I recently found a blog post which describes a nielsen rating for March 2009 of Top PC Game Titles. Second Life came in at #2 with WOW at the very top. There is a big discussion going on in that post which I’ll leave for interested users to read. What the chart really says is that users of Second Life play it a lot more hours then users of the other games. There was also a correction post describing that SL was the 8th game in popularity in the nielsen ratings. In my opinion, Second Life, has a small amount of users but those users are dedicated and find many reasons to play for hours a day. I find the nielsen chart to be very interesting from my own personal experiences. I find myself wanting to find new places to explore, create new stuff and make new friends. SL is more a social place for many people I talk to. There is a wide amount of different communities for everything. I also find a lot more international people doing business inside SL.

 I still think SL has some promises but there are some major competition coming up this and next year. I think Second Life will still be the best virtual world for user created content. Some of the upcoming virtual worlds may get more advertisers from big companies, though. That could get more users to their worlds and leave SL behind.

It’s been a very long time since I wrote about LOTRO. I thought I should update on my adventure in this virtual game. Recently the game came out with the first paid expansion called Moria. It brought 10 more new character levels and a huge area to explore in Moria. This post isn’t going to be a review of this expansion or the following update, book 7. I want to write about my experience in this game and how it relates to real life.

I started in this game playing with my best friend. We played and supported each other for a whole year. I enjoyed the PVP side of this game a lot more then the PVE side. Since Moria came out things have changed in friendships and groups. I have joined two Kinships since my last post and both have had some great moments and some drama. Recently some of my new friends I made in the game have decided to leave the game or leave the kinship I’m in. This new update, Book 7, has brought changes in the PVP side that doesn’t match my style of play too. I found myself not logging in as much due to these changes and missing my friend and the new friends I had.

With all these new changes I am going to take a break from the game and try to work on my business, life and new friends. I already lost my best friend to this game which I really feel bad about. I never knew a virtual game could make people so emotional and change lives so fast. Maybe I’ll have some time to make a real review about the new updates to this game. I still really feel this game is good and the updates have made some things a lot better.

the two met online in 2003 and married in 2005 both physically and in a lavish Second Life ceremony. According to Ms. Taylor they spent as much of their time together in the virtual world as they did in the physical one. When she suspected her husband’s Second Life avatar of cheating she hired a virtual private detective to catch him in the act.

The virtual private detective was a type of service in SL I didn’t realize existed and it even has its own name, cyber spying:

Last month, a 43-year-old Japanese woman killed her virtual husband after he broke off their relationship on the popular game MapleStory, where the two met. Spouses neglected by their partners’ constant video-game or Internet use have banded together, calling themselves “cyber widowers” or “gamer widows.” Cyber spying is also common.

Darius wrote about Maple Story back in October 2007 and it seemed a little too cartoonish to interest me at the time. Seems like there is more virtual to reality stuff going on there than I imagined.

Killed, seriously? I’m all for living your virtual life to the fullest and even taking some aspects of it out of the virtual world, but killing somebody for what was done inside a virtual world? That’s crazy. And if there are too many stories like this, it will just make real world courts clamp down and make the virtual world increasingly restrictive. Where is the fun in that?

The increased detail of armor and clothing will demand more system performance. In an attempt to stave off a lag increase, a deterioration of 2 PEC per item has been introduced when equipping garments and armor. Increased realism will make clothes look more worn as their condition diminishes.

While the worn look of clothing is a pretty neat feature, the extra 2 pecs just for putting on a piece of armor or clothing raised my eyebrows. It turns out, I wasn’t the only one. The Entropia Forum is already a buzz with people threatening to quit playing the VU, or starting writing campaigns of protest to MindArk (the people who run Entropia Universe).

How much is 2 pecs anyways? The PED(Project Entropia Dollar) is 10PED/ 1 $USD. 100 pecs are in a PED. So 2 pecs is roughly USD$0.002. Big deal right? Well yes, but in a real cash economy this is a big deal.

The claim (as in the quote above) is that this will prevent lag. Hmmm this sounds like a familiar whine that I continually see about another VU I know so well. In a more practical sense lets check out a small example. I put on 6 pieces of armor to go out for a hunt, thats 2 pec X 6 = 12pec. Return from hunt. Take off armor to repair it, which this decay costs a few pec already. Thats 2 pec X 6 = 12 pec. So withour even putting the armor back on to go out for another hunt costs 24 pec . Thats USD $0.024 BEFORE paying for decay/ repair.

In January 2007 I wrote about “The Girlfriend experience” and “The Girlfriend Experience Revisited” about the Liminal Institute

The Liminal Institute is an international performance unit. It was brought to existence by a group of artists who share the belief that performance work can – and should – cross the boundaries and definitions between dance, theatre, live art, visual design, music, pop culture and lifestyle.

Today I received an email from Martian Butler, one of the founders of The Liminal Institute, telling me “The Girlfriend experience it returning.

The Players

The Girlfriend Experience, Back Online

Internet game with 4 flesh and blood avatars at Picnic 0726Sept 07 12:00>28Sept 07 19:00
Amsterdam, Westergasfabriek
Pazzanistraat 41 | Amsterdam
organised by: Mediamatic | T +31 (0)20 6389901
organised by: Liminal Institute

Mediamatic and the Liminal Institute will present Martin Butler’s project
‘The Girlfriend Experience’ at Picnic 07. On September 26, 27 & 28 Butler
presents four human avatars to play with again on your computer. This time
you can log in from home as well as at Picnic on Mounir Noah Valentijn
(actor in the Dutch film Het Schnitzelparadijs), Marjolijn Vogels, Aimar
Pérez Galí (Spain) and Helga Wretman (Sweden). Choose an avatar, direct
them via Skype and discover what you can do with him or her.

Join The Girlfriend Experience at Picnic 07, in the Zuiveringshal Oost at
the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. Register on Picnicnetwork.org.

At the Zuiveringshal Oost you can play the game and watch the piece live.
Or play from your home.

Use

http://girlfriend.mediamatic.net

to contact the avatars.

The rampant growth of online avatar communities such as Second Life and
World of Warcraft has enabled the creation of a personal online social and
economic existence. Simultaneously this triggers inherent questions about
this existence, as it questions what the consequences will be for first
life, or reality.

When you use virtual avatars you can do as you please. In The Girlfriend
Experience you will have to get to know each other first. Player and
avatar explore what they can do for each other and how far the avatar
wants to go in performing specific desires. Who is really controlling the
situation remains ambiguous. You have 10 minutes to figure out what you
can do with your avatar after that, your time is up and another players
can take your place.

The title of the project, The Girlfriend Experience, denotes the
paradoxical character that online social interaction has. On one hand, the
safe anonymity by using the avatar, on the other the intimate releases and
projections that can spread easily. For Martin Butler is this the merging
of two apparent extremes, anonymity and intimacy, which characterizes an
important part of contemporary social traffic.

The Girlfriend Experience attracted worldwide attention when it was
presented for the first time at Mediamatic from January to March 2007.

www.mediamatic.net
www.liminalinstitute.nl
www.picnicnetwork.org.

–
Martin Butler

The Liminal Institute
de Ruyterkade 149
1011 AC Amsterdam

Thank you Martin for the advance notice.

There has been some furore over at SL Exchange in recent days, over the launch of a new Anshe Chung enterprise.  10Lindens is her new line in merchandise, all priced at 10Lindens.  Apparently it wasn’t enough for Ms Chung and her studios to undercut the creators of SL who do not have cheap Chinese labour at their disposal, and so she made it a triple whammy by initially including full perms versions of Craig Altman’s animations (I wonder if she bought copies for her employees, or simply passed on copies of her own?), AND hijacking the SL Exchange system to put her merchandise top of the searches.

Strangely enough, the ordinary creators who have used SL Exchange for selling their creations were not at all keen to be undercut by Ms Chung, were generally disdainful of her mistake in releasing the animations full perm, and derided the abuse of power that was indicated by the manipulation of search.

Within short order, Ms Chung had withdrawn the merchandise to fix the perms, and had issued a lecture on the way in which she is improving the world for us creators by undercutting us.  “Our plan for the end of this year is to have between 50 and 100 internal designers and scripters working on 10 LINDENS, plus a network of local partners we are currently training here. We plan to create a full range catalog of decent SL content.   I think this is definitely good news for the content creator community of SL, much the same way ACS entering the IMVU content market helped the content creator community as a whole to grow their business.”  So there. 

It seems that she is about to launch financial products, too, with investment from Gladwyne Partners (thanks, Aimee, via Second Citizen) the people who also invested in Electric Sheep.

The furore on the SL Exchange forums led first, to the withdrawal of the items, and then to Apotheus Silverman posting that the ranking of items would be repaired, and now to another posting by Guni Greenstein, who I believe is Anshe’s RL husband, about the background.  Given that he’s her husband, the distinction that he doesn’t own shares in SLX when she does seems odd.

Whether the constant controversy is a deliberate publicity stunt … ha ha, I think not, myself … or just blundering, I leave you to decide.  I wanted to be able to show that PR nous hasn’t been a feature before, with the notorious 2006 April Fool’s Day incident, but it seems to have vanished from the SL forum archive.  ACS failed to pay their tier by the due date, and expected Linden Lab to realise that other accounts in the same stables had the wherewithal but just hadn’t transferred it to the right account by the right time.  Of course.  Linden Lab should be doing their business accounting for them.  The thread, demonstrated no PR acumen whatsoever, in common with many threads in the forum.  However, it seems to have been pulled from the archive – at least, I can’t find it any more.

I have watched Anshe Chung’s rise to mega land baron from having met her on her first day in SL.   In that time she has not impressed me as trustworthy, and everything about her and her company is just a little bit hazy.  She joined the Brits in SL group, not because she is British, or lives in Britain, but because she once stayed there.  She started work as an escort out of Cannabis Cathedral, having begun giving sex lessons in SL within a week of arriving.  Only someone who was in SL at the time will realise what an achievement that was.  In this age of programmable rip-off sex beds and ubiquitous pose balls, it may be hard to imagine a time when custom animations were not available in SL.  Approximating avatar sex at that time involved memorising a list of standard animations, and utilising a system known as “box on/box off” which did indeed involve the attachment of boxes to avatars.  Sexy it wasn’t.

I have no problem with any adult pursuing whatever hobbies they may choose in Second Life, down to and including escort work, but there have been attempts to discredit people who publicised her infamous escort notecard, or those who claimed she worked as an escort.  When she angered the Sydney Morning Herald, they did a little digging to discover the truth.  Of course, it’s a way to offend those people who are offended by escorts and prostitution, so maybe that’s why she prefers not to remember it.

The next step in Ms Chung’s career involved selling poses dressed up to look like animations.  Having struggled with memorizing the default animations and attaching boxes here there and everywhere, the arrival of custom anims with 1.4 was a breath of fresh air.  Very few people knew how to use poser, and so a few custom dances and animations appeared in shops and clubs within a hours of the launch.  Among the shops selling these things, animations were relatively expensive and poses relatively cheap.  Many people were surprised to find that the relatively expensive boxes they had purchased actually contained poses and not animations.

I didn’t keep track of what the Chung empire was up to over the next few months, but kept tripping over Anshe anyway.  On several occasions she IM’d me to complain that my large and “ugly” builds were preventing her from selling land adjacent to me.  I’d have taken that a little more seriously if she hadn’t been using ultra terraforming to draw attention to her land for sale — bringing land up as high as possible, thus stretching and deforming the terrain textures, and sometimes returning neighbour’s possessions when the land was deformed on their side of the property line too.  She indulged in neg rating wars with a gang of alts.  She said that constant tales of her buying up first land for less than market value were lies spread by her detractors, and that people complaining about her defaulting on won auctions were wrong when they said she was using this as a tactic to prevent others from winning sim auctions.

When private islands arrived, Ms Chung was back in the news again.  At that time you could not sell land on a private island.  You could rent it out, but the title and possession of the land remained with the island owner.  Other land barons respected the rules, bought islands and carved them up for rental.  There were constant complaints that Ms Chung and her minions were advertising land for sale which was not, in fact, for sale, and argument over the interpretation of the rules from Linden Lab.

Over the time since then, there have been various complaints on the forums, about people having “bought” land which they have then been summarily ejected from, for infringing a local zoning rule, for non payment of tier, for putting up signs about “Banshee Dung”.

The issue over which I had the biggest fight with Anshe was, in the end, one which I thought was resolved before she posted on the SL forums: reselling animation balls full mods for a fraction of their cost.  She argued with me in world, agreed not to put the animation balls in her shops and then went on the forums to defend what she had already agreed not to do.  This slight sense of dual personality is said to come from the fact that both Anshe and he husband inhabit the Anshe Chung avatar.  I’m assuming that when she stoops to using “I cry now” in negotiations it is Anshe herself and not the husband, but I don’t know.  I thought it was just me that prompted tears when I called her to account for behaviour and she disliked it, but I hear from another land baron that “I cry now” is a ploy in land negotiations too.

She has campaigned tirelessly in her own self interest.  There was the campaign for a stable currency, widely known as the AS$, which didn’t endear her to people who had heavy investments — or reliable income — in Linden Dollars.  There was the campaign against point-to-point teleportation, mainly because she had purchased a lot of expensive land around telehubs (later reimbursed by Linden Lab).  A campaign boycotting the land store.

Now here comes the ACS 10Linden line, which is designed to put fear into the heart of any creator.  I don’t think it should.  There are already many free or almost-free places in SL, and they don’t appear to dent the business of the successful creators in SL.  Just like customers in pound or dollar stores in RL, the people buying ten linden goods will be those who can’t afford other things, or who really like or need the item offered.

For the majority of those with lindens to spare, they will be looking for the creativity or style that they associate with their favourite creators of goods in SL. I am slightly concerned that the  copying of creator descriptions on SLX means that they intend to make Far-Eastern knock-offs of current creators’ goods, but hope that the attempt for growing respectability will prevent them from doing that.  Mind you, some of their own descriptions seem to have lost something in the translation: “Nice buy, never miss this chance to blow!  Main color is gold, glorious to look.” Personally, I don’t think ACS ever misses a chance to blow….

Well, not often, and not like a new resident. Until I created a new character as part of the testing for a client. Starting with a fresh new inventory, I reported on my visit to the Gnubie store the other day. In the Gnubie store, the creators of items make them for the store, and charge $0 or $1 Linden at the most for the items that they sell. It is well organised, and well ordered. You won’t find any creator’s sales items given away free, and notices ask people not to sell the items that they gather there. Gnubie store gets an A+ for honesty, organisation and generosity.

Fast forward to today, and I visited a freebie place which could not be more different….

GamersBrand has a professional logo and a private island and a lot of visitors. The traffic on the island today is 86,514, and that doesn’t surprise me as there were 90 avatars on the island when I visited, all exploring the island and everything it has to offer.

I visited the group website, but I must say that I was still a little confused about what they do. This is what they say about themselves: “GamersBrand Entertainment, LLC is an internet network featuring web service, content, and community websites devoted to the gaming community. We offer a wide varierty of online entities satisfying many needs of the online global market.” So far, so good. A little further down they say: “Our overall goal is to create a variety of entertainment sites to offer a variety of services in order to satisfy the need of an ever growing global marketplace.”

GamersBrand Island in SL consists of walkways linking vending areas containing piles of boxes. It is fairly confusing when you first arrive: some of the boxes have prices on them, and yet seem to be selling for $0 Linden. There is a huge range of stuff… clothes, shoes, jewellery, textures, sex stuff, combat stuff, almost anything that an avatar might need.

I looked into some of the boxes, and they seemed to be giving away full perms merchandise. Now I was already starting to be fairly attentive to the range of material on offer, but what really caught my attention was the fact that a number of items came up with “unknown” creator, and others showed that creations from several different creators had been crammed together in a box.

After some digging around in the boxes myself, IMing people named as creators of objects in some of the boxes, and some pretty long notecard conversations with Doug Pau, who is in charge of GamersBrand island in SL, I discovered that:

- they are selling items such as the infamous sex bed, for free, a bed which has been the subject of repeated DMCA takedowns. To be fair Doug Pau did eventually remove the bed from sale, but the rose rug — which has also been the subject of successful DMCA takedowns — contains similarly illegal animations;

- they are selling items from shop-in-a-box deals, which they may have paid 20,000 lindens for, but which they are selling as individual items for $5 lindens, thus undercutting ordinary residents who have bought the same shops;

- they are giving away items originally from shop-in-a-box schemes, and don’t seem to have much idea about whose IP they are, or on what condition they were originally released. One set of jeans, which were all boxed by the same person, shows an outrageous number of lindens on the box, but is actually free. The jeans inside have a variety of creators including “unknown”. The creators I tracked down told me that they had been chasing down these boxes all over the grid, because the jeans inside were meant to be free, but had been packaged up as part of a shop-in-a-box scheme. I’d hazard a guess that some of the boxes being sold originate here and get sold elsewhere;

(There are boxes and boxes of stuff all over the island. There are shop-in-a-box scams all over SL, involving freebies or a collection of full perms material that people have picked up from yard sales, some of it exploited, some copied outside it’s licence, some just free. Some of these are being sold, full perms here, sometimes boxed up with a price on the box. )

- they are giving away a huge range of items, having received them from diverse sources, and not necessarily the original creator. There are literally *hundreds* of items over the island now, and the IP status of many of them is necessarily unclear. I was told that they do not sell things full mods, but this is demonstrably not true. Many of the items which my alt bought or copied for free, were full perms inside restricted perms boxes. I could pull full perms animations out of the pole dancer poles, for example, too.

I have started the process of tracking down the originators for some of the full perms items, to see if they are aware that their creations are being given away for free, or in some cases, sold when they are meant to be free, and I assume that process will continue for some days over the items I chose to look at. I am also hoping to make contact with the RL company GamersBrand to see what they have to say for themselves.

At first glance, you may think that this is no different from a hundred freebie and yard sale places where things that ought not to be given away free are given away and things that ought to be given free are charge for…. But I would remind you that this is a commercial company who wishes to promote online gaming and provide what the player wants. Is this what *you* want? It looks as though they have decided that making a splash in SL and maybe a fast buck too, given the number of avatars on their island, is worth the chance that the odd creator or three will notice them and start to ask questions. Well guess what? I am a very odd creator and I ask a lot of questions when I see something that is this wrong going on.

Now you know, I feel I ought to be investigating everything there, but honestly! I could work at it from now until Christmas and still only cover a small part of what is there, because they didn’t do what they ought to have done. In the end I decided that I couldn’t investigate all … but looking more closely at the big box of textures demonstrates nearly all of the types of situations which arise with the many items on the island.

It’s a BIG box of textures… 10,000 and more it says. It has a price of $499 on it. Bargain! But wait, it is actually “selling” for $0. So… I look at the box and it tells me that lex Fitzcarraldo is the creator. I buy a box. A folder with many boxes opens in my inventory. 302 ultimate interior textures, 100 beverage textures, 100 churches and temples and so on down the folder..

Looking into the boxes, 302 ultimate interior textures all show lex Fitzcarraldo as the creator of the textures in that box – many of them 1024×1024 textures. So … if lex Fitcarraldo intended his textures to be sold for $499 dollars, how come they are set for $0 on GamersBrand?

But wait a minute… here are Linden textures, textures from Gnubie by Jai Nomad, bundled up together in one of the boxes, and without the Gnubie store terms and conditions. The box says $200, although it was inside the box with $499 painted on the side which I bought for $0.

Another box from inside this box… Drift Monde textures – never to be resold, I know, I’ve read the agreement – a whole series of Drift Monde’s textures. So… in one package we have Drift’s textures which she sells full perms on condition they should never be resold or given away… Gnubie textures which need the licence with them… textures that are the IP of the originator of the boxes, which he appeared to intend to sell bundled with the others for $499, but which are huge…. I only opened three of the boxes out of about 30 in the folder. Many have such a lot of textures in, it is quite painful to look at items in the box, and I didn’t want 10,000 extra textures in my inventory.

GamersBrand appear to me to have demonstrated no concern for the right ordering of their business in SL… the impression I get, is that if it looks as if they can attract traffic and do it on the backs of the SL creators, they will. They have not spent the necessary time in ensuring that they are not selling things or giving away things they ought not to. I have emailed the RL company for their opinion on it. When I receive a reply you can be sure I will let you know. Meanwhile, if you are as appalled as I am by what you find on GamersBrand, abuse report any IP infringements but why not email them to tell them how you feel?

Remember what they said about themselves? “Our overall goal is to create a variety of entertainment sites to offer a variety of services in order to satisfy the need of an ever growing global marketplace.” In SL that seems to involve infringing the IP and rights of creators, and promoting poor business practices. Frankly, if Gnubie store is an A+ model of what a freebie store should be, GamersBrand is the Z- what-not-to-do example to us all.

I can’t finish without a word about the lack of protection from Linden Lab of our IP as creators. Some of these items were created by people who have been issued with more than one DMCA takedown notice. Shouldn’t deliberately exploiting someone’s IP in this way be a once a warning, two times you’re suspended and three times you are out sort of deal? And shouldn’t a Linden be taking a very close look at GamersBrand Island for themselves? Is it REALLY necessary to make the individual creators issue DMCA after DMCA to take this company out of business in SL until they can tell a freebie from a full perms object and know how to work out whether something retains full permissions? Can you hear me in Chicago?

Yesterday I found a comment on one of my several posts — which I started to answer, but decided to bring the whole thought out as a new post. A plea, if you will, to you the readers.

Government is an institution that guarantees that rights are enforced and legally demandable. Its sovereignty dependent on it’s territory (region marked off for administrative or other purposes) or jurisdiction (area within which power can be exercised) .

Let us examine that word sovereignty — it is used as a noun– (a derivative of the word sovereign — {the ancient Greek concept for Sovereign is Basileus (original meaning was chieftain) The first known usage of Basileus is found on the baked clay tablets which date back to the 15th century BC} definition: A nation’s ruler or head of state usually by hereditary right) which makes sovereignty’s definition: Royal authority; the dominion of a monarch.

Today sovereignty is accepted as: the exclusive right to exercise supreme political (e.g. legislative, judicial, and/or executive) authority over a geographic region, group of people, or oneself. A sovereign is the supreme lawmaking authority, subject to no other. wikipedia

It has been suggested to me that cyber-worlds crosses these boundaries by merging such territories. I disagree. I do not believe that territory (region marked off for administrative or other purposes) or jurisdiction (area within which power can be exercised) should overlap. I believe that “the powers that be” would like it to be overlapped because they do not want changes to their power structure.

If the idea of “We the people” actually start heading back to meaning WE THE PEOPLE, it would scare the hell out of “the powers that be” around the world.

Ideally laws are rules which are made by agreement, but we know that is not truly the case. Today in the real world, through lobbies and greed, laws are bought with little or no thought to the good of the mankind, but for the profitability of the corporations or the extremely wealthy. Corporations have no rights! Therefore, the invention of corporate law. “The corporation being an entity bound by rules separate from the individuals that comprise them. Corporate law is what binds rights and their demandability or enforceability.” Ever wondered who came up with that idea?

Oops! I am getting off on a tangent.

In an earlier time, when people formed a belief different from the sovereignty they packed up and moved, or were run out, to a new world where the new beliefs were out of sight and not flaunted in the old sovereignty’s face and the laws were difficult to enforce due to distance.

In the United States, our founders believed so strongly in that very principle that the separation of State and Federal powers was the  second most important, and almost a deal breaking aspect of forming the United States of America, and second only to the importance of unity of the states to fight deal with foreign governments.

“I believe the States can best govern our home concerns, and the General Government our foreign ones.” –Thomas Jefferson writing to William Johnson, 1823

Each state was to be allowed to determine its internal affairs and in turn that right passed on down the line to local areas of each state. In theory, this allowed the individuals to find an area where the “laws” (rules by agreement) were within their belief system. This was also a major reason for the rapid expansion of the country.

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That “all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.” To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. –Thomas Jefferson: National Bank Opinion, 1791

Often these new ideas were able to grow to the point that they affected how the belief of individuals from the old area viewed them, thus creating some change in the old beliefs.

Virtual worlds create new places for people to go with their ideas and beliefs. With “tools” to separate those areas of belief, there are boundless opportunities for those with differing beliefs to be participate. People offended by those beliefs, when they are found, could simply limit themselves to not enter or even “see” (as in a search results or ability to get to) those areas.

You would think as intelligent people we could respect the desire of people to be different and have their own belief systems, but history says different. There is always someone who wants to control other’s beliefs… regardless of whether they are right or wrong, (and who determines that?) but most often there is the opportunity of profit at the root of those control issues.

On to the issue of governments having jurisdiction because a server is located within the physical area of a sim “land” they claim to “own” control.

Why should any one other that the actual owner of that sophisticated off/on switch have dominion to determine what takes place inside that piece of electronics, which is only the direction signals are being directed. The ideas happenings action is truly taking place inside the minds of those participating viewing the results of those electronic switchings. Since when have we began allow external thought control?

My thought is, as long as due diligence is used to prohibit access to minors, if it can be conceived (even by the most warped mind) it should be allowed in virtual worlds. No matter how popular or disgusting an individual perceives it to be. If there are others around the world Universe with similar ideas — a virtual community will form around those ideas or beliefs; if not eventually it will fade away.

The fact is in a virtual world you can not be forced to do anything. No one can actually be harmed in a virtual world any more than they can be in a movie theater, or by reading a book. Worst case scenario you can always turn off unplug the computer.

The trouble is that governments do not seem to want allow ideas, thoughts, or beliefs to foster which differ from the ones that established them into power. Those ideas may take root and become accepted by their populace and challenge their power structure.

The world could not have reached this enlighten era without civilization coming together and forming groups to protect their beliefs. Where would the world be if that little tea party in Boston had never occurred? I can’t answer that, but I am pretty sure there would be considerably less freedom in the world. The American Revolution has stood as an example of what can happen when colonies of different beliefs come together to stand up against an injustice.

If we allow any belief, idea, or thought to be squashed without it having a chance to take root, grow, mutate, and mature; who knows what advances to society will be missed?

We have the opportunity to be the leading edge of the advancement of society by virtually allowing a nursery for ideas, belief, and thoughts to have a chance to be planted, take root, grow, mutate, mature, and be harvested — judged by society by either being accepted to the point of being adopted into real life or ignored.

Where all will Linden Servers end up?

The Linden Lab CTO, speaking in the Singapore iX conference, spoke about the majority of the numbers of residents of Second Life being from outside the United States and “So the vast majority of our usage is overseas [and] because of that, we need to start hosting servers in foreign markets,” he revealed.

This isn’t going to create a different Second Life, parts of the virtual world will be ‘closer’ instead to the residents. This would address any latency issues, so users in this part of the world will not experience a time lag–especially when the network is congested–when they access Second Life’s server infrastructure

For us, being able to deploy servers both to Europe and Asia is a critical next step for us. We have some architectural changes we need to make in order to allow that, but we’re working on that right now.

What do you think? Will Linden Lab host servers around the world? Or Will they just host to help control latency until open sourcing the server code?

The article is well thought out and extremely well written, giving pause for thought no matter what your beliefs on the subject might be.

If you are relative new to Second Life, reading an accurate (although necessarily brief) history on Second Life makes her article an excellent read.

If you are a “thinker” interested in the direction Second Life will could should grow; I am not sure this article will help you determine with any certainty how you will should actually would like to see Second Life grow, but will give you plenty to ponder.

Great post Gwyneth, makes me re-examine  some of my own thoughts.