Monat: Mai 2007

About virtual rape

Wired.com asks: "Virtual Rape is traumatic, but is it a a crime?" Well, it is written behind the background of such a thing happening in Second Life and the Belgian police investigating it right now. The author of the article disagress that it is a crime, to quote her:

Rape is the ultimate perversion of sexual intimacy. Like sex, rape has
mental and emotional elements that go beyond the body and the damage to
the mind and spirit generally takes much longer to heal than the body.

But that doesn’t make the psychological upheaval of virtual
rape anywhere near the trauma of real rape. And I can’t see us making
virtual rape a matter for the real-life police.

It’s a shitty thing to do to someone. But it’s not a crime.

What myself always strikes is, of course: why the heck don’t the people just logout or turn their computer off? But ok, just a thought, either way, it’s not happening in real, it is still affecting the psyche of the raped person strongly.

Well, the first documented virtual rape ever happened back then in 1993 in a MUD (multi user dungeon), a text based form of online games, very popular back then and still available today. They were considered hightech back then and hip, today they are lowtech but still have their fanbase.

Here is a paper from about the implications of such things by Richard MacKinnon.

A feature I’d like to see: Mute a certain group

We all are members of more or less big groups, some are really spammy in the time being. I’d like to be able to mute all or certain groups e.g. during a meeting, so that I am not disturbed by them at all. When the meeting is over, I want to be able to unmute them, so that I can hear again, what’s happening on it and attend them, too. So, deal? 

Things to come

A few things to come in the future in my opinion, sooner or later:

  • income tax paid to your national government on virtual earned revenues,
  • more CAD tools like now this exporter named Henshin (AutoCAD to SL),
  • strict enforcing of this adult flag,
  • a 3rd party API to extend the client with plugins like importers, adding client side scripts etc.,
  • saving contents with LSL to notecards,
  • some sort of external backup,
  • regulation of the Linden Dollars, perhaps by the Fed, if it becomes popular enough,
  • some kind of interests on credits, defined by whomever,
  • more law rushing into SL (it has never been out of SL),
  • some kind of external grid/corporate grid, well new grids anyway,
  • the sale or IPO of Lindenlabs,
  • some bridge to existing instant messaging networks like ICQ, MSN or Jabber.

Growth has slowed down

When you take a closer look at the key metrics of April or make diagrams out of them like here by Tateru Nine, who has been interviewed here about the growth, you can only come to one conclusion: growth is still there, but it has stalled. 

What are the reasons? There could be many. Perhaps the bad performance – but that’s something you experience after you’ve created an avatar, so perhaps not really. I personally think that the times of the big hype as Second Life as Web 3.0 are gone now – the time for bashing Second Life starts now, meaning usage and new account creations are going down and after that somewhat up again.

The question is: is this a good thing for a while? Yes. It gives Lindenlabs more time to work on their next generation architecture and some air to solve out some big issues. It is bad still in business terms since land sales should go down a little now, so I wonder how this affects the income of LL at all.