I’m writing this post to urge Linden Labs not to restrict the number of accounts someone can have under the new verification system. If you are worried about people using alts to grief others then just ban or suspend all the accounts associated with that person when they get in trouble. Plus they can just make free unverified accounts to be griefers, so limiting the verified ones doesn’t even make any sense to me. If you are going to limit the amount of accounts a person can have you already have to keep track of that person’s information, so this is the same for privacy issues one way or the other. Second Life can be, and has been for me, an invaluable tool to learn more about myself and explore things I never would have been able to in real life. I don’t want to see this ability taken away from others. I’d like to give you a few examples for reasons for not limiting accounts per person. Some of these things are personal to me, some come from situations that happened to others I know. I’ll be writing this like a story using I for each thing but this doesn’t mean all these things happened to me in particular.
1. I hear about this cool online place called SL from a real life friend so I go ahead and make an account. I have fun learning how to do things in this world and begin to explore.
2. Being from a small town there is no way to explore my sexuality in real life without fear of getting killed, but hey, what if I make a second account in SL, this would be a safe way to experiment with these deep down questions I have.
3. Well I’ve been pretty depressed lately. I’ve been thinking about going to a depression group meeting in SL. But you never know who still associates depression with mental problems these days so it’s time to make a new account just for that.
4. You know what, I wonder what it would be like to be a member of the opposite sex. Well I guess I can make a third account and find out. That’s much cheaper then having a sex change operation lol.
5. I never have money in SL and I don’t have the money in real life to exchange into it. But I am pretty good at cybering, especially after all my practice with those other accounts. Maybe I’ll make an escort account in SL, and who knows maybe if I get really good at it I can make enough money to exchange into real life.
6. Oh no, one of my accounts is in a pretty bad relationship. This is getting to be too much, I’ve tried breaking it off but this person just doesn’t leave me alone. It’s time for this account to disappear and get myself a new one to replace it.
7. You know what? There is this sub culture (pick your favorite) that I’ve been wanting to explore. But all my accounts’ friends make fun of them. I’m going to make a new account just to hang out with these people.
Now I could go on and on but I think seven possible things that could happen to the same person are enough. Will everyone need so many chances? Will everyone have so many issues? No of course not. Then again I’m also sure there are people out there with even more. So what happens to us? How can you put a number on how many tries someone should be allowed to try to find themselves and to fit in? Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a big open society where most people don’t care about your life choices and you are free to find out who you really are. I know there are other online places that let you have multiple characters and accounts, but they are just games, not a virtual reality like SL. I know that in real life you get one you, one life, and you want to try and keep SL close to that, but if the way things worked in real life was perfect then we wouldn’t need virtual realities. I hope you will take all of this into consideration before making a final decision.