The new Skill Gaming Policy officially arrived in Second Life yesterday. However it arrived with an apparent late twist to who is authorised to participate. The last blog post on the subject stated :

If you live in a jurisdiction where skill gaming is permitted and you plan on playing these games in Skill Gaming Regions in Second Life, you should not need to do anything differently. However, adding payment information on file now is a good way to help ensure you’re able to play as soon as Skill Gaming Regions are live.

However it seems that there had either been an omission or Linden Lab decided they needed to be a bit more careful regarding who can participate. On August 29th, after some venues had been approved, a change appears to have been made to the FAQ. The change to the FAQ is a sensible one and one that really should have been mentioned before. The change to the FAQ points out that to participate you must have current payment info on file and you must be 19 years of age or older. On top of this you can’t be connecting from a prohibited state or be a resident of a prohibited state.

The change to requiring current payment info on file is likely to throw those who wanted to go play on their alts, although those who are determined to do so know what needs to be done to allow them to access Skill Gaming Regions.

Continue reading “Skill Gaming Policy Arrives With Sensible Late Twist”

Linden Lab have issued a reminder : New Skill Gaming Policy in Effect September 1, 2014. The blog post also contains a warning that the new policy will be enforced. Skill Gaming in Second Life is basically defined as :

• A game where the outcome is determined by skill, rather than by chance.
• Has the option for payment to participate in Linden Dollars.
• Pays out in Linden Dollars.
• Is legal according to United States and international law.

That’s pretty much the gist of it, so if the game allows you to pay in with the option of paying out if your skill allows you to win, then it’s a skill game. Now if those criteria aren’t met, say for example you can pay in but there’s a random chance of the game paying out, such as a traditional fruit machine style game, then that’s gambling and is strictly forbidden.

Now if you haven’t been paying attention then you may be wondering how on earth Linden Lab know if the game you play or create meets this criteria. Well that’s what the Skill Gaming Policy is for. Games of skill will only be allowed to be played on approved sims. Only approved games, created by approved creators are permitted and they can only be operated by approved operators. This means that if your game meets the skill gaming definition, you will still be breaching the rules of the new policy if the game, the land or the person operating the game have not been approved.

Continue reading “LL Issue Reminder And Warning On Skill Gaming Policy”

On August 13th I blogged about the problems both Linden Lab and Skill Gaming applicants had experienced with the application process : Skill Gaming Applications Appear To Be A Skill Game In Their Own Right. In that post I highlighted the moving goalposts of the application process and how they were proving challenging to applicants.

Linden Lab had initially set a deadline of August 1st for this policy, that was later pushed back to September 1st. In my post I felt that September 1st was looking a little problematic, indeed I said :

I’m firmly in the camp that believes that this deadline will need to be pushed back again, but that in itself is no bad thing because we can see that this is a learning curve for Linden Lab and applicants. The important thing to do is to get this right.

Days passed and my opinion did not change, there were no signs on the public wiki of any approved games or operators. However it seems that I was wrong, something I’m not afraid to admit, because approved operators, regions and games have started to rear their heads, as we can see if we look at the public wiki page : Linden Lab Official:Second Life Skill Gaming Approved Participants.

Whereas there are a number of listed Skill Gaming Operators, I’m not sure they are all different people, here’s a current list :

• MooTownGames SLSGO
• SushantDiesel SLSGO
• SushantYing SLSGO
• SushantLecker SLSGO
• EchoBlaylock SLSGO
• PokaMachines SLSGO
• PIGamesResident SLSGO

At this stage I’m not sure if all Skill Gaming operators will have SLSGO after their name or whether this is indicative of this only really being one applicant. The same applicant certainly appears to have more than one operator licence because the contact email addresses are the same in some cases, or extremely similar in others.

There are a number of listed regions associated with each operator, but again we see some regions listed next to more than one operator.

Continue reading “Skill Gaming Ventures Start To Get Approval”