Watch One of Second Life's Biggest Fans Explaining Second Life's Own Bad Design & Branding Decisions

"I have a full-ass real life but let me tell you when I want my down time to myself, just log in, talk to my friends, do some dumb shit, play some games, blah blah blah, make my videos, that's what I want to do in my spare time."

Lexy Nexen, who's one of Second Life's best and brashest YouTubers (so subscribe already), recently posted this fun if frustrating video, explaining -- via her casually cool real life self -- a key frustration with vlogging about SL: YouTube comments full of snark which more or less boil down to "LOL you're playing Second Life to have weird sex and you have no first life". She effectively addresses the second part by mentioning many cool and worthwhile places in people in Second Life (including the late Fran Serenade), but flounders a bit with the first part.

And that frustrates me: This is yet one more time one of Second Life's biggest fans feels she has to put herself out there explaining the world's bad reputation, in a way few other online game world users have to contend with. (VRChat, by contrast has a bad -- and at least somewhat unfair -- reputation for nasty trolls and an excess of anime girls, but that's different.) And the thing is, this was and is an addressable problem:

Calling Second Life Second Life is inherently problematic -- pro tip: don't give your product a name that invites a joke on the name itself -- which is why the company should have long ago (and still can) be rebranded as, say, SL3D. 

As for weird virtual sex, as Lexy allows, that's just a thing that's there, no denying that, and really, not anything wrong that that per se. But again, it's why the company should have long ago (and still can) totally move all extreme content to an entirely different server grid with a different brand name and web page, with only Linden Dollars the only fabric linking the two. (So users can go back and forth between the two.)

Anyway, enough of me ranting on top her rant -- watch more Lexy above and don't forget to subscribe.

Comments

[William Burns]

The weird sex comments are not handled well in the community. Instead of trying to distance yourself and put it on a separate grid, the answer is simple. Just remind those commenters that they are all one click away from PornHub and yet nobody is demonizing the Internet or people using it.

As for the "get a real life" sort of comments, well we brought that on ourselves with the abstraction of persona and anonymity. All that leads to the catfishing and stigma.

The best way to combat that is just to show that we're real with real lives separate from the virtual. That Second Life is just that.. Second to Real Life or an addition. When it becomes our only life, then we bring it in ourselves for that ridicule.

[Wagner James Au]

> one click away from PornHub

I get the analogy, but we all know SL has a fair amount of extreme niche fetishist sex depictions that not even PornHub hosts.

[Markus Breuer]

The only reason, some people consider sexual content a problem with SL is, that they are deeply routed in the US-American culture. This culture has grown into an – actually "weird" – combination of attitudes. On the one side media and advertising has been completely hyper-sexualized over the course of the last decades. At the same time exposition of people under 18 to the picture of a (female!) nipple or male penis is considered a kind of traumatic experience, which will deform their character (or holy soul) forever. This is .. "weird" and "extreme" ;-)

On the other hand: Second Life has many, many issues that kept it from becoming a roaring success. And, unfortunately, most of them cannot be fixed easily with just a name change or banning female nipples and "weird sex" to a separate grid. Linden Lab has made mistakes, no question. But if the idea of a virtual world based on user-generated content would be one which is ready for prime time, other companies would have been successful with it.

[Wagner James Au]

"The only reason, some people consider sexual content a problem with SL is, that they are deeply routed in the US-American culture."

Not really. Germany, for example, bans the depiction of ANY representation of pedophilia, even virtual. (The US only bans RL depictions.) This is why a German news crew confronted Linden Lab about that content existing unregulated in Second Life in 2007:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/06/broadly_ambival.html

After that Linden Lab banned "age play" but reports of its continued existence keep cropping up. Other types of SL sexual activity still allowed and fairly active include simulated rape, beastiality, coprophalia, cannibal sex, etc etc, countless examples which are considered broadly offensive in much/most of the world beyond the US.

[Arwyn]

I hate the fact that bloggers pit sexual and non sexual content against each other, like there's no overlap and no reason someone would engage with both, so much so that they should be segregated. Let's take Crack Den for example. They have a mixed space, which includes child avatars allowed in some parts and sexual RP in others, yet all of their sims and characters are connected. If you ghettoized the sex, I don't think their RP could survive. Let's say you instead just tried to move the "extreme" sex. Again, they probably wouldn't survive, because they allow rape RP and the like, and that's a draw. Yet, if you walked across their sims, you wouldn't see much or any of it in public. You've got people who play characters with home and family lives who are also off engaging in what you might consider "extreme" content some of the time. What's wrong with that?

People are complex. We contain many facets. If your best friend came to you and admitted "Hey, I have a fetish for being tied up and used as a human footstool", would you refuse to speak to them again? Refuse to go to their house because they might have weird sex stuff in their closets? If so, you're a shitty friend. Let's embrace the fact that SL contains sex and people expressing themselves through it rather than shaming them for it.

[Clara Seller]

All of this makes my head spin. I'm virtuous, I don't ever do sexual things. Nobody wants you? No, I have lots of sex. I'm just offended by it. I just bought a really big ass and huge boobs and I photograph myself constantly, but I think all of this adult stuff needs to be controlled. I want sexual attention, I'm just repulsed by it. Yes, we've made a lot of money off of sex, but we condemn it. Let's build a world without sex, I won't personally have any interest in it, but it will be an ideal place to put everybody else for their own good. I'm an extremely together person and a healthy role model for my children. Look don't touch. Touch, don't look.

[Plato]

I, like, believe what everyone says about themselves.

-Plato