Virtual Worlds – Page 297

February 27, 2011February 27, 2011

One Account To Rule Them All

The Redzone kerfuffle is in serious danger of masking other concerns regarding Second Life, griefing being one and I personally find some of the harassment of Redzone users to be particularly unpalatable, whether you agree with Redzone or not, there is nothing to be gained from harassing Redzone users. However one thing Linden Lab should consider is taking a look at Argent Stonecutter’s Jira proposal to give us better security via a master account, as explained on Jira-SVC-6212.

This proposal has quite a few big advantages, for a start it means it’s harder for people to guess your Second Life login name, it could be used to adult verify and give payment status to, all your associated accounts if you choose and it could also be used to ban or allow access to parcels or sims for this avatar only or all avatars associated with this account.

This would of course mean some substantial work for Linden Lab, but in terms of security and greater options it would enhance the Second Life experience.

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February 26, 2011February 26, 2011

Redzone Row Rumbles On

Dale Innis describes the Redzone issue as silly, not just people’s concerns about Redzone, Dale is talking about Redzone itself being silly because it can’t possibly be accurate. Hamlet over at New World Notes suggests it’s not a big issue because so few of Second Life’s total population have voted on the Jira. They are both right to a degree but are both missing the bigger issues because this isn’t about IP logging or tracking, I get to see IP addresses of visitors here, it’s not what gets logged that’s the issue, it’s how it’s used.

Data is required to help improve services, but that data should really be limited when it’s going to be shared or used for marketing purposes, I used to work with a guy who would spell his name incorrectly during surveys so he could track who was selling on his details. People get miffed when their data is used for purposes other than they expected, anyone commenting on my blog, or Hamlet’s isn’t giving us permission to put them on mailing lists, publish their details or engage in a marketing campaign with them and although some sites will try to do this, there are privacy laws and directives to be aware of, the issue is really one of respect, and that’s where Redzone and its users fall down.

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February 25, 2011February 26, 2011

Games and Obstacles

I saw a comment recently about point and click that said something along the lines of Second Life not being a Lucasarts adventure, quite, but you know what, I’d love there to be a LucasArts type adventure in Second Life, you know, like Monkey Island! Now of course, Monkey Island has been done and Ron Gilbert won’t tell anyone the secret but wouldn’t it be great if someone like Ron Gilbert felt there was a big enough market within Second Life for him to create a bit of a fun adventure for the platform? There are of course obvious issues such as scalability, physics, data storage yadda yadda yadda but I’m sure something could be done point and click style, the big barrier really is how does one make games pay in Second Life?

How about going even more basic than point and click and having a text adventure, Scott Adams style, I’m sure something like that could be scripted. Why are you talking about games Ciaran, I hear my alt saying, well it’s because Rod Humble has been penned in to be a keynote speaker at The Inventing The Future of Games Symposium on April 15th, according to Gamasutra.

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February 25, 2011

Will Redzone be hoisted by its own petard?

This is not a love song, this is another post about Redzone, which is getting to quite flabbergasting proportions right now for the sheer breathtaking cheek of it all, just when you think it’s safe to go back into the ocean along comes Redzone 2. There are some who think Linden Lab are dangling enough rope for Zfire and the Redzone massive to hang themselves, I’m not quite so convinced but there is something extremely unsavoury going on.

There appeared to be some talks between Linden Lab and Redzone, Zfire appeared to be listening, he agreed to opt in for the hud, he agreed to seek consent via the hud, but the comments on the Redzone forum puts Linden Lab in the position where they’d like to know where Zfire got the notion to rock the boat.

The new community standards aren’t even dry from the printing press and the creator of the device that seeks to stop griefers, copybotters and does not at all have a primary function of detecting alts, is suggesting ways to circumvent the new community standards, you couldn’t make this up!

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February 24, 2011February 24, 2011

Community Standards changes toothless without common sense

There has been an unannounced change to the community standards, which can be read here. The main point people have noticed so far is with regards to disclosure:

Disclosure

Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Life experience. Sharing personal information about your fellow Residents without their consent — including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, alternate account names, and real-world location beyond what is provided by them in their Resident profile — is not allowed. Remotely monitoring conversations in Second Life, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without the participants’ consent are all prohibited.

Now before people start popping the champagne corks thinking this means the end of Redzone, think again, because without Linden Lab applying some common sense and moderation, things haven’t changed that much at all.

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