Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Is a teen invasion looming?

Well, so how many of you out there heard Philip Linden's interview, when he talked about the future of the Teen Grid? To say it came as a suprise to me is an understatement, as I can see the potential for all sorts of problems for LL, though probably less for us as a community (that's all of us, not just the kid AV community!).

How would it affect us specifically? Not really sure it would, as I still can't see teens (and the way PL was speaking, it may not be limited to just teens...) playing kid AVs. Certainly as a teen myself, I would have played a heroic adult AV, ready to save the world from all dangers! PL spoke of parents not being able to join their children in-world, I have a feeling the parents might be a bit stunned by the choice of Av their kids want to play...

I would be quite worried if I was playing an adult AV, because I would never know if that rather stunning person I just met, with the wonderful eyes and a body to kill for was actually under age in rl. It could get some people in big trouble very quickly.

But the last thing a teen would want to do would be to hang around with a bunch of kids, they can do that every day of their rls. SL is a place where we can explore life in ways we are not able to in rl, why would anyone want to do the same things they are able to do in rl?

So I think our world is quite safe, though we may be in for an interesting time over the next few months or a year. What do you think?

Tepic

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was having much the same thoughts as you - what would a bunch of teens in SL think of adults who have youth avatars?

That makes me wonder what the demographics are like in the teen grid- are they mostly humongous Barbie and Ken shapes, non-humans, SL versions of themselves, or what?

For each person in SL, there is an individual relationship between themselves and the fraction of which they use to fashion as their SL persona.

I know a lot of kid avatars in adult SL are not just wanting to return to a life before adult responsibilities and physical decrepitude; but sometimes wanting to go back and having something they didn't when they were kids, such as family or friends or selves that they had dreamed of the first time around in that time of life.

So it could be there are teens that want the same thing - maybe having a parent that is missing in RL, or a sibling they never had, or any number of other things - that they could have by RP a young avatar.

isignedupcuzihatefowler said...

this will be interesting. On gaia online teens and adults can interact and debate or give advice etc but then gaia online doesn't allow any material past pg 13.

you can drop the f bomb but you can't cyber. so this will be interesting to see what securities they put up. will they restrict minors to pg places? will places that have mature content be better marked so those of us that avoid sex anyway can be better warned before clicking the teleport button?

somehow I see a lot of bad things happening. I rather like talking to teens because they have good insight, but man a lot of noobs are kids. I see a rise in griefers if anything.