In the past 24 hours this blog post has been circulating throughout the Second Life blogosphere. As I am sometime inclined to do, I decided to do some investigation to determine how real this is or how much of it is bullshit.  Yes there is some truth to this, but it may never happen either.

Some background:

Australia is the only developed country without an R18+ classification for games, meaning any titles that do not meet the MA15+ standard – such as those with excessive violence or sexual content – are simply banned from sale by the Classification Board, unless they are modified to remove the offending content.

So far, this has only applied to local bricks-and-mortar stores selling physical copies of games, but a spokesman for Senator Conroy confirmed that under the filtering plan, it will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.

So does someone like Senator Conroy from a supposedly liberal democracy like Australia have the right to censor web content without some say so from the Government? Well its complicated, and it depends on some interpretations of laws passed a couple of years ago. There are also multiple components to the governments “clean feed”, some compulsory (usually regarding child porn) and some voluntary.

Basically, games are currently “rated” by a group called the Australian Classifications Board (ACB). Anything that not get at least a MA15 or below cannot be sold in box stores in Australia, but can be purchased and  downloaded via sites like Steam, Direct2Drive, etc. MMOGs bypass classification all together.

Meanwhile, there was a formation of a Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) which provides a blacklist to ISPs via the “clean feed” legislation. What the evil Senator Conroy has done is expand the ACMA mandate to cover online games, whether downloaded or played online, thus closing the loopholes of the ACB. The ACMA block list is kept secret, but has been leaked online.

Furthermore:

While Senator Conroy refers to ‘games’, this appears to just be the spoonful of sugar to make it easier to swallow. Does anyone think that virtual environments like Second Life will be exempt from the proposed network-blocking? We don’t. Some sources are reporting that environments like Second Life and games like Age of Conan or World of Warcraft are confirmed as being banned outright, but at this stage, nobody official has actually said that.

So, currently there is no official word that Second Life will be banned by Australia, it is also possible that Conroy’s orders could be overridden before they take effect.

If Australia does ban online gaming, the roar of opposition both inside and outside that country will be deafening.

Hang onto your popcorn, this ought to be fun to watch!

Metaverse News Australia, censorship, Metaverse News, secondlife

I haven’t written in a while especially about Second Life. Felt the need to post something. I wanted to check out Hair Fair 2009, but all four servers were consistently full. Oh well, off to plan B…

Second Life finally opened the “Adult” rated continent to public access. There is no privately owned land or building yet, but there is some new construction courtesy of Linden Labs. I decided to check it out before the place gets crowded with who knows what kind of places.

This shuffling all adult content to one continent is an odd experiment I plan to watch carefully. Already there are people attempting to scam the system and trying to get land there.

Despite minimal content, there seem to be other people wandering about, many recruiting adult “clubs” currently open on other islands. At least most people had their clothes on.

I am curious how life on “A” continent (they keep changing names, first Ursula, now apparently called Zindra) is going to go.

On the one hand if the age verification system works, this may be the place to go to get away from kids pretending to be adults, and newbies begging for free Lindens.  If the continent becomes popular enough to overshadow the rest of Second Life, it could make SL’s already sullied reputation as a virtual sex world even worse.

On the other hand this could turn into an “adult ghetto” with tons of tasteless textures and graphics we do not really want to see, driving away any business interests, and quickly turning into a waste land. The upshot will be LL can now tell potential deep pocket clients and investors that they cleaned the place up and it is no longer the anything goes virtual waste land it was in the past. Despite official statements, it is obvious that this is the result LL is hoping for.

Lets face it, when it opens for building starting next month, it is initially going to be the place to be. What happens after the initial newness and curiosity factor fades remains to be seen.

Here is a pristine map – a “before” picture. I suspect the place will look quite different by the end of the summer.

Virtual Society adult content, censorship, exploring, secondlife, virtual sex, zindra

Notes from the Metaverse:

- I’ve been in a Guild Wars state of mind lately, which makes it hard to blog. Whenever you see months of no blogging, it is usually when I am playing Guild Wars.

- The Sims 3 is out now.  Have not gotten it yet, but the reviews look good. In the past I have gotten obsessive with The Sims:  1, 2, and Sims Online. Got burned out really bad at one point, not sure I’m over that.  Spore and Sim City Societies were kind of disappointments.  Apparently they are going with an online update system this time, where you can purchase new objects individually, instead of prepackaged CDs. If virtual worlds are any indicator, this could ultimately be an even more profitable way to go, especially if they open up to 3rd party brokering.

- Still waiting on Blue Mars to go open beta. I’m hearing really good things from beta testers, but they are not allowed to get specific or show screen shots per the NDA.  The Open Beta should happen later this year. I keep hearing “two months”, but I have heard that for the last 7 months.

- Also waiting for the new Second Life continent “Ursula” to open up.  The adult only continent where the rules are quite a bit more relaxed. I’m very curious how this experiment will work out, it could potentially be a disaster that ends SL once and for all, though the odds are small on that front.

- Speaking of which, SL is showing revenue growth in an other wise declining economy, just as I predicted in a post last January. Because of its low start up cost (free) more people are joining Second Life, and actually staying more, but as expected, they are spending less money per account. According to a recent interview with Phillip Rosedale, it seems the player growth rate is exceeding the spending decline rate, resulting in a net gain. Interesting.

- And finally, I released a new Dating Simulator update again, version 5.8. In the last version, I improved the swimming scenes, but noticed a “bug” that if you go to the kitchen after swimming, it goes immediately to an ending scenario. There was a very simple fix for this, but I decided the bug is a symptom of a problem in general: all the late date ending scenarios either involve sex or drinking, and if you do something dumb early in the date, all you are left with is drinking.

In an effort to open up the ending a bit, if you do go to the kitchen after eating dessert (or swimming, or showering), Ariane will suggest what to do next based on what you have or haven’t done so far. You can accept or decline her recommendations, until she gets tired of your constant rejections, or she runs out of ideas, whichever comes first.

The basic pattern of the whole dating simulator is to start out with a few basic options, explode into a ton of options, and then if you don’t royally screw up, finish with one of a few appropriate endings. Unfortunately, there are not enough appropriate endings. I needed a fun innocent ending to round it all out to add as a “bonus” to the suggestions.

The “downtown” solution to this is to find an amusement park to check out for a silly but innocent ending. I decided I needed a home version of the amusement park and came up with a “board game” ending.

Now I had the idea to have a board game in the dating simulator since version 1.0, but kept on running into obstacles. It would be silly to simulate a whole game unless I picked something easy like Tic-Tac-Toe or Nim, which are too predictable. So I decided to just simulate the ending of a game.The decision of which game ending to simulate came down to  two criteria: 1. It had to be a game with simple ending scenarios (Life, Clue, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, etc.) 2. It had to be a public domain game (Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Chinese Checkers, most standard deck card games). For whatever reason, these two criteria are nearly exclusive. It took a while to finally figure out that Parcheesi is probably the only game in both categories, hence that is what I picked.

Metaverse News, Virtual Society bluemars, Dating Simulator, guildwars, secondlife, sims3, virtual economy