Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Answers to Questions

I do sincerely admire anyone who can say that their avatar and its experiences are completely detached from the typists real life.

Unfortunately everyone is not like that. The sci fi convention talk was a great example of it, not matter how surreal, if it touches your imagination or emotions then you have a bond that makes you vulnerable to hurt or influence.

I admit I don't play online games (never have) and any kind of violence makes me shudder (I can't even watch things like roadrunner cartoons) and whilst my barbie doll avs are fun to dress up their interactions with people are my interactions. They're no different whether I'm sitting in a cafe chatting in rl or appearing in sl as a butterfly sitting in a cave at 4000m.

People are influenced by their situations and surroundings, that's why sl has it's own linguistic variations and a quite discernible culture.

There's a body of work around the more traditional online games that demonstrates a lot of people do bond tightly with their characters, despite them being different to their rl makeup. Even to the stage of mourning their death if the worst happens.

To me sl is rl, just rendered differently. I see little difference between the penpals I had as a kid (ahh I'm dated now) and logging into sl to catch up with people who I've never eyeballed in rl - except of course sl is more intimate and immediate.

yes, there are many unrealistic things in sl, after all who can fall 4000m and get up and dust themselves down (although the dusting anim has vanished ) and there is a line for npirl but like everything else it's defined differently for each. There are some people who it's a fantasy to walk to others it's being tied up and beaten.. yet for some these are rl occurrences.

I don't think that the extremes in the debate about virtual/real help.. we're all on the spectrum and as this becomes more mass market you'll see more people in here who don't see it as a way to indulge their imaginations but more to kill a bit of time doing something interactive rather than watching tv. If that makes sense.

the point of this post is that absolutes don't help here. sigh I'm rambling now..

edited to add: and the person I was at 8 years old is still the same genetic person as now, but I look completely different. the 8 yo has ceased to exist except for the of the experiences.. I probably need to think about this with more than 1 braincell functioning to make it coherent..

..and why Linden Lab (or us) are never gonna be able to define anything adequately beyond some very (already in place) loosely agreed terms, IMHO.

They're not even going to be able to define things when I'm rigged up in a latex gimp suit with multiple live motion capture cameras (a la Gollum in Lord of the Rings) and a variety of Xcite Touch USB remote control toys in all of my orifices when I'm logged into SL.

/me thinks a lot of attorneys, politicians and CEOs need a good dose of Baudrillard, Borgmann, Tiffin and Eco.

*steps aside to avoid the reality shift*

Ah, but there IS an absolute - the avatar in second life is not now, in the past, or in the future, a real being. It is a cartoon. Show me a single avatar that is actually alive, I dare you. They are 3d plots on a 2d surface that we interpret as representing Billy or Jane. But the pictures are not really Billy or Jane. They are cartoons that they drive, much like a spaceship you drive in a video game. The spaceship isn't real either.

Now, we can go on and on about how attached different folks are to their characters. I'm fond of mine too, though not to the mentally ill level of thinking it IS me. Just because you are fond of something doesn't make it real. Little children are fond of Santa, but that doesn't magically make him real. How much attachment a person has with their fantasy life avatar varies from person to person. But it is still not you - it is a representation of you that you create for yourself to play with other representations of other people in ways that aren't possible (or advisable) in reality. Just like when you are in a video game, shooting someone isn't committing murder because nobody is dead. Stealing the car in the game isn't theft because the item doesn't really exist. And when we are all done and have had our fun for the evening, when we turn off the computer, we are not harmed in the slightest... save maybe for some finger cramping from typing all night.

I can go with that, when I talk of detachment from the avatar, I mean it in a literal physical sense in that what happens to it physically isn't happening to me and isn't "real". "I" am not falling to my death when my parachute fails to open, "I " am not suffering the ill affects of the random griefer, "I" wasn't trying out the bondage rack at your store last night.........uhm...you get the picture.

I do think that outside of RP, there is a real connection emotionally betwwen avatar drivers, there is a real person there, but I can divorce that from the on screen characters.

It's still there. Have you changed your AO recently?

I was wondering about that. Last I fell, I dusted myself off. And that was last night.

I see logging on with my av as the same as climbing into my suit when I have to go onto a client site. The suit is not really me (i'm more a gothic backpacker in style) but when I go corporate it sharp suit, shoes, haircut and briefcase. But it's still me at the controls.




That one I dispute. People get hurt at the personal level all the time. That's the nature of human beings.

It all boils down to what you want to get out of the platform. For some it is pure cartoon fantasy, for others it's fully real and the rest of us are somewhere in between.

I don't usually use an AO. I know, how old fashioned of me. The one i have interferes with the mlp stuff i seem to spend my life fighting with so I rarely use it.

Have you checked recently though? I last noticed it a couple of months ago when i fell off my work platform and fell 500m and i tried it a few times then and it wasn't there.

edit: last night huh? when i go inworld tonight I'll give it another go. I confess it makes me laugh to see myself dust off and carry on as if nothing has happened

Yeah, right before I posted, and just now with no AO.

It doesn't play every time though.

I'm almost fine with that too.. sometimes though I found myself playing a scene where i lost the detachment and have become so immeresed that whilst it may not have been the visuals themselves that got to me, the scene itself was disturbing (I'm such a sook!! too sensitive for my own good obviously lol)

perhaps I should be banished to the g continent as punishment. That should harden me up.

Whatever butters your flapjacks. Makes me no difference how anyone else uses the service. UNTIL they start saying that I'm not allowed to do X or Y because THEY can't handle it. That's when I become upset. Your world, your imagination. My world, my imagination. If someone can't handle that other people are banging their prims together and having a good bit of personal fantasy time, they can butt out and worry about their own virtual and real lives. While I'm not into the Gorean thing, I don't go telling them that they can't do it anymore because slavery is wrong, it's degrading to women, blah blah blah. It's not real so I don't treat it as real. If it's real to you, then fine for you. Don't think that everyone else believes that "wearing" a pixel suit makes you into a videogame character, though. And we aren't going to take kindly to being told that we have to obey your interpretation of VR over our own, and be restricted to living in your world, either.

I could turn that around of course and ask what gives you the right to force your version of the world onto me? This of course is the nub of the issue here.

LL think that content separation is the best way to make a certain element happy. It's not going to make a lot of people happy because the assumptions they make are not the assumptions others make.

that's life

Yes, but that all and also the opposite of that all, has not to be the beer of the Lindens or anyones beer. If we still talk about the actual case LL vs customers, in all it's aspects.

LL try to make culture-politcs in a reactionary and repressive way, wich is under no circumstances acceptable, no matter if one is emotionally bonded to an avatar like married and the next person is emotionally bonded to the avatar like a Linden is emotionally bonded to a customer. Lol. In anyway it is not we what we represent here. We move these avatars, like we move a Porsche or a rusty bicycle, but more is an avatar not. It is a tool, or artwork, or a composition, an artificial installation or an art happening, or whatever - we are the authors of our creations, but since when is an author responsible for what a third person is seeing in an expression?

If I write an extreme sad story, is the reader free to commit suicide after reading or to dance happy on the table and holding his belly nearly dying by laughing, this is at least not the problem of an author of any creation, what others doing with their individual impressions.

Means the Lindens have no right to judge, because any judgement would be only subjective and arbitraraly, within that totalitary and within that not acceptable and not reasonable.

5-6-7-8 thousands posts with a simple and clear NO is what they receive here, even while all are additional individual and multi-reasonable argumentative - but beside Nany and 2-3 exceptions is this whole forum a strict NO. A NO to LL's way to try a culture-revolution with reactionary and repressive methods.

They have EVERY right. SL is their product, they own it. We use it. Their goal is to make as much profit from it as they can, and they believe this course of action will help them accomplish that goal. That's all this is about. They aren't making any moral or social commentary beyond what is best for their bottom line.

That's my point - I'm not. Saying that everyone is free to do what they wanna do on their own parcels so long as it's not accidentally viewable from public spaces seems good to me. I don't tell you what to do, and you don't tell me. Simple as simple can be.

Yep that was why I said in an earlier post that this would be a silver lining in the new adult policy. Essentially adult flagged land will be the most secure land against griefer alts since the account will need to be verified in some way to even enter.

Sorry no, because *we* are not their product, nor our avatars or creations, -these are our products. Their product is only the tech-platform. And in censoring they do a moral and social comment on our creations and this is, sorry, not their right. They can think in private what they want about this or that creation, but they cannot set globewide effective prohibitions on creations made by self-responsible and per constitutions and law and age 18+ people. Even a private company is not free to overrule aspects of human rights and freedom of art and authorship, etc.

They are just not democratic or otherwise authorized to do that. We gave them a hint how they can manage the issue in a non-repressive and non-reactionary way easily, but they refused strict and unteachable to use our help.

Keyword: PG-continent.

If you're talking to someone in your sunroom and some political dishrag parks across the street in a loudspeaker van and interrupts you in the privacy of your home, and he won't go away, and you call the cops, and they cite him for noise pollution, and he screams "freedom of speech", he'll probably lose. Because that's how it's gone down. A griefer's screaming-longcat-tubgirl bomb has even less justification.

A lot of the real/unreal/connected/disconnected debate can be illuminated by how people create their avatar.

Some see something cool (real or imaginary) and choose to become that thing - depending on the needs that drove them to become it that may not be anything they closely identify with at all on a personal emotional level.

Some create an "ideal" or attempt to model their innermost self in a way thats just not possible in RL - the latter category there would probably include a significant percentage of furries and probably one or two that choose to express themselves as the opposite gender in SL. Obviously these folks would have more of a personal attachment to the inworld persona and more of an emotional feedback from events that occur inworld. They would probably expect it and welcome it.

Others, like myself, get almost obsessive about getting as close as possible to their RL appearance. Meet me on the street and I'd hope you would recognize me from inworld. I must have spent a fortune on skins until I found one that was close enough to my real skin tone and wasnt shaded to match a surrealistic bodybuilders shape. Cant count the hours spent carefully tweaking the shape (in particular the face/head settings) to match what I saw in the mirror. I still havent found hair thats the right shade with enough grey in it, so I look younger than I am in RL but thats about the only difference other than "costume avatars" - I have three of those.. one thats based on the hardcore punk I used to be in my college days, a samurai and a borg for when I RP in a trek sim, but with the exception of the borg they all have "my face", "my skin" and "my shape." I have little hard evidence to back it up but I suspect it is this category where the human ends up surprised by how much of a connection they truly have (usually when some very unexpected emotional feedback, positive or negative, lands on them)


Fundamentally though, it truly doesnt matter which category we fall into, to a greater or lesser extent we are all creating online voodoo dolls of ourselves and one way or another we will feel the pins that stick in 'em.

I have seen Argent for real in real pictures on his blog, i got a good graphic card and new glasses please don't tell me he is not real or do i need the psych ward then?? lolol

Six nerve trampling months or more I worked on that, it is brutal difficult. At the end...the wrist joint near hands is not perfect, my nose is some millimeters to high at top and the most fitting hair i found is not shaded enough because at age 38 there are some small lightgrey parts on their way, but I have no idea how to twiddle them in. Mabye I wait ten years, and then I buy full grey/white hair, lol I also hate that we have not two different eyes available, - left looks like the right, same bright point in both.

Conclusion: this being neat helps much for architecture and interior building, as discipline, but while ava creation it can drive one crazy. Well, and since that I am crazy...

I would imagine that you are pretty close to the truth its the genuine adult businesses here that have to move that are the ones going to suffer in all of this in the short term, long term who knows, we will have to wait and see and i have to agree with Brie in this it would be unfair to those that have run adult content here to be trumped by those just looking to make a quick few bucks reselling and then cashing out.

Mind summarizing? I did not see any replies that answered that and it just seems like another option ppl use to put up those annoying ban lines.

I'm sorry, but I disagree with you totally. Second Life is not public space. It is LL's.They answer to their shareholders, and to a lesser degree whtever laws they are obligated to. Beyond that, they can do what they want in terms of "censoring" speech and content. Just as you have the right to dictate what someone can do in your home in RL , so do they.

Our avatars may be our creations, artistically. But we are displaying them in LL's Gallery. It is a private gallery. They can decide what to exhibit. If we don't like it, we can go create somewhere else.

There are plenty of reasons why this whole move stinks, and to be angry, hurt and feel betrayed, but it has nothing to do with The Constitution, UN Resolutions. The Magna Carta, or The Charter of The United Federation of Planets. It is simply a matter of money. LL feels they have wrung all they can out of the current SL model, and they are going to tke it in a different direction. It is a done deal, and it was such before they even announced it.

The best to be hoped for is that they will at least listen to input on how to make the transition as painless as possible.

Bullseye!!! Probably the most truthful statement made in this thread.



This just made me laugh.