Second Life is lowering the age limit, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as lowering the age (I mean, surely there are 17-year olds running around the Grid?), and I’ve been wondering, lately, whether this might be a good thing.
There’s something I find intriguing about what the impact will be of a slightly younger demographic. Their interests might be different (more games, more socializing?) but there’s also the possibility that you’ll end up with some newly ambitious and engaged content creators (who, yeah, can probably learn Blender a lot faster than I can).
This isn’t to say that I don’t have concerns, but they’re the same concerns I’d have elsewhere on the Web. (Did you know, for example, that Goldshire, in World of Warcraft, has been policed a few times for being, a, um, hook-up location?)
But in conjunction with already announcing that they’re lowering the age from 18 to 16, Linden Lab is also likely to announce that the Teen Grid will merely be relocated rather than abandoned altogether, with schools able to host their classes within a partitioned section of the Main Grid.
Whether and when this will be confirmed is entirely speculative. But the idea that seems to be floating around goes something like this:
- Accounts would be “pinned” to specific estates. An avatar would not be able to leave the estate to which they’re assigned.
- Separate estates for schools (15 year-olds and under) would be set-up, and registration would be restricted to the same protocols that govern the Teen Grid. A school, for example, could bulk register its students, whose avatar accounts would be pinned to “Teen Grid” estates.
- In order for this to work, a separate viewer might be required depending on the policy of the school related to being able to “see” adult-rated search content. A school could either use the main viewer and have their students activate the G-rated filters, or they may want to ‘force’ this and there might be a TPV specifically made for schools.
- What students could see in the viewer and what they could access are two different things: remember, they wouldn’t be able to leave their estate.
This leaves open the question of whether the teen avatar accounts would be able to access material on the Second Life Marketplace.
But by shifting the issue of accessing content from the servers to the Viewer and Web site, Linden Lab would have a far easier and cost-effective way of managing the Teen Grid. The problem with it previously was that changes to the server code always had to be vetted against their impact on the Teen Grid. Changing Display Names? You’d need to run a separate test and check the code to see how it impacted the Teen Grid.
By putting schools on the Main Grid and pushing the issue of access to adult content (and adults) to the viewer and Web site, the Lab can better afford to support their needs, with a few added benefits:
- Access to the same asset servers and thus the same assets. The Teen Grid previously didn’t have the ability to port content over from the Main Grid (or that’s how I understand it, anyways).
- The ability for approved adults to move from the Main Grid to the partitioned Teen Grid. So, a teacher could go to a session at, say, Metanomics 
with the same avatar they use when instructing their students.
But one final thing which is a possibility, and an intriguing one: what if the members of the newly partitioned Teen Grid could create content and then sell that content to members of the Main Grid? I’m not sure the teachers would agree, but I think it would be a really interesting and empowering thing for a 15-year old to be able to create and sell content in Second Life, while being ‘pinned’ to the Teen Grid estate.
While the above is somewhat speculative, it’s anticipated that Linden Lab will come to an accommodation with the current Teen Grid educators sometime in the near future, and well ahead of the December shut-down of the current TG. Time will tell, and maybe they won’t, but I’m willing to take a wager that we’ll hear something soon.
Way back when, when they were saying they were going to change the ratings to General, Mature and Adult, I said to a couple others that I bet they are going to merge the Teen Grid with the main Second Life Grid. At the time, they chuckled and said that would never happen. My reasoning was it’s not cost effective to have them as separate grids, and if they can keep those that are under aged from accessing adult content, there are more reasons to merge the two than keep them apart. It’s nice to know someone else had the same idea.
The current situation is that the ‘teen grid’ is an estate on the main grid (agni). The magical part is that adult accounts cannot see the teen estate on the map, or communicate with a forced-PG (teen) account, and vice-versa. Unless you’ve got Linden mojo on your account.
So, basically the teens are currently locked down to a specific PG estate, which is then rendered undetectable to everyone else by the use of mighty and unreliable software magicks.
They do share the same asset and inventory systems and so forth (being the same grid and all), and it’s possible to move content back and forth. There’s a trick teen users use when they want to obtain content from the main-grid that convinces the grid to transfer content into their estate.
That’s the status-quo at present.
Further proof (if needed) of what Tateru posted: the Teen “Grid” can be seen on both the Slurl web page map and the SL website’s world map. It’s that arc of land somewhat resembling an attenuated Cuba, along with a collection of island regions, due east of the Old Continent (Samsara) and southeast of the continent called Corsica.
i do not know how they will manage this on mainland, where PG regions and mature are mixed. With drawing distances maxed out it should not be a problem for the interested youth to obeserve at least some kind of pixel reproduction. Nor will the lawyers of some concerned parents be resticted there. And the youth loves cars and motorycles. Will LL rebuild the traffic system? Questions, questions…
Lalo/tateru:
OK, this is going to seem a little like semantics but I think we’re confusing “The Grid” with the “grids”.
Let me put it this way:
- There is one “Grid” – a collection of services (servers, asset servers, etc.)
- This single Grid is expressed visually as a map
- HOWEVER, there is also the Main Grid and the Teen Grid. These are defined by the sub-routines built into the code that runs the services.
Currently, access to the servers (land), assets (asset server), identity information is all ONE THING, but it is divided via sub-routine between Teen Grid and Main Grid.
Philip made it quite clear at SLCC that the issue with supporting the Teen Grid wasn’t the support staff etc., but rather that because of the sub-routines built into the code that runs all of the services, every time there is a change in code, they need to make sure the sub-routines still work.
Therefore, there are two grids within one larger cluster of services, services, infrastructure, etc. which are defined by the sub-routines that are run which determine whether a person, asset or server is MG or TG.
By saying that they will move the TG to the MG, what I mean is that they will eliminate these sub-routines. There will be one Grid and they will push the definition of “Teen Area” to estate-level commands and changes to the Viewer (if required by educators in order to filter adult vs other content).
YES, the Teen Grid always ran on the same servers and infrastructure – but the SUB-ROUTINES within those servers and infrastructure defined TG vs MG.
I am proposing they will remove those sub-routines and simplify things by allowing schools to have their own version of the RegAPI through which the avatars that are created will be automatically flagged as being “pinned to an estate”.
Not sure if that makes sense and I’m sure it might seem like semantics, but Tateru’s comment about how the teens could hack the recognition of assets shows, if nothing else, that the sub-routines probably weren’t the way to go in the first place and became very expensive to maintain.
What interests me is how some of the most popularly circulated speculations as to how it might work are only really a few lines of code from how it works already
Hahaha true enough Tateru.
[...] Grid and its imminent demise. Now, I don’t usually get much right, but a scant 5 hours after my post, Terrence Linden announced, well, that Teens would be ‘welcome’ on the Main [...]