It’s no secret that Linden Labs (developer of Second Life) is experiencing a lot of bad PR these days. I’m not going to bother to look up the articles, but just Google yourself up “Second Life child porn”. Presumably in order to try and run damage control, Linden has angered a good portion of its userbase by instituting new rules that prohibit some types of violent and sexual content (that are legal in in the US, but not in, say, Germany).
Last night I was chatting with a friend who was in a call on Friday with a group looking to make social virtual world experiences for a number of prominent real-life brands. What was interesting was that my friend said that the group had rejected Second Life out of hand because the bad PR around it wasn’t something they wanted to be tainted with.
Back in December, I put up a post here on the Forge listing what I thought were the five major challenges facing Second Life and Linden. “Media Backlash” was one of them, but I’m hardly the first person to have predicted that. I do give myself props for listing ageplay (ie virtual sex with avatars that look like little children) as the most likely cause of a media backlash.
What’s slightly confusing to me is what took Linden so long to address this issue. Linden likes to put forth an image of Second Life as a 3d web and thus “anything goes” but they’ve long actively banned certain types of content (such as Nazi imagery) from Second Life. I realize there’s a PR advantage in trying to appear “open”, at least among their customer base (early-tech-adopters, mainly, who tend towards libertarian as a group), but it was an empty policy to begin with once they started banning content. Surely banning simulated sex with children is an easier call than banning Nazi imagery once you’ve accepted that yes, you are going to regulate content?
Robin Linden (the representatives of Linden Labs, in what always strikes me as cult-like and creepy, all use ‘Linden’ as their last name when speaking to the public) had this to say, “Let me ask you all this. When faced with an opportunity to create a new world where things are supposed to be better, do you think there’s a place for slavery, forced sex, and the like?”
I wrote a post a couple days ago about how the developers of EVE Online are deluding themselves if they believe they’re engaged in nation OR state-building. It’s the kind of breathless, ohmigodwearesokewl kind of thing I expect to hear from Linden, typically, not CCP.
I’ll just quote Virtually Blind (a good blog on virtual world legal-ish issues) who, quite sensibly, had this to say,
“First off, I don’t think that Second Life is a “new world where things are supposed to be better,” I think it’s an attractive three-dimensional communication tool that simulates an environment we’re familiar with, but if you want to play that game, I’ll take the question. You’re damn right there’s a place for it — just like there is in a public library, an art gallery, and a history book.
Your “new world where things are supposed to be better” better not include censorship of the expression of ideas based on what you say your citizens want to see and hear about, even if you do think it’s for our own good. Because even if you’re right about this policy this time — and you are emphatically not — the next guy might decide to ban political commentary or art that criticizes religion, and your policy sets the precedent. This is political theory 101 level stuff, and if you’re going to act like this is a nation, you better start there.
The absurdity of this question really can’t be overstated — Haley’s Roots could not be enacted in this “new world where things are supposed to be better,” neither could The Color Purple. Should actual slavery and actual forced sex be forbidden? Of course. And they are, by real laws in the real world. Linden Lab runs a simulation. It should no more ban depictions of these things than a library should ban descriptions of them.”
Linden is in a tough spot. Their own PR efforts have gained them international recognition (though only a medium-small population of users), but that PR has always been full of double-speak. When it’s aimed at the marketing departments of the Fortune 500, Second Life is all about the opportunity to reach out to users in a new way that shows you’re hip and with it (though it mainly shows that your marketing department is fairly clueless about the reality of trying to reach customers in SL). When the PR is aimed at the people who actually use SL, it’s all about Snow Crash-inspired dreams of the metaverse where anything goes.
I wonder if there is any way at all to reconcile those two that doesn’t involve splitting Second Life into many different boxes that cannot cross-access each other, and then branding SL as a platform rather than a place? If it’s a place, then everybody who chooses to inhabit that place is always going to be tarred, to some extent, by the activities of other users in a way that does not happen with other users of a platform (nobody cares that Apache likely powers sites that host actual child porn, for instance, since it’s just a platform).
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June 12th, 2007 at 4:55 am
Talaen
Now that I think about it, I think where Linden really went wrong with SL was marketing it as a service rather than a platform.
What I mean is, if they want real-world commercial enterprises to get involved in Second Life, then what they need to do is distribute the software and let the companies host islands on their own servers. Linden becomes the software vendor, and maybe maintains some islands to test upgrades/revisions to software. But the Second Life world at large is provided by the companies out there who want to maintain a SL community as part of their free web offering.
So instead of one big virtual world, what you get is a lot of small virtual worlds that have the ability to interconnect. So if I go to Nike’s website, I can “dive in” to their SL island there and get all kinds of Nike stuff for my avatar if I so choose. That stuff stays with my avatar, so when I go over to Sony’s SL-site later and “dive in”, my avatar is wearing/using the cool Nike stuff I picked up before. And so on.
This puts Linden in the position of being the software vendor but not actually the people running the “shards”. It removes them from the position of having to moderate content. Instead, that’s up to the people running the shard in question. SL becomes a platform and, if leveraged and marketed right, really does start to become the 3d web.
Or maybe not. But it’s kind of interesting to think about, and it seems to me like it might have been a better strategy than trying to operate a big VW where “anything goes, but oops not really”.
June 12th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Sam
Well, let’s take a look at what keeps players ingame:
- Adult content(90% of the users)
- The motivation to make money. That usually works through providng adult content. (9% of the users)
- The opportunity for limitless creativity, freedom of expression and trying new social concepts. Reaching new groups, working on their own PR and exploring a new virtual world. This accounts for roughly 1% of the user base and 99% of the game’s publicity and academic attention.
Second Life has a structural problem:
Nothing that is responsible for the influx of new people is responsible for keeping them there (hype). Nothing that keeps people there will help them to gain new subscribers (adult content). That is, unless they start to market it as it is - a virtual wild west where nearly anything goes.
Welcome to the Internet 1998.