Sky News, previously covered here, has 'discovered' Wonderland, a sim in which Ageplay is condoned at best, and encouraged at worst. A representative from the Kid Avs community has made this statement: "It's really upset alot of us as we've known about this place and its reputation for weeks, and no matter how much we AR linden lab or IM the Lindens ourselves, they don't seem to want to close it down. Now it's our Kid Av community that's going to get it in the neck. Its like, what was the point of starting up all those policy reviews about broadly offensive behaviour, then not doing anything when a real problem sim appears? Its very frustrating, all our hard work ignored."

Now, let's understand a few things here. According to the article, "Wonderland is a virtual children's playground where paedophiles cruise and kids are solicited," said Jason Farrell, a Sky News reporter who's reportedly been researching this for some time. Well, on the surface of it, there's no actual proof, once again, that these child avatars are being driven by actual children. It's likelier that these are adults roleplaying as children. Regardless, this is exactly the sort of 'broadly offensive' behavior that Linden Lab is famously against, yet nothing has been done about Wonderland, despite repeated entreaties over a period of weeks from the community of residents who roleplay nonsexual children. Of course, the mainstream press pick this up and run with it, making Linden Lab look bad, the child avatar community look bad, and all of us in Second Life look bad by tenuous association.

We've contacted Linden Lab for a statement, but received no response by the time we went to press. If/when we get a reply, we'll follow up. The way Sky News is pushing this right now, you can bet that none of us have heard the last of this.

A number of factors lately seem to have contributed to increasing the friction between different nationalities and cultures of residents within Second Life.

Firstly, of course, we have the ... robust nature of some of the political extrusions into Second Life - largely harmless and inconsequential wars between small numbers of ideological groups - though no less deadly serious to the participants.

The next time you feel like LL is restricting your rights (justified or not), read this article from our sister site Joystiq. Apparently, Peter Edwards, the Executive Producer for the upcoming Sony virtual world Home, has told the Official PlayStation Magazine that there will be no costume play (or 'cosplay') in Home. He claims to want to keep Home friendly to family members, which is funny considering it's probably not Mom and Dad who will be interested in Home.

Of course, with all the recent hoo-ha over ageplay and adult content, LL is edging us closer to that boundary anyway, but at least we have it right now. Whether or not that will remain the same, we have nothing to fear from Home.

(Thanks, Wai-tung!)

Ambiguous Linden Lab policies responsible for closure says content creator

Zoe Llewelyn, owner of the child-safe, PG roleplay region and business Dolltopia has had to regretfully close Dolltopia (the region, and the business) due to the risks inherent in what she sees as unwritten and unclear policies from Linden Lab's Governance and Community Development teams.

Llewelyn's Dolltopia hearkens to an age of innocent fantasy, and talking, living dolls that so very much partake of the memories of our youths - that many of us still take pleasure in experiencing on television, video and in cinemas with our own children and grandchildren.

On the 8th of March we sought clarification for an ambiguous-seeming sentence at the end of a warning notice that was being distributed by Chadrick Linden. That sentence was:

"Any account asserting an age that does not meet Second Life's minimum age of eligibility will be closed."

What we wanted to know was whether that referred to the claimed age of the avatar (particularly where it came to role-playing purposes). After all, it was pretty clear that the claimed age of the user was covered by this - but what about role-players, you know, role-playing?

A little while back I wrote an article entitled Just Killin': Avatar Murder, which was about the possible escalation of treating virtual crimes as though they were real crimes. The gist was, if we start treating the simulated acts of pedophilia as a crime despite the fact that no real life pedophilia had occurred, then we will have lost any justification that protects other simulated crimes from regulation or scrutiny. The most obvious virtual pastime at risk is killing including war games, action adventure games, etc. But the next crime I predicted that would follow was simulated rape.

Well here we go: Belgian police patrols Second Life to prevent rape.

Now that Linden Lab has taken a stance against ageplay in Second Life, a few thoughts have come to mind. I'm not really talking about why Linden Lab made this decision. Their motives are obvious and completely understandable. They don't want to run afoul of foreign laws, they want to reduce liability, and they want to avoid affiliating their brand with an illegal and widely condemned practice.

But I'm wondering how society's priorities, got stacked the way they did. I've seen passionate opposition to the practice of two consenting adults role playing sexual acts as though one were a child. Honestly I can understand the opposition. But why doesn't anybody care about good old fashion killing?

Murder!

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.