SL5B - No Kid Avatars, please!

Your World, Our Panic

does that happen a lot when you drink?

Oh and I will display an artwork in SLB5 depicting a child and a 'adult' together and it WILL be totally 'legal'! I'll post a link to the site when its done.

I guess you haven't heard the rumors about Lewis Carroll.

You know, I'd stopped reading the thread here entirely... and now this. Yey.

>_<



SL5B has now become 'about child avatars' - it may go down in history this way.

Wasn't elimination of "sensationalist media coverage over absolutely nothing" the original goal?

No, I've heard of them. The only thing we know is that the Charles Dodgson was a fairly awkward intellectual fellow who like to tell stories to young girls. Whether his photography of young girls (as opposed to his photographs of other age groups) was actually sexual in his mind is a matter for speculation, as the gentleman in question is not really around to tell us of what his actual thoughts were. And there is certainly a post-modern ethic of searching for feet of clay to fuel such speculation.

None of that changes the fact that Alice is an entirely innocent, wonderfully wrought book that I personally find delightful, two decades after my first read of it, and nearly a century and a half after it was written.

I don't blame all of LL for this.

I think I've narrowed it down to one particular Linden. You know, the fellow who originally wanted to ban kid avs altogether from SL5B. LL put him in charge of this particular event, yeah, so I guess there's -technically- some accountability. But still, I think it's all him. If he is anything close to human, LL's overruling of his original no-kid-builds decision almost certainly left him really, really pissed. I think this latest development is nothing more than vindictiveness.

"Rated 'E' for 'Every...' um... I guess that's Rated 'E' for 'No one'."

but you don't really know. you're just speculating, Dakota. doesn't mean you're not correct, but it's really more credible if you only present facts, and not assumptions.

Newsflash - facts, not drama...

After some investigation, I've found that this image:

http://caledonstrandmag.blogspot.com/

...has basically been seen to be 'okay' by one of the event people, they are being understandably cautious about ageplay stuff but seriously, this innocent picture isn't going to destroy the grid - nor was it banned.

Besides, Miss Cornelia is a clockwork adult anyway.

that's a good pic, Desmond. i dont' see anything wrong with it, and even if every character were a child, i can't imagine why it'd be banned.

Actually I was trying in my awkward way to inject a bit of wry humor into the proceedings. Thanks for coming along with the facts. I loved all of Dodgson's books when I was a kid and I don't want to fan the flames of speculation.

If you had a display showing something like Red Cross worker-avatars administering vaccinations to child-avatars, Linden Lab would reject it, is that right?

Displays of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters organization's activities depicted by avatars are forbidden?

Would real life pictures of Teen Grid members with their parents be ok, but a texture showing their avatars photoshopped together wouldn't be?

Displays depicting Avatars depicting any school room in action are forbidden?

That might be the key point.

OMG SteambotPlay!

No, I need to apologize for being sharp with you. Your post was clearly meant in a humorous light; I was simply being cranky about the whole Strand magazine painting, which as it turns out, isn't being banned anyway. So, I'm feeling a bit foolish now.

Time for the evening verre de vin, I think

If that was ever the goal then it would have been totally unrealistic. The only sensible goal would be to have a well thought out and united front to counter sensationalism.
LL's panicky inconsistent reactions appeared to indicate that there was something that needed to be brushed under the carpet.

This is an adult grid. Any child avatar that a very misguided "predator" would come across would almost certainly
1. be an adult
2. AR them the moment any inappropriate suggestion was made

I wonder how many AR's have been submitted on people making inappropriate approaches to child avatars?
LL should be highlighting that child avatars are adults and that sexual age-play is an explicit and serious no-no.

I already ARs several "predator" and for the record, they were always "noob", less than a week in SL.

So:
Far from being the innocent trusting victims of vile Net predators, Child avatars in SL perform a valuable (albeit involuntary) service for real life children all over the world.

Whereas a 'career' paedophile would obviously go nowhere near SL to look for prey, someone who idly entertained thoughts in that direction might misunderstand the adult reality of child avatars in SL.
The upshot of any attempt to dabble would be that the child avatars would scare them off dabbling any further.

I think that Congressman Kirk would approve of that if anyone cared to run it past him.


Add:
To be fair to the Congressman, the main thrust of *his* contribution to that Fox News piece was that he was concerned about children accessing adult material. He wanted parents to be informed/educated about that. I got the impression that he was being used by Fox to lend weight to a piece, as opposed to Kirk using Fox to promote himself.

Well, I wouldn't get too carried away about that. Really, if a newbie tries to approach a child avatar with apparent cyber-amorous intent, I wouldn't necessarily conclude that the newbie was doing so because the avatar they were approaching was a "child". After all, we all know at sign-up that everybody on the grid is an adult, but we may *not* know that the SL culture has so internalized the avatar as to treat child AVs as if they were real children--very much more than we interpret furry AVs as woodland creatures, or forbid human-neko-nookie as if it were some kind of quasi-bestiality.

When you think about it, it takes a pretty perceptive newbie to realize that a child AV is different in kind from a RL adult putting on a high school cheerleading outfit in an attempt to spice up playtime. *We* all know better, but we've been "living in our avatars" long enough to have all kinds of identity tied into our pixels. (I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, whether it's the newbie or us who have the unhealthy perceptions there.)

I have to admit that I was floating a positive spin above, as opposed to proposing some killer argument.

It takes a perceptive noobie to appreciate many things, such as:
- This is not a single-player game. There are real people behind the other avatars. They are entitled to respect.
- This is not WOW. You can't go around shooting people without their agreement.
- This is an adult grid, but there are PG areas and even limits on what you can do in public Mature area.

Adding an explicit TOS ban on sexual age-play to the noobie perceptions isn't such a big deal.

Well yeah. I wasn't pretending to introduce any facts; my post was nothing but a conclusion I've drawn based on the facts others have already presented, here and elsewhere. There's a whole slew of "I think"s in there. YMMV.

Given that technically there is no such thing as a "child avatar" in that you can't change an avatars "age" just its height.

And given that the default (and ipso facto typical) height is six and a half feet!

Distinguishing between a realistically sized adult avatar wearing "high school cheerleading outfit in an attempt to spice up playtime", and a child avatar wearing a high school cheerleading outfit in an attempt to be a high school cheerleader can be quite tricky!

Matthew

Yes, but in my experience most people who have kid avs are usually portraying kids young enough that it's fairly easy to tell they're supposed to be kids. That's why it confuses me that women who make their avs "just a little" shorter than the default height - but nowhere ever near as short as kid avs -tend- to be - catch all kinds of grief for being ageplayers. I can only conclude that the griefers haven't seen an actual kid av yet.

"Realistically sized adult avatar" in the context of SL means about six feet and over.
An avatar sized at RL height in SL is unrealistic-looking in the context of the default height avatars around it.

It might be difficult to distinguish between the two types of cheerleader above when simply looking at them in isolation from the context in which they appear. In context, it's pretty much a no-brainer.