Socially|Mundane

The whole triumvirate of segregation is no secret among you who follow Second Life news outside of Second Life. Yes, we are very familiar with the new 'rating', a third 'tier' - or is it 'depth' (of depravity)?

PG, Mature and Adult. There are a lot of shouting about how all this is going to work-out and a lot of nervous people chewing their nails off. The main logistic is pretty straight-forward and simple. Separate the naughty from the angelic. If you have anything in your shop, store, club, dungeon, playroom, whatever that allows, depicts or allows to be depicted any kind of visual inappropriate for 9-year-olds, then it is, for all intents and purposes "adult content".

If not then it's rated a traditional "Disney" G, and you are good to go. You win a cookie. No, wait! That could be taken the wrong way as it can be considered slang for camel toe... no, wait... you know, a juicy peac.. well, er... fruit's out, desert animals are out... bakery goods are out...



This is the problem. This is what everyone is up in arms about.

Picking up all one's prims to move them to a new virtual continent is no big deal. Especially when you'll be allowed to leave forwarding landmarks behind for a time that point to the new location. It's the way classifieds and searching will be affected. Specifically: keywords and their connotation and how they'll be interpreted by the system. This can become a really tricky issue as the wrong keywords could put every reference to you and your stuff into a completely wrong category. Most of the commentary about this "Project Ursula" (my words) seem to revolve around this particular facet of the operation in the new virtual world.

Many are pleading with or outright demanding Linden Lab stop, regroup and rethink their strategy. The segregation itself doesn't seem to be a point of contention among the majority of those concerned. It's the way search and referencing will work.

Slow down. Rethink the strategy. Allow more user input. Simple enough. Why aren't Linden Lab able to do that?

What if there simply isn't any time?

One thing that has always really jumped out at me since all this stuff was first announced and as more news and detail trickles out of Linden Lab has a lot to do with the urgency of it. Existing projects were put on-hold immediately so that this new code could be injected into the servers. The current beta viewer was frozen and a new branch created to get this new "Project Ursula" code into it - and fast!

So fast they didn't even bother to name each sim in that new Ursula continent. Each sim being an exciting variation of "Ursula 001" and so on.

Let's face it. We aren't privy to what's going on at 'the Lab'. We don't know where the motivations are coming from and how much of that motivation and decision process is externally influenced.

So then, here you are: among the best-known virtual worlds on the entire landscape. A virtual world known for it's leniency on deviant activities - very deviant activities. You make it clear at the outset that all visitors to your world must be 18 years or older. But the cracks and leaks are obvious. Even the Titanic's gaping hole wasn't this large.

And then you learn that the Federal Trade Commission will be doing a little snooping around, evaluating virtual worlds with regard to their content, and just how easy (or not) it is for the wrong age group to gain access to that content and then they will report to Congress...

The report was prompted by the FTC appropriations bill passed by Congress in March 2009, which noted, in part, that "[c]oncerns have been raised regarding reports of explicit content that can be easily accessed by minors on increasingly popular virtual reality web programs."   

The bill went on to dictate that "the FTC shall submit a report to the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations discussing the types of content on virtual reality sites and what steps, if any, these sites take to prevent minors from accessing content."

[From Virtual Worlds News: FTC Reporting To Congress On Virtual Worlds, Kids, And Explicit Content]

So... with all that goes on with the grid. All that Linden Lab is trying to do with so many things - stability, new features, whiz-bang new wowzer-gah-gah of the viewer and script interpreters and all that stuff... and then seeing something like this coming down the pike...

Can you really blame Linden Lab for "Project Ursula"?

And I have to hand it to Mark Kingdon and Linden lab. They have balls.

Big balls.

Why?

Because with the feds coming in to look around and then reporting to the effed-up Congress and Administration we have now who are trying so hard to run our lives and save us from ourselves (be careful what you wish for, United States voters, you dip-shits)...

Linden Lab is still allowing you to be your naughty, nasty deviant selves in utter depravity.