One of the most lucid Second Life bloggers around is Ciaran Laval. His posts are intelligent, insightful, and entirely devoid of the drama and rambling vitriol that so often undermines whatever point an author wishes to make. I’ve taken to dropping into his blog regularly throughout the week as he does ferret out things many of us miss.
An example of this is his commentary on a possible merging of the main and teen grids. Ciaran raises the question as a result of noticing some interesting trends around the “new” forums, as his post indicated. Without wishing to steal any of his thunder, I had noticed the thread he gives as “exhibit 3” – but unlike Ciaran, I’d failed to see it in a wider context. Kudos to Ciaran for putting things in perspective and raising the flag on matters.
While this apparent trend towards merger within the forums is indeed worrying, I have to admit the most surprising thing about Ciaran’s post are the replies given – people expressing surprise or smug “well, I’ve been predicting this”.
The fact of the matter is that the merger – despite commentary otherwise from LL – has been openly on the roadmap (to use a favourite LL buzzword) since the end of 08/ start of 09, when Philip Rosedale went on record in an interview vis:
Generally, I think that the future of Second Life needs to be one where people of all ages can use Second Life together, and that’s the direction that we’re taking in our planning and our work……if you look at the problems with having a teenaged area, which is itself so isolated from the rest of the World, they’re substantial. There’s an inability for educators to easily interact with people in there because we’ve made it an exclusively teen only area. Parents can’t join their kids in Second Life so problems like that are ones that we think are pretty fundamental and need to be fixed. We need to stop creating isolated areas that are age specific and, instead, look at how we can make the overall experience appropriately safe and controlled for everybody. So that’s the general direction that we’re taking there.
[My emphasis at the end]
This view was openly stated in an interview with Robert Bloomfield at Metamonics 09. At the time, it passed with barely a raised eyebrow within the community as a whole – those that did question Rosedale seemed to accept the brush-off that he was talking about something “off in the future”.
It matters not who has been predicting it or since when. No, if there is any surprise at all, it as that we’ve all – myself included – been far too complacent when it has come to the issue of mergers. Hopefully, Ciaran’s analysis and flags will help change this. Assuming LL will even listen.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 