I was prompted to post this by the recent thread about folks gaming the Texas Hold'em tables via private chat.
I remember shooting the breeze with another player awhile back, and we kicked around the idea of a feature request for property owners to be able to temporarily disable IM and email event handlers on their properties, and to block the chat channel spectrum except for a requested range.
We weren't thinking of Hold 'em, but it seemed to us that such a feature would open up the Grid to a horizon beyond trivia events, and make possible a number of interesting party games (a variation of "Password" was what we had in mind at the time) which simply aren't worth trying to implement as long as avies and objects can communicate privately with one another.
Technical considerations aside...and I have no clue how much effort it would take for the Lindens to add such a thing...there would be social consequences as well, unless Grid citizens were encouraged to use the facility only as needed...perhaps an hourly cost in Lindens, per block of channels enabled? When entering into a chat-governed area, I suppose avies could be presented with a dialog similar to the permissions requests made by LSL. As for detecting those who opt out of the limitations, a color change in their names might suffice to alert a casino pit boss.
That would give game hosts a private spectrum to run their networks, and their networks alone, during an event...and, with a small range of assigned channels, they could monitor their own spectrum (with a temporary dispensation from the Lindens) to make sure nobody was wardriving in the area. Or, to cut down on listens, perhaps the Lindens could provide an ASCII logfile of all chat events as a deliverable for renting the feature.
I'd forgotten about this until the Texas Hold'em thread started. I figured I'd float it to see what kinds of holes would get shot in it by folks who know the SL environment better than do I.
I know the Lindens have mentioned at a recent Town Hall that they're working on ways to sweeten the game feature set.
== danny d.