Try to type that 3 times fast girl I dare ya. I take this whole sex in SL ( which I just discovered there was such a weird virtual place as SL. ) as good freakin gawd, people will never reach rock bottom of pointless and stupid. Though who am I to rain on their virtual sex parade I guess … sighs .. WTF … 4 real ?!?!?

http://zindrala.co.cc/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=18
http://zindrala.co.cc/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=16

Mony’s been a member of the Zindra Alliance since way back. One that’s objected to the way they were doing things, but you can see in the top link there that she’s also calling out others for doing exactly what this article claims she is now up to.

Next (be still, frail and pure heart of mine) he may learn to capitalize his sentences and avoid barbarisms such as “u” and “lmao.” We pure-living avatars will ban such atrocities once the proud and upright JLU uses its Linden-granted superpowers to destroy the verminous votaries of voluptuous villainy.

I agree that SL usually just ‘says the right things’ to sound good for PR reasons in the real world, and for legal reasons. If you are in SL or any creative 3D online world… no matter your age, if you go looking to find something, chances are you’ll find it. If you are a 12 year old boy or girl (or an adult posing as one) and you are using an SL account that your parent lets you use unsupervised, you can go find places or people to interact with in a violent, sexual, or adult manner… no matter what the rating level of a land parcel or sim may be. There isn’t going to always be anyone else around to spy on the situation much less actually enforce some sort of code of conduct.

If you have build permissions on land, including sand boxes and public places, all you would have to do is find a private spot up high on a skybox platform to ‘do your business’ or whatnot and no one would ever know. Rez a pose ball, and go for it. or rez an item that has mature textures on it like naked pics or violent pics. For that sort of thing, you dont necessarily need to setup for long in the same place, so tracking down anyone who is doing something ‘inappropriate’ for the particular sim’s ratings would be like playing virtual ‘whack-a-mole’.

If Second Life was a static game world created by Linden Lab and provided ‘as is’ with no ability for users to create or edit objects/avatars not pre-approved and provided by the Linden Lab game creators, then the environment would be policeable. With SL being an interactive user created environment, to be caught violating the ratings system for mature/adult/violent content, you have to be very blatant and out in the open with your activity.

I’m all for SL being user friendly to all who want to use it, no matter what they like doing in this virtual world game environment, so long as they are adults. When it comes to children or anyone who might be offended by mature/adult/violent game content, they should avoid that type of content. In the case of children, no parent should ever let their kid play on SL unsupervised… that would just be ridiculously negligent parenting. With that said, the mature/adult/PG ratings system for areas in SL is merely a guideline that people who build the sims will basically be the ones to enforce, and to enforce those rules without fail 24/7, would take using a lot of your ‘land controls’ along with real human monitoring every time you see a green dot on the map on your sim 24 hours a day.

That is a lot of work! Rotten people who want to interfere with your SL experience can almost always find a way to do so, unless you own a private area and dont allow others to teleport in there without permission. Even then, once they are let in the door, who knows who they really are and if they will always ‘behave’ on your sim when you are not around to police their activity.

SL is just too wide open for anyone to think that a ratings system is going to be strictly enforceable in all places at all times.

Btw, I look forward to seeing your article about Ballocki and our Ballocki Champions League in SL. I am an adult, and I have absolutely no problem with other adults (or me) viewing adult content if it entertains or suits our needs in some way, so long as that type of content is only available to adults. (not sure why a real life adult would be too excited by avatar sex or cyber sex, cartoon sex, or the like, but anyway if you like that or want to see photorealistic naked avatars, then I’m cool with it)

Nevertheless, as Senban already knows from visiting our ballocki game stadium recently to write an article, the Ballocki game is purely PG rated content while at the same time it is a really engaging and competitive casual gaming experience that adults of all ages from all around the real world enjoy. It is a robust social experience too because the players who play it usually get to know each other and build friendships with the other players and their teammates. The ‘ballocki gaming experience’ is not unlike the social networking and casual gaming experience that is a mainstream phenomenon on platforms such as facebook, etc. It’s fun, it’s casual, it’s not offensive content, and it’s social.

Linden Lab is striving hard to make SL friendly to that massive potential market in 2010 and beyond. Linden Lab wants and NEEDS mainstream adoption of SL as a casual social gaming platform to succeed, and as SL content creators, we NEED that too for this platform and our businesses to be a success. (for that matter, even if your SL business offers violent, mature or strictly adult content, you also will benefit from more mainstream adoption of SL, so cleaning up SL’s image to give it real world mainstream appeal is in your interest too!!!) If anyone reading this article wants to find a fun for all ages gaming experience in SL, come and check out Ballocki Stadium or one of the golf, hockey, soccer, sailing, or other sports sims. You’ll see that SL is not all about social misfits, griefers, and virtual cartoon sex.

There are lots of fun casual type games that can be played in SL if that is what you are interested in doing for a bit of 3D virtual world fun and entertainment. If you’re looking for adult content, you can find that in SL too. No different than the 2D internet or real life. SL is a creative platform, and there is no way to expect that the Lindens can or even should try to police the whole thing, with the exception of really egregious violations that are done on a massive scale. The ratings system seems a bit confusing though, and Senban is right that it seems very easy for people to violate the ratings system now, at least in small doses, by ‘violating’ each others avatars just about any place they would like to do so, at least until someone in a virtual superman outfit can show up on the scene to report the violation to Linden Lab and/or a sim owner.

Dude Gilruth
http://ballocki.blogspot.com

“You say that when you first entered there was nothing going on and we told to wait then people started showing up and started boinking for your journalistic pleasure. Kind of sounds like maybe your source generated some traffic (friends, alts, whatnot) possibly for you to witness naughtiness. Just something that stood out about the piece, not that it matters.”

Well done Patasha, you win my extra special prize for clear thinking! Also Ari for the ditto

I want to address this because it’s important. And I want to thank you both for having the intelligence to question the facts you are presented with. It’s difficult to ask for your trust that I wasn’t fooled by a set-up and it’s difficult for me to be open about what went on without unveiling “Deep Lag” and also several accomplices of mine. But if I explain a few things, hopefully I will lay some of the questions to rest?

When Deep Lag first got in touch, the first thing I did was question every single word she said, looking for a hidden agenda. I know Deep Lag is reading this and I know there won’t be any surprise or offense caused by me explaining this because I was pretty open about it. Whenever someone comes to me with a story, the first thing I do is look for possible agendas – my middle name is “Sceptical”. Again, it’s tricky to go into too much detail regarding Deep Lag but the information provided turned out to be correct and checked out. I’d also add for completion that I didn’t even reveal Deep Lag’s identity to Pix as editrix. Rule one is that you never burn your sources and I stick by that because trust is hard to come by, yes?

My second point is this. I too was suspicious about the lack of activity at the start and make that clear in the article. There were a few people around but nothing suspicious per se, other than the explicit images I mentioned. However, once things started, they started. Now, you are absolutely right to say “what if it was a set-up?” and I’ll tell you now, I asked myself the same question. Again, I always look for hidden agendas unfolding. In order to allay my suspicions, I returned at random times over the next three or four days and without telling Deep Lag what I was doing. And to be on the safe side I also had a couple of accomplices who, for fun, I’ll call the “Lone Gunmen”. They visited the clubs without me and at different times. Deep Lag wasn’t made aware that I was doing this and would have no way to know that I was double checking the story I was being presented with. I also had a further Lone Gunman doing some background research for me.

I also feel I should point something out to help balance the story out a little. This wasn’t the only club that the “Lone Gunmen” and I poked our noses into. And we found similar patterns unfolding over multiple visits. If it had just been one instance, then I would have really suspected I was being set-up to witness and report so as to further someone’s agenda. Thankfully, I was satisfied that this wasn’t the case here.

It’s difficult to trust that someone has done some proper research behind an article I know, especially a relatively unknown quantity in a new reporter like myself. But I do a *lot* of digging into my stories and keep going back to triple check my facts (I’m still working on the bots/camping issue from weeks ago, gradually building my story, I don’t rush things out). Anything that I can’t back up or that I am even suspicious of gets taken out. And even then, I submit drafts of the stories for editorial review so that they can be picked apart for errors. So all I can do is ask you to trust me that if I put something in writing that I’ve done everything reasonable to pull it to pieces.

As for “Will the game gods ever decide to start enforcing their own policies or are the policies just an exercise in saying all the right things?” – I vote the latter.

It helps to own the entire sim as well. Muahahah