There's been a flurry of debates going on within the Second Life blogosphere, in-world, and elsewhere about the possibility of Linden Lab integrating the Teen and Adults-only spaces in the virtual world of Second Life. This all erupted after Philip Linden, founder and chairman of Linden Lab, revealled in a recent Metanomics show that a mixed Second Life grid was the direction that the lab was headed.
This machinima video from last year neatly summarizes the various opinions of Teen Grid residents about both controlling access to "their sims" and wanting to be able to access adult sims. From a teen perspective, it's about their rights as digital citizens.
Barry Joseph, Director of the Online Leadership Program at Global Kids, wrote a cogent article about what makes Teen Second Life a unique space for youth development, and how that might all be lost in the transition toward a mixed-grid. It's a good thought piece that goes beyond the typical knee-jerk worries about teens getting access to "adult content." Read it all here.
Have your own views on the subject? Daniel Voyager, outspoken former Teen Grid resident, is facilitating a discussion on Teen/Main Grid Integration over on RezEd.org. We'd love to get your views on the topic here.
I’m fine with the grids merging, so long as LL doesn’t try to Disney-fy the adult grid any more than it already has.
I’m not normally paranoid about these things, but could these plans have anything to do with LL’s lack of action on Teen Grid registrations?
Overseas registrations, I hear, have been down for six months, and if you share a computer with your kid, you haven’t been able to register stateside for the teen grid for at least a year and a half (I know, I filed that jira…)
As a parent, this really bugs me. I love the edu/NGO side of SL. My kid’s probably going to wait until he’s 18 now. He’s developed his own online social nets in the last year and a half, but I can’t help believing he’d have grooved on this experience.
To be fair, I believe that overseas registration has now been fixed. See the Jira here:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-734
thanks, Raf. Apparently registration was also borked on the MG for several countries for several months.