Several travel firms make a good living from selling island holidays which guarantee no children anywhere to be seen. But Second Life is going one step beyond: it’s launching an adults-only continent.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Second Life is a virtual world game played online. Pretty much anything you can do in the real world can be done in the game (plus a few activities which defy the laws of physics), which inevitably means there’s some pretty fruity elements to the ‘game’, including virtual prostitutes. That’s caused controversy with some schools and public libraries banning access to the game on their machines.

In theory, this shouldn’t be a problem as the game is over-18s only. In reality, it’s pretty clear youngsters find a way to access the game and however much they talk about their commitment to responsibility, manufacturers Linden Labs probably wouldn’t like to lose a chunk of their audience.

The firm has announced a new system to take effect in June. All content will now be ranked as PG, Mature or Adult, the latter covering sexual and violent conduct which is explicit rather than suggestive. Adult content will be moved into a separate section: not just a literal separation, but a virtual one too, with the ‘action’ taking place on a separate continent within the game’s world. Linden Labs says the filtering will be intelligent and won’t, for example, rate content relating to “breast cancer” as adult.

By default, users will have access to the Mature level, but can change their settings to PG-only. They can also apply to access the Adult section, but this will require even more stringent age-verification, for example by confirming a credit card.

The changes seem a pretty sensible and balanced approach. It’s simply unrealistic to expect that children won’t play games such as Second Life, but this at least means they shouldn’t be able to get to the truly adult sections of the games. It also gives responsible parents the option of letting children use the game via their account, but restricting it to family-friendly content.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 3:10 pm under Adult content, Internet.

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