Posted by mikezillion at June 1st, 2007

The Second Life community is reeling from a blog post warning that the service will not tolerate certain taboo activities on its site. Among these is role-playing of sexual interaction involving minors, even when both role-players are actually consenting adults.

This is getting into a sticky area, and I don’t envy the folks at Linden Labs, who run Second Life, their responsibility. I’ve visited Second Life a few times (and no, I’m not going to tell you my alias there) and as far as I can tell it’s equally easy for a minor or for an adult to log in and play around as either a virtual minor or a virtual adult. This being the case, I don’t see that they have any choice but to impose reasonable limitations on the activities of their members.

Make a site that’s limited to adult members, and make sure that all the members are adults, and then we can open this discussion again. Of course, I might still side with the folks who want to impose similar limits on what’s acceptable in virtually public adult-only spaces, but at least then the discussion would be worth having.