A Merged Grid for Second Life?
So today I received a call for help from the SL mentors group. there was a new resident, a young lady from Japan, who was stuck on Orientation Island. Since her English was almost as good as my great-grandfather’s (ie. next to nothing), I was called in to help her in a language she was more accustomed to.
In the process of helping her, it transpired that she was most definitely a young lady, of no more than twelve summers. Much too young for the main SL grid, and even, as it happens, too young for the official Teen Grid (which is for ages 13 and up). Since I was wearing my official mentors’ hat at the time, I had no real choice but to follow the official rules, and report her as underage.
I am not altogether sure that reporting her is the most effective method in dealing with this issue. Thanks to the rule-abiding nature of japanese people generally (yeah yeah, nihonjinron i know, but it’s still kind of true for all that), I am moderately confident that she won’t try to get back into SL. I have no such confidence for more western children.
Fact is, you can ban any number of accounts owned by underage kids. All that will teach them is to be very secretive when interacting with authority figures, which isn’t the most beneficial thing to teach. And it is so easy to make a new account that you’d be playing whack-a-mole if you seriously tried.
I’d rather see accounts banned or not banned based on maturity rather than age. What is maturity? Well, crashing the grid, openly ignoring PG rules (no swearing/nudity) in PH areas, and so on. the usual stuff. that’s being immature, and depending on the severity of the offence, anything from warnings to bannings is aprpopriate.
That isn’t to say that children should be left alone to fend for themselves. Far from it.
Practically speaking, there isn’t any way to prevent children from entering the main grid. Any age verification method based on typing data into a form is open to blatant dishonesty or “borrowing” of another’s credentials. Any based on eyeball checks will be far to expensive to operate effectively. We have to work on the assumption that children will be in Second Life, despite the 18+ banner on the front gate.
In that regard, I’d like to see the teen and adult grids merged. Shocked yet? Each sim (and land parcel) can designate itself as teen only, adult only, or mixed. Furthermore, any account that is flagged as a teen account must have a designated account owned by an adult as their guardian in SL. That account would have the power to restrict access for the teen account in several other ways, by time of day, and by blacklists / whitelists of banned/approved sims. This would put protecting the children back into the parents’ hands.
Thoughts?
October 6th, 2007 at 9:57 am
As far as I can tell, the problem is not the kids, really.
The problem is the adults trying to protect the kids.
Kids are supposed to be, like, pure and perfect and all, which they aren’t, but we want to believe they are, so we try to “protect” them.
And then they get guns.