Amsterdammed: Linden Lab to Segregate "Adult" Content in Second Life to Red Light Continent (Real Life ID Required)

Real world Amsterdam is famed for its liberal laws regarding prostitution and pornography, but if you want to avail yourselves of such entertainment, it's actually not on every street; to get it, you need to consciously walk into a district clearly demarcated from the rest of the city by a canal and literal red lights. (SL's version of Amsterdam nicely simulates that geography, as above.)

And by the end of this Summer, if things go as announced, that's more or less the zoning regulations Second Life will have, too. This from an announcement now up on the Lindens' official blog. In summary, content designated as "Adult" will be forced off the main continents, and resettled in a Linden-managed "Adult Continent". To access that land, users will need to show proof of adulthood, either by registering a credit card number, using the Lindens' official age verification provider, Aristotle, or via other forms of ID. (Private islands and estate owners will be required to flag Adult content, and require such verification for entry.)

Yesterday I was given a chance to conduct a phone interview with Cyn Linden, company VP of customer relations, and Linden counsel Marty Roberts, so they could explain the company's reasoning for doing this now. According to Cyn, the impact on landowners on the main continents will be minimal; she estimates only 2-4 percent of the mainland contains adult content that would be affected.

The looming question, of course, is what exactly constitutes "Adult content"?

That's still unclear and decidedly left undefined now; in a conversation that's sure to be contentious, the Lindens say they plan on taking Resident community feedback, to establish specifications. Broadly speaking, however the regulation will mainly apply to extremely sexual and violent content.

"We’ll meet in the forums," the official announcement reads, "and we'll reach out directly to several constituents as well as to the thought leaders who will undoubtedly emerge here. What comes from this process will not be perfect, but it will be better for our coming together to make the plan happen."

The prohibitions will include depictions of "egregious violence, simulated drug use", Roberts told me, but here again, questions remain. Do first-person shooter games built in SL apply? How about simulated drugs which don't exist in the real world?

I gave a specific example to Cyn and Roberts. One of the more popular roleplaying groups in SL is "Dark Den RP Group", which by its own description, offers "Kidnap, auction and slavery RP". Would that be designated as Adult? Surprisingly, both suggested it wouldn't, since the wording is "not about sex and violence."

How about "Capture" roleplay, generally associated with S/M sexuality? Again, they suggested, if sex wasn't explicitly mentioned, it wouldn't be defined as sexual.

Why do this now, though? According to Cyn, "Because the community has been asking us". However, she acknowledged "[I]t will help businesses and education [groups] to feel more comfortable about what they encounter" when they go in-world.  I asked her if this was related to rumors that the main Second Life grid would be merged with Teen Second Life; she denied any relation.

In any case, the clock will start ticking on this policy in early Summer, perhaps May. Adult content owners will need to start the movement process then. "We're not going to put a hard line on that," Cyn told me, "at least sixty days."

In the meantime, the community is left to wonder who will have to make the move, and how it will change the culture of Second Life. What will the metaverse be like, after certain content is sent packing to its own continent?

Top image taken at SL's Amsterdam [Direct SLurl teleport at this link]; Cyn photo from Linden Lab's site.

Comments

[Sioban]

Like their run at ad farms/land cutters, this has to be aimed at improving the quality of (second) life on the mainland areas. I had a lovely parcel on the mainland for a while, but a massive sex club was located along one edge. The club had a high number of avvies or bots, which ate up capacity for the sim. The club's visitors would also stray over to our area and think they were still in a sex club. Not nice at all.

[magggnnus]

"In summary, content designated as "Adult" will be forced off the main continents, and resettled in a Linden-managed "Adult Continent"."
An interesting thought. As the announcement itself is a little vaguer i did ask myself if LL was planning to restrict access to all "adult" regions (as in the current "adult" or "PG" region designation) for NPIOF avatars.
which would have been crazy.

[Nexus Burbclave]

My impulse reaction is anger. Seething anger at a company that has clearly let go of its libertarian ideals. But I'm going to take some time to fully read and digest everything before I make any detailed comments.

[Dirk Talamasca]

It is a great thing and it's not like it should shock anyone that this is taking place. The tools to implement this have been in place on SL parcels for quite some time. Anyone just beginning to WONDER what will happen missed the WONDERING boat over a year ago.

[Dusan Writer]

Hmmm - great info Hamlet, although I feel like I'm definitely not getting it. They refer to their community standards as the place where these things have a reference point, and while the sims you mentioned might not have a problem in search, they might still need to be rated "R" if they include:

* Representations of explicit sexual conduct or genitalia, whether or not photo-realistic ("sexual conduct" will be defined inclusively, to include all erotic themes)
* Representations of intense violence depicting death, torture, dismemberment or other severe bodily harm
* Photo-realistic nudity
* Sexually themed spaces (whether indoors or outdoors)

So should we be thinking of this as "search terms" or by actual content? It's murky to me.

I see this from two sides - as an 'enterprise user' it will give assurances to clients and 'business noobs' that they won't blush by accidentally stumbling into Gor. On the other hand, I don't entirely buy that it will impact a tiny sliver of the population. We'll see - but I'm thinking of mall owners with, say, 10 tenants and one is "adult". Or needing to make choices about where you "live" because you want to walk around nude or something - whatever, I sense a dislocation or diaspora, one or the other.

Longer post here: http://tinyurl.com/cf6pf9 although I will say that based on some comments I sound more snarky than I feel.

I'm more interested in the strategy behind this, which I'm not sure I see, and the logistics of how it will be handled. Time will tell.

And I call it SLAMsterdam, btw, while risking trademark issues.

[Nexus Burbclave]

My initial reaction is anger. Seething anger at a company that has clearly lost site of its founders' and early adopters' libertarian ideals. But before I make any lengthy comments, I'm going to take some time to fully digest the details.

[Hamlet Au]

I'm not even sure Gorean content would be forbidden, Dusan, since that's not explicitly sexual. I love "SLAmsterdam", I'm sorely tempted to change the post title to that. :)

[Crap Mariner]

Dirk, I strongly disagree that the tools are in place.

The grid is managed and allocated with tools that assume X,Y.

But objects and activities use that pesky Z coordinate.

And that's just scratching the surface of the problem (once again, more of that pesky Z thing).

-ls/cm

[Catherine Linden]

I can see you all have lots of concerns, comments and questions. It'd be great if you would join the conversation in the forums where there's a group of people watching and answering. Your feedback is absolutely critical to the process.

here's a link to the blog and the different forums:
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/03/12/upcoming-changes-for-adult-content

[Valentina Kendal]

Having all that pesky, potentially offensive content segregated to a ghetto will make it *so* much easier to just delete that continent when LL finds a big corporate buyer. Good thinking!

[Gahum Riptide]

Seething anger? I think you need to learn to pick your battles and focus it in a more positive direction, Nexus.

[Ananda]

Hamlet you put a bizarre spin on this story - so for instance as long as you don't mention certain words your slavery/torture/cannibalism dungeon and tentacle outlet store should be fine, but potentially my group that hangs out in a jewelry store parking lot and occasionally announces a "nakie orgy dance party" might have to be ghettoized? *boggles*

[Robert Graf]

Hmmmm No Gambling, No Sex, maybe no guns in the future... No Fun..... Adios, Second Life... See Ya... wouldn't want to be ya.... LOL!!

[Arwyn Quandry]

I'm feeling that is a huge step towards the Grid Merge, and for that reason, I'm both pleased and horrified. Pleased in that they may actually merge the grids and support teens. Horrified that they're going to step on the freedoms of those already occupying the Main Grid to do so. I fully expect an overreaction to start by Saturday at the latest.

A more complete reaction is here: http://arwynquandry.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/ll-segregate-adult-content/

[Robert Graf]

Money Talks... Vote with your feet... And wallet... Walk away from this lunacy... Sell, land, sell lindens, sell inventory, and move on... Just say no thanks to the Lindens... And then maybe layoffs will be in their future... No Paycheck will motivate them more than anything else... We as the customers and users pay the company bills. Starve them of money.. Its the only way they respond otherwise.. They are tonedeaf, small minded prudes... And to think they are from San Fran.. Thought that was hedonism central? LOL!!

[Nexus Burbclave]

Gahum, if sanitizing the place that once boasted the motto "your world, your imagination" isn't the time to pick my battle, I don't know what is. Once they've set the precedent of pushing the undesirables into ghettoes, who comes next? Furries? Goreans? Child Avis? Will the mainland be for "well behaved, normal" adult human avatars only. I think this could set a very dangerous precedent and I do think this is the time to take a stand. If not now, then when?

[Iggy O]

I don't know how to feel about this. The cyber-libertarian in me is not pleased, but my avatar won't be influenced by the change.

But I'm putting on my professorial mortar-board for a moment to note that whatever Linden Lab's motives and the impact on the SL economy, we are seeing a clear evolutionary step in what some call the "3D Web."

It all has happened before. Putting the adult content in a ghetto lets LL put filters in place, the same sort that work--sort of--at schools. Yet those same filters on the 2D Web block content from the Smithsonian.

Business clients of LL might even get a SL business client for their employees, with some sort of back-office feature to prevent (or even log, secretly) visits to adult-themed parcels.

Time to chime in at the LL forum.

[dandellion Kimban]

Crack Den is not explicit in sex & violence? Well, ok then :D

[Gizzy Alter]

SL can go screw themselves, I use a free account, refuse to pay real money to use SL, if their age verification means i have to go to a paid account, then i'm out of SL, never to return

[Random Merryman]

Cross-posted from the SL forums:

Now here's where it looks from where I am.

Linden Labs just slit their own throats today. I don't have any great interest in the adult industry, but I'm damned if I can see how it will survive when it ceases to be possible to access it with an anonymous account. And when it falls, the economic basis of Second Life is fatally weakened too.

Sure, you survived shutting down gambling. Big deal - we were in a boom then, and Second Life was trendy. Now we're in a slump, a lot of major brands look on SL as something that got tried and failed, and you're about to tell the rest of them 'we have a problem here'.

And what for?

There can only be two reasons, since LL (to its credit) isn't trying to push arguments about moral right and wrong.

Argument one is, 'but what about the CHILDREN?' and argument two is making SL more business-friendly. As in, real-world business.

Well, I run a real-world business with my partner. We have an office in SL, rented in a business park. We attend seminars and training events. We're building partnerships and holding meetings. We're exploring sponsorship of SL events. We're spending money here.

And when we're not working, we're off in our home sim, where we rent a couple of parcels from the Guvnah. We're learning to build, we spend a fortune on clothes, we socialise, we're part of a community. We love it.

And we're seriously considering leaving because of today. If the Teen Grid merger comes then we certainly will.

It's not because we're fans of the adult industry. Our only use for couples poseballs is the foxtrot, at formal dances. Roleplaying means, to us, calling people Mr and Miss, and bowing before departing. Xcite is simply yet another badly-spelled brand name.

But this piece of short-sighted, unnecessary control-freakery is a killer. It bursts the bubble - destroys the illusion that Second Life allows you to build your own second life. It says the Big Boss in the Sky doesn't trust the residents and is going to start intervening to make the world look more acceptable to - well, who?

Parents? No need - just keep the Teen Grid and make it work. If the brats aren't in the main world then where's the problem?

Businesses? Hello, RL business-owner here and seriously unimpressed. This won't make me more likely to invest, it'll make me less. I don't want to operate in a plain-vanilla theme park.

Some kind of existential fear of failing to conform to a shapeless, ill-defined but potent sense of How The World Should Be? Strangely, I don't think it is.

No, it's got to be the business thing and the parent thing. And that's stupid, stupid, stupid.

The damage this will do to the SL economy - the bit of it that LL don't like to put in their press releases, but which pays for so much of the other stuff - is going to be horrific. The drain of people to places (virtual worlds or otherwise) where they can still be anonymous will be huge.

Really, it would be kinder to just shut the whole thing down now rather than force us to sit through the thrashing of its long, extended, but inevitable death.

[Ann Otoole]

Second Life is not about corporate garbage. it is and always was about entertainment. Some people are quite obviously incapable of comprehending this blatant staring in the face fact of life.

The money will go where the entertainment value goes and that is going to be somewhere other than a place run by people with no entertainment business expertise.

But really... Kapor doesn't like us (and calls us names) so he is killing it. End of story. It is his toy. He owns the ball and is picking it up and taking it home to his corporate meeting room filled with college student griefers.

Why is it rich people are always stupid?

[BJ Tunwarm]

They're either going to have that make that continent mighty big or that definition of a "adult" mighty narrow with the way things go in SL. Hello Linden Labs, this is the internet; we are all here to have anonymous sex and to attack each other.

[Raul Crimson]

I agree that everybody should feel comfortable in SL and a solution is needed, anyway, i'm not sure the best is to create a ghetto, a concentration camp for sexors, as someone named it.

For me one of the problems is some people consider themselves better than others becuase they don't cyber, so the "sexors" should be "recluded" in a special area. Sorry, but nobody is better, we all make SL, including the sexors.

I am Age Verified, and this won't affect me directly, but it will affect what SL is... and it is adult content too.

[Sianna Odriscoll]

Wow... how disappointing is this. Apparently "Your World, Your Imagination" doesn't apply if your imagination is filthy like me. If it is, you get to be pushed out of the main community of SL and segregated off to the side like freaks.

Way to alienate your PAYING adult-content users, LL. And I thought you were so libertarian. Guess those ideals fall by the wayside in the face of conservative pressures to clean up.

[Yak]

A majority of the citizens in SL are non American and that should be taken in consideration, but this is a a decision by American moral standards.
Not everywhere people believe that prohibition and separation are the best ways to deal with issues.
But just like in RL, entrepreneurs have the last word. I'd rather be surrounded by happy avatars living out their fantasies in an uncencored world, then by shopping centers and corporate presence.
Greetings from Amsterdam