Second Life seems to be getting a bit busy lately. Almost certainly a direct result of my patronage and ramblings here, no doubt!
In the few months I’ve been pottering about with it, it’s ‘residents’ figure, listed on the front page of their website, seems to have risen from about 71,000 or so, to 108,000 and more. However, this is almost certainly misleading, and the ‘residents currently online’ figure is, as with most MMOs, a more accurate number to work with, particularly since being a Basic Level Resident, is tantamount to having a free trial, and it’s very difficult to ‘cancel’ a free trial. How many of the 30,000 people who have signed up in the last few months have even been in game more than once, is anyone’s guess.
Still, despite book-keeping niceties, the title is doing suprisingly well. It regularly claims 2,000 concurrent users, and around 25,000USD of in-game transactions – small, but healthy. It also seems to be a regular source of Virtual World news, having a much wider diversity of stuff going on inside itself than, say, World of Warcraft, or EVE Online; sociological, technological and economical – the whole thing seems a fascinating experiment from any angle, and crops up more and more on sites like Terranova and Slashdot.
This one in particular caught my eye:
Clickable Culture: Hidden Virtual World Prison Revealed (Via Slashdot)
Now gang, although the reports don’t say why that particular chimp was banished to Neo-Kansas there, we know, because we’ve met this chap before:
Van Hemlock: The Lapse of Security
That's right - it's the Emulator Punk! After I’d written that and moved on, this Yaffle kid – the one who was trying to extort the emulator creator, started banging on about some Corn Field on page ten of his, frankly over-milked, five-minutes of fame thread on the SL boards, and frankly I’m still not sure if it’s a hoax, despite Linden Labs apparently confirming it’s existence. It does seem odd: a hidden and novel game feature (easteregg), which can only be got at by violating the Terms of Service? That’s mad, and asking for trouble!
Traditionally, the punishment for breaking the rules in these worlds is to not be allowed back in them, either temporarily, or permanently. As Tony asks at the bottom of his article – is this just going to make people want to have a look for themselves?
Still, it is good to know that in a world as essentially and necessarily anarchic as SL, that there are some rules, and that those are enforced. More on my own doings in there later, but I’ll leave you with a few reposts from their ‘Police Blotter’ page (login required), where they list recent disciplinary actions, which gives you some idea of the kinds of comparative morality that exist in digital utopia these days.
Date: Tuesday, January 3, 2006
Violation: Community Standards: Intolerance
Region: —
Description: Displaying Swastikas and promoting intolerance.
Action taken: Suspended 14 days.
(A comparatively harsh penalty, the next one up being an outright ban. Context is everything mind you – I wonder what sort of reaction an accurate and historical recreation of Stalingrad or Normandy, circa 1944 would receive?)
Date: Tuesday, January 3, 2006
Violation: Community Standards: Assault, Safe Area
Region: —
Description: Repeated scripted assault in safe zone
Action taken: Suspended 3 days.
(There’s always some griefer trying to get around the rules, so when technology fails, human common sense has to step in. The nature of the assault is not clear, but can be many and diverse, and often very subtle.)
Date: Tuesday, January 3, 2006
Violation: Terms of Service: Mature Content
Region: —
Description: mature content in PG region
Action taken: Suspended 7 days.
(Despite everyone notionally being 18+ in the ‘Main Grid’, not everyone wants to see dangly bits on parade all the time. The areas of the world are clearly labelled (PG) or (Mature). Seven days for getting the naughty bits out in the wrong type of zone seems fair.)
Date: Tuesday, January 3, 2006
Violation: Community Standards: Assault, Scripted Objects
Region: Clear
Description: Scripted prim litter.
Action taken: Suspended 3 days.
(Again, context is the key here - it can be quite easy to do this accidentlaly. Hell, I leave a lot of junk lying around while I'm working in the sandboxes. Littering up some one else’s virtual backyard with pine blocks on purpose, and worse still, having those pine blocks do something annoying, is another matter though.)
Date: Saturday, December 31, 2005
Violation: Terms of Service: Global Attacks
Region: Da Boom
Description: Grid attack.
Action taken: Suspended 14 days.
(The biggie – a Grid Attack is a deliberate attempt to bring parts of, or all of, Second Life to a screaming juddering halt. There are probably a number of ways to go about it, but Linden Labs have every right to protect their own business, which essentially *is* the world they’ve built. 14 days seems lenient to be honest, although there is always benefit of the doubt – scripting at the complex end is potentially capable of crashing Sims quite by accident.)
Date: Friday, December 30, 2005
Violation: Community Standards: Rules of Conduct
Region: Atiu
Description: Persistent abuse and nuisance-ness.
Action taken: Warning issued.
(Tough on nuisance-ness, tough on the causes of nuisance-ness! No idea what this one is about, but a warning is the least punitive measure, so it can't have been all that bad.)
Date: Friday, December 30, 2005
Violation: Community Standards: Assault, Scripted Objects
Region: Da Boom
Description: Assault: Scripted weapons "YOU FOOLS IM SHOOTING YOU"
Action taken: Suspended 3 days.
(Good comedy griefer! My nomination for replacement ‘LEEEEERRROYYY!’ Meme! Remember kids, next time you’re in Ironforge and someone pipes up with the most overused spam of 2005, just come back with a snappy “/shout YOU FOOLS IM SHOOTING YOU”. Assault with scripted weapons is a serious matter though – most folks in there have no idea what is going on when they’re hit with homemade Uzis, Shotguns, Lasers and Atom Bombs, and really aren’t there for Counterstrike.)
Ah…the mean streets of cyberspace…