With a hat tip to Cristiano at SLUniverse for his post on the subject, it seems that Richard “Lord British” Garriott is planning a virtual world social hub called Centerport, which you can read about here. The blurb starts well:
“When it makes its debut in 2012, CenterPort will be the virtual world social hub for the OpenLife ecosystem, a broad yet fully integrated meta-community. And, it’s also a robust game unto itself.”
There’s talk of reward systems, games, friends lists and when it’s initially launched it will be as a social network app for the likes of Facebook, MySpace and hi5 …. will Myspace still be around in 2012? Facebook will be and that’s going to be one of the problems for this venture, but that’s a different issue for a different post.
However before folk get too excited, let’s look a bit deeper:
“Learning providers can create entire campuses composed of multiple learning environments. Game designers can create custom games Virtual world providers can provide any type of environment (within similar constraints as the Entertainment Software Ratings Board [ESRB] content ranges, we intend to avoid the issues that Second Life is wrestling with due to the adult/erotic/pornographic flavor of so much of their content).”
Hmmmm……..
So what’s the problem with the no sex please issue, well for a start, it ain’t gonna work! Oh sure you can hide the content and the interactions, but people do these things, whether developers want to be grown up about it or not, the see no evil attitude is blindingly small minded.
Second Life had the chance with Zindra to be very grown up about it, however the implementation was poor during the adult content fiasco, they should have built a PG continent for those who wanted a PG continent, let’s not forget that the reason Second Life has adult content is because the users of Second Life created it and wanted it. Second Life has never been promoted as being a world for those who want adult content, unlike Redlight Center, but users developed, used and created a market for adult goods and it thrived.
Now when they created Zindra, they had people knocking on the door asking to be let in, people were complaining about being refused a swap and going through appeals, people who felt their services and goods were adult wanted to be in Zindra, but then Linden Lab took their eye off the ball and didn’t grasp this opportunity.
One of the issues was reach, people found it difficult to market their wares effectively from the exiled lands. At this stage I wanted Linden Lab to allow anyone to search for adult content, they still wouldn’t have been able to access the content without going through a verification process, but they’d have been able to find the content in search and know it existed. However officially opening the doors to the teens, makes that a non starter now.
However once people discovered that their reach would be better served by returning to mature land, where they were borderline cases, some adult vendors took that route, so instead of having clear boundaries and an opportunity to create a good social status of what maturity rating adult items were on, we had this mish mash. I repeat, despite all the wailing about the forced moves, which was something I didn’t agree with at the time, people were complaining that they couldn’t get a land swap into Zindra, opportunity was knocking loud and clear here and with the counter PG continent, great strides could have been made, but that didn’t happen.
However, it should be said that at its heart the concept of the adult land rating was a good one. I can recall walking around malls looking for clothes or furniture and then suddenly being confronted by a store with a giant phallus on its roof , leaving me thinking “WTF! No need” The idea of adult merchants selling adult items to people who had gone through an extra step of verification was also a good one. The point really was that Second Life users had learnt to adapt to the inclusion of adult content and although there was some ickiness for some folk, largely people happily co-existed.
I can still recall selling a PG plot of land that bordered a mature sim after a gentleman’s club opened on the neighbouring mature parcel, making the PG status of my parcel redundant, I didn’t actually realise that PG and Mature sims bordered each other like that (they still do), but that was my fault for not investigating properly. So for me the idea of adult land, if done correctly, had an appeal. Then it has to be said that Linden Lab did take a very open minded view of what could be advertised on adult land, I mean very open minded, I’ve never been a fan of super crude parcel descriptions and adverts, but now that Zindra was upon us, this was officially allowed.
Now I’m sure there were and probably still are, people at Linden Lab who absolutely hate the adult content and I’m also sure there are some users who have been put off using Second Life by its existence. However there are also plenty of people who have been mature enough to turn a blind eye to it and get along happily without it even bothering them, as people do every single day of the week when they browse the web, there’s loads of adult content available online for those who seek it, this doesn’t stop adults from using other services.
The problem with trying to make your brave new venture too sterile is that it cuts your reach, the official Second Life forums have not yet recovered from their bland, clinical, Stepford Wives type opening, they are nowehere near as busy as they once were. I’m not saying that adult content should be actively encouraged by developers, I’m saying that trying to actively discourage it is just burying your head in the sand and Linden Lab do have a better approach, albeit still flawed, to the concepts of human nature, than those who from the outset want to neuter it.
There, which will be re-opening soon aren’t encouraging adult content or interactions, but they are taking a different approach to some realities, as they announced in the blog post announcing their impending revival:
“We will work to re-open There as a Paid Service (fees TBD, but at least $10/month) for folks 18 or older. You will be able to use your old Avatars, and will have all of the inventory and Therebucks you had when we closed.
I know that many of you will be disappointed by the 18 or older aspect of our decision. As I’ve said, at this juncture we can’t afford to provide the level of support and monitoring we think is right to protect folks under 18, so we’re not going to put minors, or ourselves, in that position. In the future this might change, but that decision is final for now. Again, I apologize.”
Second Life has thrived because it was open minded about user creation, that has always been a big appeal for Second Life. People may shake their heads and feel the adult content thwarted it, but really it didn’t, big businesses just haven’t found enough ways to reach people in Second Life to make it viable for many of them, if they could, they’d welcome the adult content rating in Second Life, because it’s a better one than the web at large has in terms of trying to restrict adult content, if business could sell us their wares, they wouldn’t care that much about the existence of adult content in Second Life.
So a long time ago I mentioned Centerpoint and I do wish it success, I’m a more the merrier type of person when it comes to virtual worlds and such like, but by starting out sounding so clinically corporate, it loses an edge for me.