Ageplay. What the heck is it? In the strictest sense of the term, it is pretending to be younger or older than you are. In the normal sense of the term, it is pretending to be younger than you are -- plenty of our SL population are over 40 and (like myself) have an avatar that appears to be a good 20 or more years younger. Technically that makes most of us ageplayers, even though it's often only because of the difficulty of reproducing our own natural age as an avatar.



Some people go farther. It's common for Second Lifers to have a child version of their avatar. Starax Statosky -- the famous Second Life builder -- was an ageplayer by the definition that he frequently wore a child avatar. I remember sitting with him many times watching him work. The most common avatar I saw him in was a leather-jacketed, cigar smoking, pugnacious boy with a teddy bear. It very much suited his amiable grumpiness.

I left the mentor group today. And rejoined it. Haven't yet decided if I am staying or not.

I hadn't been in world more than half an hour, when someone posted to the mentor channel asking other mentors to look at an individual's profile. That's all they asked, so I brought up the profile and saw someone who had joined all the most extreme groups in SL -- age play groups, Hard Alley, which seems to be a place to rape and be raped (which is then consensual, and therefore not rape, confusing). There was stuff about his interest in power play, and an eclectic mix of groups, but nothing offensive per se in the profile.

Ageplay is a difficult subject to write about on a blog which does its best to be office-friendly, but I will do my best to keep to the issues surrounding it, and no salacious detail.

It has been on my mind, firstly because it is surfacing often on the soon-to-be-closed general forum; secondly because of a prosecution recently in the UK; and thirdly because of an experience I had when I was running Slave City in Bragg. I'm thinking out loud here, but indulge me.

SL does enable people to be whomever they like. As long as you're above 18, you can be a predatory vampyre, or a fluffy bunny, and you can look and be whomever you want. People choose for themselves whether to play a role, or to play themselves, to look like their RL self, or find a younger, slimmer, furrier incarnation for our virtual world. Often, that pretty girl is a guy. I'm not sure the reverse happens a lot.

So, you sort out your own presence, decide how you want to look, and be, and whether you will live the dream of being a sexy 25 year old, or own up to your age and real life photographs. Then you have to start dealing with the other people and their choices about who and how to be, and how you feel about them.