose. It can be quite boring here sometimes, as you pretty much know the whole grid like your pockets when you have been here for as long as I, for an example. I started in 2005. But I must say that I kinda like the place. There are good things and bad things, and I guess we just have to live with it.
urizenus
Jul 3rd, 2007
Thanks for the report Calade. What companies are in the TG and what are they up to? I mean, do they just have builds or are they involved socially?
pixeleen mistral
Jul 3rd, 2007
Uri,
We will probably have to wait a few weeks for another report. Calade filed this story just before leaving for an RL vacation. It will be interesting to learn what (if any) RL company metaverse marketing is going on in the TG.
DH
Jul 3rd, 2007
I haven’t seen any companies yet in the TG, but I have seen some organisations. We have Eye4You, which encourages activeness and creativity.
What surprises me is that he didn’t visit Furry Plataeu?
But it’s always nice to get some attention to our Grid. :0
Lynette Radio
Jul 3rd, 2007
Nice article – great that the Herald has someone from the teen grid to give us a peek in.
Tenshi Vielle
Jul 3rd, 2007
GREAT!!!
Happy to see ya here, Calade!
Calade Lamington
Jul 3rd, 2007
Hello people! I’m writing from a ship sailing between Sweden and Germany. Got limited internet time, and it ends very soon so I can’t write anything long. Thank you for your comments, and I was thinking of visiting Furry Plateau for this article, but then I thought I could do it in the next one. I can also write more about companies and organizations in TG, RL and SL ones. Actually, I think no RL companies are advertising or even present there at the moment, just some organizations such as Eye4You and Global Kids. Someone can correct me if I remember wrong.
Jackson Widget
Jul 3rd, 2007
I am a teen grid resident as well, and I would like to voice my opinion. Although this article did shed light onto some details of the Teen Grid, these were merely details. Calade, who I have only heard of once, missed many key points of the grid.
From personal experience, there are a few so called “armies”, although there aren’t many, and none of them are popular. Additionally, there are way less than 30 adult owned sims, around 10 or so, and Global Kids has 4 of these. Teen Grid owned sims weren’t around until February ’06, until Tin Bling started Mecca, our first PI. Now they have gained popularity and more and more people are buying them. Many teens have opted for uniting both grids, and there is much LL support, although there haven’t been any steps taken to do this.
In many ways, our grid is quite small. Yes, we still have Linden land sales for L$1/sq.m. We still have land grabs when new sims come around, many of which I have participated in.
Many Teens view themselves as FIC, there’s even a teen FIC group, although they get no attention from anyone as a whole.
We have many great builders, scripters, and entrepreneurs. One great builder who just transfered over to your grid over there is Aesop Thatch, check him out. (http://greydawning.net). Two great scripters who just transferred who are twins, Alpha Zaius and Ming Chen. (http://alphazaius.com)
Forum-wise, we have a fairly small sized forum compared to yours. All of our sub-forums are still open, and we have a fairly central group of about 50 forum users which often post. We have 7 forum moderators, 1 of which is me (another was Alpha Zaius). The content is more or less abiding of the TOS. Oh, and yes, we still have drama.
Anyways, thats all I can really think of for now.. read up on my TSL blog at http://greydawning.net/jackson
Caboose Enfield (TG)
Jul 3rd, 2007
The Teen Grid has alot to offer to the residents who reside there. Like Katharine who has written many scripts and currently runs AJAXLIFE (found at https://secure.katharineberry.co.uk/ajaxlife-s/login.kat)
We have alot of multi-gadget stores, ostly griefing tools are sold to the new players for outrageous prices. But Covenants are starting to cut down on that with rules in Malls and other such places. Right now we have a couple of PI’s (actually Getting close to 10!) And recently alot of groups like Eye4You are buying sims to try to spread out the grid and get the lag off the mainland.
It seems like most people who join the TG will see the horrible laggy Mainland areas which seem to ruin the experience. Lots of issues that cannot be fixed unless people learn to use the ABUSE REPORT. So right now a new sim is opening tomorrow (July 4th 2007) And its really looking good for a sim that will be 100% public, the owners are trying to set the standard for builds in the grid and so far i feel that has been reached.
The market is kinda flimsy right now as Land Baroning continue to make it difficult for new premiums purchase land and pay tier. Our market seems to crash every now and again on certain things (Furniture, multi-gadgets) but then a user will bring it back by setting a bar of standard for the product.
Well, I gotta get back to my Real Life Vacation.
-’Boose
Prokofy Neva
Jul 5th, 2007
Leave it to kids to do it better. Calade has just the right kind of pompador needed to be a proper country-and-western singer look, after his day job running the Tilt-o-Wheel at the county fair. I think we need to steer Ksa from the Bluebird over to this guy’s hairdresser and set them up!
Tenshi Vielle
Jul 6th, 2007
Prok, this better not be another one of your damn alts.
Calade Lamington
Jul 10th, 2007
Hello people, Im in France at the moment. Sorry for typos, but the French use these weird AZERTY keyboards, quite different from my QWERTY. But anyways, Jackson, I think you miscounted the adult-owned sims. Well, I cant check them from here, but will do when I get to SL. Also, this wasnt my first article, and the detailed ones are yet to come. Ive been writing new ones on my laptop, actually. Another thing you might want to check again is the number of armies. Most are small, but that doesnt mean they dont exist. I dont want to start to fight with you, but I also have only heard of you once.
Mariel Voyunicef
Jul 11th, 2007
Linden Lab allows the presence of adult-owned sims in the TG when the use that will be given to them has educational purposes. This means that the adult-owned sims in the TG are expected to follow some rules, like notifying teen residents that they are adult-owned, have the adults (who are admitted into the TG with a previous background check) wear an “Approved adult” group tag, not have direct inference over the TG economy by holding commercial practices, etcetera.
I think that, honestly, the best way you will learn about each specific project is by visiting their blogs on the web. There are many impressions about the presence of adults in the TG, their work, etcetera, so I guess none of us can give an accurate comment on this.
What I do want to mention, though, is that the presence of certain adult-owned sims in the TG is, in my eyes, quite similar to the one of sims owned by certain institutions in the MG. It would seem that everyone wants to be in SL (in this case, the TG) because it is *the* thing to do at the moment; sadly, while rushing things, everyone forgets about the real state-making projects that they are expected to hold in there.
For respect to privacy (which makes me wonder if it’s even right, but well), I will not mention the names of specific projects or sims, but these are the things that are happening in the adult-owned part of the TG:
1) Last time I checked (a.k.a. 9 seconds ago), there were over 40 adult-owned sims in the TG. I did not bother to try to teleport into any of them now, but I only know of five sims that are actually open to all teenagers. Three of them are run by the same non-profit. One of them is known as the ‘most organised and aesthetic’ sim of the whole TG, and now it’s also covered with spam that has been there for weeks, as it apparently was abandoned. It is like a phantom city.
2) Some sims are in construction to be open for everyone. They have been for a few months now.
3) There are a lot of private educational institutions, apparently, that are using their simulators as an online campus.
4) The number of adult-owned sims has grown exponentially o.O since last year, but still, most of the activities and involvement happen in the three sims owned by the same non-profit. In-world, web-based and offline involvement.
5) One of the sims has a large amount of registered adults and has held no educational events or run projects since its creation, and it has been around since last year.
6) I have seen in multiple occasions the presence of non-PG objects left by spammers in the fully built but abandoned sim. Obviously, this one has held no obvious educational activities in-world.
I know how tedious it is for some blog owners to have blog posts in their comments (sorry! x.x), so I’ll stop with the facts and move on to *my* conclusions:
1) Most adults in the TG have no idea of the power they are being given by LL when they are given access to it, or perhaps they simply don’t care about it.
2) “Activism/education” in the TG, after a year that it began, is still wearing pampers…
3)…And, honestly, taking it as a whole, I consider it a real offense to activism and education, as the presence of most of these sims has brought negative comments from many teens. Although many of them are in favour of the presence of adult-owned sims under the set conditions (me included), I can’t count a lot of activities that are actually benefiting the TG.
4) Also, I think it is a not-so-considerate way of acting when we remember that there are educational institutions and non-profits out there who will have to work harder to regain the attention and respect of a large part of the Grid when they want to open.
This is just my opinion. Not that you were wondering, but I barely ever see things on the web that discuss the role of ALL the non-profits in the TG.
Sorry for the humongous comment!!! T_T
Calade Lamington
Jul 23rd, 2007
I just noticed a typo in my comment. “Also, this wasnt my first article, and the detailed ones are yet to come.” Replacee first with last/only. Sorry about that. And also I forgot to thank Jackson about adding his point of view, even thou it wasn’t 100% fact.
Derek Ristow
Sep 9th, 2007
About connecting the Teen and Adult grids, I have discovered that the grids are both technically together already, but are invisible to each other, and teleports are banned. I found this by going in to a Linden’s favorite places. The to are actually fairly close together.
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