It was bound to happen sooner or later - paradigm shifts demand it.

Old technologies do not disappear from one day to the next, they get assimilated, until it’s hard to understand where one stops and the next begins. Sometimes this happens overnight, and we don’t even notice what has happened.

A few months ago - not many in terms of “real life” hours, but an eternity in Second Life® - a brief discussion with Linden Lab exposed the rumour that they were planning to integrate an HTML browser inside the Second Life application client. This is not a revolutionary breakthrough - things like ActiveWorlds or OpenCroquet have done it ages ago, and the world did not shatter and end at that time.

Some eager residents of SL were happy about the idea. At the very least, you would be able to exchange notecards with “rich text”. Perhaps even have a way to browse a bit while in-world - no more need to open up your browser to check the Help pages, do some forum posting, or even insert events directly from in-world.

On a second stage (according to Linden Lab®), HTML may be directly drawn on top of a prim face. This would mean, for starters, a way to get outside information on top of a 3D world. Older platforms already allow for this usage of HTML. Things like proper text management on top of a prim are finally possible - books, slide-show presenters, scoreboards, even clothes vendors, will be able to get away with textures for writing text, and use HTML-rendered text instead.

The third stage is full integration. Prims with HTML pages (and LL is still thinking on how this will happen) will be point-and-click browseable. Neither we nor Linden Lab have yet figured out how exactly this will be implemented. Apparently, Second Life has the ability to define with a certain degree of precision where exactly - pixel-wise - you can point your mouse and click. Unfortunately, due to the mechanisms at the renderer level, this kind of interaction is not “visible” at the Linden Scripting Language level. This means that eventually the system may “know” where you are clicking, but you only get told which prim you’ve clicked. Being able to click on part of a prim is what you need to have a clickable browser, fully able to reply to hyperlinked text. And, of course, a way to fill forms (on a prim?) will need to be thought out as well.

The technology is not too hard. After all, it’s not if Linden Lab is developing everything from scratch. They’re simply integrating Mozilla technology - open source code that came from the Netscape days and is currently being used on the Firefox browser, Internet Explorer’s most direct competitor (although with perhaps only 5% users). Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine, will be part of the Second Life browser. You can think of that as a “plug-in for Second Life” - so, besides streaming 3D content, your “Mozilla plug-in” will be able to deal with hyperlinked 2D content as well. We’ll explore this model in a bit.

Hiro Pendragon, in his own blog The Second Opinion, takes a look at this Big Change in Second Life, mostly from a technical point of view. Basically, what Hiro means is that the changes are going to be monumental and spectacular - all point towards a reduced usage of prims and textures in SL, allowing people to use HTML embedded into 3D objects to replace current “workarounds”. Imagine a Web-based vendor: one prim, you see the pictures, click on the page to see the next or previous one, pay the object and get in-world delivery. One prim, no scripts, no hover text, no open listeners - no lag at all! That’s what currently people like FlipperPA Peregrine (programmer for SL Boutique, one of the off-world e-Commerce sites) are working on. Laggy shops and malls will once more become fun places to visit!

There are lots of more possibilities: casino machines which will work the same way, or vehicle controls, bank ATMs, or the whole InfoNet system, as well as slideshow presentations using textures, or in-world books. As a matter of fact, all sorts of information-based objects will use HTML-on-a-prim of some sort.

So, this will reduce the amount of prims, textures, and scripts with “open listeners” or similar lag-inducing features. Add Havok 2 and the new 2.0 renderer, and this is what Second Life will look like:

… with the same 15-25 fps that a “normal” machine is able to render.

Some may be worried about the performance issues of Second Life, when it grows to “embed” the Gecko HTML renderer from Mozilla. As a matter of fact, Second Life’s client will probably become smaller. Here is the trick: all information-based dialog boxes will be replaced by their HTML equivalent. With proper Web design, you won’t be able to distinguish them from the current dialog boxes.

Prime candidate is, of course, the “Find” dialog boxes. As you may have noticed, most of the functionality is available (even if on a limited way) on SL’s web page as well. So, things like who’s online, available land for sale, what transactions have been done, the many many help files, and, of course, the event list, are currently “web-enabled” already. The only thing you need to put them inside SL is to simply change their appearance to match SL’s “white text on anthracite background” look.

The common player won’t notice a difference, but the amount of flexibility is tremendous. Robin “Linden” Harper, VP for LL and handling the SL Community, has often explained the patient residents that developer time is very restricted for new features on the client - but Web development is easy to do. So, this means that all developers can concentrate on the 3D viewport, and have the Web team change the 2D information-retrieval facilities inside SL. And they’ll be able to change that without releasing new patches. Just think of it: new changes can be done by simply rearranging a few lines of HTML server-side, and the interface can be dynamically re-arranged! You log in again, and all the dialog boxes have been “improved”.

If cleverly done, this will mean much more than the “Find” dialog box. The whole Instant Messaging system can migrate to a Web page as well. Scripts and Notecards can be written on an HTML editor (and currently there are so many cool alternatives using Javascript, so no need for extra coding), and, when you save them, the text goes into the asset server. Eventually, if it’s very carefully done, even the infamous Inventory could become a Web page with clever Javascript and all the nifty new features of cascading style sheets to deal with opening and closing folders.

The way you can make a Web page interact with your 3D environment has been explained by SL developer James Linden. When you embed the Mozilla code into an application, you can develop Web pages that “call” things in the application itself. This means that you could put Linden Scripting Language (or whatever will be available soon as a replacement) calls inside Web pages. So, the Web-based inventory would be able to do all the folder/item tracking using HTML-based programming; but, as soon as you need to transfer an outfit on top of your avatar, or rez in an object, you’d call a function from LSL - from inside the Web page! - which will take your work from there (I imagine that the only thing you need to do anyway is to keep track of the item’s UUID).

This sounds like replacing one way of programming by another. But it’s far more than that.

Imagine that you could call those in-world Web pages from another browser - outside SL. So, things like IM, inventory browsing, or buying and selling land, could be done on a normal web browser. For those of you fortunate enough to have two monitors connected to your computer, this would mean having one of the monitors dedicated to the 3D viewport, the other for the multiple dialog boxes that clutter up your windows (no more missing your friends when you’re busy scripting!). It would also give you some sort of a “limited SL experience”, like being able to chat when not logged in, or even being able to send items to other people.

This shouldn’t be too hard - after all, a web page will be a web page, you will just need to do some authentication (like you do nowadays for the SL web site anyway).

But the more interesting aspect is that you can do things the other way around. People have been complaining about limitations on “flat” interfaces - like, say, the console system of a vehicle, or multiple options on dialog boxes that let you easily pick up choices, instead of creating multi-prim objects with dozens of tiny prims just to be able to click on them. Now you can touch on an object, and you get a floating Web page with all available commands - no need for opening a listener, or demanding more interaction tools on the “command pie” menu besides sitting or touching. As you see, this will allow you to extend your user interface easily this way - something that has been asked for ages, since the dawn of time, and that never was so easily and conveniently offered, but which is now possible - even perhaps for 1.7, taking into account the “limitation” that the first version of in-world HTML will always be on a separate window, and not on a prim’s face.

So, Linden Lab is effectively giving people a way to change their interfaces at will, and extend them by using in-world objects which pop up new windows. This is really very clever.

The biggest change, however, is not going to be either of the above items. The biggest change will be another major paradigm shift - and SL is already so good at redefining those!

Whenever I talk about the similarities between Second Life in 2005 and the World-Wide Web in 1993, I’m astonished to see how many people have completely forgotten the pioneer stages of the WWW. I feel that I need to go back 12 years or so and refresh the memories of many - and still, they will fail to understand the analogies.

The World-Wide Web started to be a text-based web. Content was important for Tim Berners-Lee, credited as the HTML/HTTP inventor - and not design. WWW was an alternative to a few content-retrieval systems that were around, most notably Gopher, which had a similar purpose at that time. But there were really dozens of similar systems around, based on Bulletin-Board Systems, that you could (in some cases) access via the Telnet protocol. All text-based. All were different from each other. The point was, there was not a “web” of information - but isolated systems in the Internet, each one being accessible in a different way, although, from the comfort of your office, you could access them all remotely through the Internet.

So the WWW was just “the latest” online system. But two things happened very quickly to the WWW - by chance, perhaps. The first was the graphical browser, Mosaic. This was a huge application, incredibly heavy, which consumed all your poor computer’s processing power, and which allowed you to see things like GIFs and text rendered with fonts, as well as being able to use your mouse to click on hyperlinks.

The reaction of many was twofold. The visionaries would say: “wow, this is the killer application that will bring the Internet to the masses! Graphical browsing! No silly commands to learn! Yay!” Most of the people at that time were much more skeptic - they said “nobody will launch a multi-megabyte browser just to see a few nice pictures”.

Of course, from our privileged point of view in the future, we know who won that argument.

Still, the skeptics did not stop at that. They claimed - very wisely - that without any sort of input, the alleged World-Wide Web would be worthless. It would be mostly static content, and there is limited interest in viewing other people’s home pages. Sure, there was some appeal in that, but the WWW would be a minor fad, and quickly disappear.

The second radical change was the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). This was a trick done server-side - with some help from the graphical browser - to be able to put forms on the Web page, and you could send the values inserted by the user to the server, which would render - dynamically - a new page for you.

At that time, people discussed the impact of a graphical Web browser with form-sending capabilities lightly. Ok, we could now do remote phonebooks: select a page, insert a name, and the system would retrieve a card from a database with that name’s phone number. The first “web-enabled applications” were not much more than toys.

But then things started to become serious. The graphical browser started to be able to “talk” other protocols as well - things we take for granted nowadays, like FTP, and outdated protocols that we don’t use any more, like Gopher or WAIS. But you could also read the Usenet News online that way (for those that never used the Usenet News, this is a free, 30-year-old, multi-million-user forum with hundreds of thousands of separate group forums, that sadly has gone out of fashion).

And suddenly - literally from one day to the other - more complex applications started to be developed. Things like Yahoo - which started out as a list of cool web sites to visit, sent to you by email periodically - became “catalogue sites”. The phone companies put Web pages online where you could look up the white or yellow pages. You could start to shop for travel flights, or books and CDs. All this was not done from scratch, these systems already existed. The “WWW revolution”, at the beginning, was just to put “new clothes” in front of an old product.

The phrase “web-enabled applications” was coined. Suddenly, the WWW was not so much thought as a network of static content, but rather as an universal interface to billions of applications “out there”. You just needed to do the application, and forget about the user interface - everybody used the same browser (or almost ), so you just needed to put a nice HTML wrapper in front of your code, and the application was ready to be launched world-wide.

This was the “web revolution” - an universal way to interact with all sorts of systems and applications, from a common interface.

Now, as the web revolution progressed, new tools, systems and services were employed and incorporated into the Web. Streaming, for instance - something very dear to Linden Lab’s CEO - would never had “taken off” if you hadn’t a way to pick your stream from a web page. But more broadly speaking, nice buzzwords from the IT folk like e-Commerce, e-Learning, e-Marketplaces, and whatever you fancy to name the next e-Business - would never exist if it weren’t for this simple fact: you have an universal interface to all those very complex systems and applications. The Web browser.

As time passed, from 1993 to 2005, new and better technologies were incorporated in that “nice graphical browser which displays GIFs and texts in printable fonts”. You got all sorts of improvements on the browser side - Javascript, Java applets, server-side includes, later XML and all the many acronyms that designate a trendy and fashionable technology of the year. But on the server side, things improved as well. The whole industry started to create platforms and frameworks that were designed from scratch to produce Web pages easily. The notion of “web-enabled applications” or “web services” evolved slowly, to mean mostly that you either do it on the Web, or you don’t need to bother. All attempts to create Internet-based businesses which were not Web-based (or Web-incompatible) have so far utterly failed. Remember how Microsoft made a 180º turn when Windows 95 came out - starting as an anti-Internet company, Microsoft soon became one of the leading builders of the “Web revolution”.

But now we have - finally! - a new technology to replace the 2D browser-based Web: virtual worlds! This could be the new paradigm shift that will bury the rectangle thingies on our cluttered desktop. However, the key issue is that things like Second Life should not fight the 2D paradigm of the Web, but assimilate it, by incorporating its protocols into the virtual world itself. And this seems precisely to be the route Linden Lab has taken. 3D content uses a Linden Lab technology; but integration with the myriad applications, systems and servers “out there” in the Internet, will use the “common” protocol that they all are happy to “speak”: HTML over HTTP.

On my earlier posts, I imagined that 3D virtual shops would appear in Second Life’s virtual world, and that people would pick clothes and items that “look like” the real items, and eventually buy them in-world, to get them delivered off-world, by postal mail. That’s the model for c-Commerce (cybercommerce). My only question was, how would this work, in terms of technology?

Now the answer is simple: take the existing framework - web-based applications. But have Second Life talk to those applications directly.

Imagine how SLamazon could work. On the 2D WWW, you go to www.amazon.com, and either you go to a page with a certain category, or you do a “find” from a search box. You see a picture of a book or of a CD. In the first case, you may have an excerpt of the first chapters to read online; in the second case, you may have a sound bite to download. Finally, you enter another page, write down your credit card number, and the item gets delivered to your home.

SLamazon will use exactly the same backend servers to deal with the logistics, but the interface will be different. You have a plot which looks like any “real” bookshop. You can either visit a certain room (corresponding to a category) or eventually have a search engine which will teleport you to the right shelf. On each shelf you see digital analogues of books - like the ones you can pick up at the Book Expo for the forthcoming SL launch of Cory Doctorow’s latest novel. You can open these books, zoom on them, and read the first chapters. Or, if you’re at the CD room, you see the small CDs that you can attack to yourself and they’ll happily play a 10-second clip. Now you can pay the object, and automatically, SLamazon’s back-end servers dealing with the logistics will be able to deliver your book or CD to your home.

Of course, this also means that SLamazon will auto-rez shelves according to statistics from their data-mining applications. They will know which shelf should have the bestsellers or the latest published books. The book contents (the chapter excerpts) are actually HTML which comes from their web site. Probably the music in the shop will come from a streamer, playing the most wanted song on that week’s hit list. And it will also mean that you’ll probably meet one or other “bookshop attendant” - an SLamazon employee, working in shifts to staff their SL shop - that will help you out and pick related choices for you. And, best of all, you’ll be able to shop with your friends, who will also use “word of mouth” to advise you on what should be good choices.

Now all this can happen. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s Second Life’s “3D browser”, web-enabled to talk to Amazon’s back-end servers. They will be able to provide all content that is currently 2D and limited to a Web page automatically into a 3D world. The best part of it, of course, is that if you plan it well, you can support both the “legacy” 2D Web as well as the new 3D virtual world environment.

Shopping is a possibility, but what about other areas? Well, imagine that Warner Brothers sets up a “virtual movie theatre” - you could watch trailers, but you could also buy tickets from in-world. Or imagine your favourite airline selling you tickets. Or your homebanking system working in-world - but this time, your bank’s virtual ATMs will look like real ATMs, and not be a pretty web page, although they would use exactly the same back-end servers to process all the data.

The key point here is that you will not need to change the back-end servers - where all the “business logic” is. You will not need to replace databases, security systems, and all the needed services and systems to mantain your “web front”. As a matter of fact, if well done, you may even be able to have SL talk directly to your “web front”. Just the interface and the interactions will be very different.

So, I’m not really so excited of being able to open up a Web browser to be able to make a choice at Amazon or read my mail online. Instead, I’m excited about the possibility of entering a 3D representation of a bookshop, which looks and feels like a bookshop, but that in reality is sending HTTP requests to and from the back-end servers of Amazon.

Fully understanding this paradigm is what will take more time.

I have talked about these issues to many skeptics in SL. Interestingly enough, many are technical-savvy, and come from the computer and IT industry. They see Second Life as a “thing in itself”. Their major argument is mostly “why would someone launch an incredibly heavy application to do their shopping online, when they can use a Web browser much more easily?” And, of course, the rest of the conversation usually degenerates in issues like if the implementation of the Gecko renderer will be able to clear cookies, or block pop-ups, or how you can avoid your IP to be known. Just take a look at the transaction logs from the Town Hall meeting with James Linden. I mean, people were worried if they could use ActiveX objects inside the SL browser! (as someone who never used an ActiveX-compatible browser in my entire life, I naturally couldn’t care less)

As usually, the point is so often missed by my fellow residents. They forget the recent history: in 1993, we did not have 3D virtual worlds with the complexity of Second Life running on personal desktop computers, but we had “incredibly heavy applications” that took a huge amount of resources to run, just to view a few GIF images and some nicely rendered text on a grey background. And the exact issues were raised back then - who would use such a cumbersome interface, when text-based browsing did the job so well, even back then?

Well, let’s look at history and learn a bit. Paradigm shifts are never easy to understand, even by people with a technological background who are supposed to be riding the waves of the state-of-the-art innovations.

I certainly look forward to a Second Life WWW experience. The more I think about it, the more uses I find for it. Some, of course, are based on 3D replacements for the current 2D WWW experience, and this is the first step when one technology “assimilates” another. But I’m amazed at how many things will be possible only on 3D. Being “backwards compatible” with the “legacy WWW” and bringing brave new uses for a brand new technology is what I hope to be the success of Second Life - or whatever will come next.

It was bound to happen.

As we slowly plod along towards 32,000 residents, things are changing in the social dynamics of Second Life®.

I’m still a pretty new resident, compared to several thousands. The Old Ones knew a world which was a tiny, intimate, almost private club. There was a point in time where you could meet the whole of the population, and talk with all of them - all where eager, bright-eyed idealists, working towards a common goal, and side-by-side with the Lindens.

As the population grows, it’s natural that it reflects different tendencies, ideologies, and even cultures. The first thing that anyone experiences in Second Life is the sensation of absolute freedom - you can be anything, become anything, and do anything, and nobody is there to stop you. This is the stuff the Internet is made of - let’s enjoy it to the fullest!

Of course, this enjoyment of freedom goes both ways. “Liberty of expression” is too often interpreted by “liberty to do whatever I want, and who cares about the rest of the world”. Discussing the difference between both is, sadly, a question of education - a good topic for discussing at the Thinkers’ events, but not for me to say.

The first “enjoyment” of SL’s freedom leads, naturally, to abuse. That is the state we’re at the moment. It could be foreseen. The larger the population, the most likely you get people unable to distinguish between both freedoms, and since the group understanding only “freedom to abuse” is the largest in RL, itr makes only sense that even in SL this group grows.

Fighting abuse is a full-time job - and not even then successfull. We have this lovely tool called “Abuse Report” which allows us to complain to Linden Lab whenever we see an injustice or feel that our rights - our “freedom” - has been abused. Of course, this is a powerful weapon to put in the hands of residents. You can stuff the abuse report queue with so many reports (again, it’s in your “freedom” to do so…) that LL will only be able to reply to them after months - sometimes too long, since not every resident stays in-world to hear the veredict. And even if he/she does, the harm was done so long ago, that it’s pointless to insist.

So, what is the alternative? One could consider a massive influx of new Liaisons, but that would hardly be a cost-effective solution. Things like the Welcome Area - a special meeting place for everyone welcoming the new users - are completely out of control, for months. It’s rather more the unwelcome area - quoting myself, kindergarten during break hour, with all teachers absent. Although there have been Liaisons around, and even a “Mentor Special Task Force” called on emergencies (of course, in an unorganized way), the truth is that one or two Lindens are helpless to deal with the chaos, and Mentors are just regular residents with a fancy title - they’re most likely to attract the wrath of griefers first than be of any serious help.

In the mean time, fraud and abuse all over Second Life are rampant, and grow unchecked. Feeling that the abuse report system is clogged, that people are successfully able to pull their scams without any punishment, that the multiple-avatar rule is a safe way to constantly replace the hosts of griefers, the Dark Side of the Force is definitely gaining followers. After all, if you suffer no consequences, and your way of having fun is depriving others of either their fun or their money, who’s to stop you? Not the Lindens, that are overstressed to deal with so many problems at the same time…

New scams are invented every minute. The defective land tools are an excellent way to deprive residents unfamiliar with the complexity of the real estate business of their money. Also, even if you do it “legally”, on the mainland scammers now resort to creative tacticts - building horrid constructions only to force others to sell cheap and go away, encircling smaller plots completely and activating ban scripts (so that you’re unable to go to your home, nor invite your friends over). Some of these tactics are perfectly “legal” under ToS, and it’s hopeless to appeal to the Lindens for help - nothing really prevents people to “harass you” visually or by using the tools that have been created to deal with harassment for exactly the opposite purpose. Here and there, some Lindens tend to define stricter rules for proper use of those tools, but the truth is, there are far more creative ways to abuse them.

Recently people were advertising “sim bombs” on public websites - devices that you can buy, press the button, and force the sim to reload. Yes, that’s how far we have gone in SL - plain terrorism. While selling these kinds of items is not forbidden, its use is cause for immediate ban. But so what? You create a new account, get money transferred from your main account or from a friend, buy the “sim bomb”, release it on a sim, disconnect and cancel that account permanently. Repeat ad nauseam - and you’re free from ToS or any sort of abuse report (which is targetted to an avatar, not to a real person). There are lots and lots of ways to get randomly-generated VISA cards with fake names, that are used just for the purpose of verification of your age, and discarded well before LL charges you anything.

It’s not my purpose to describe what sorts of things are possible to make SL a worthless experience for others - unfortunately, this platform, designed for creative people, is attracting all sorts of creative griefers as well, and they are able to do things utterly imaginative.

I’ve discussed “sexual harassment in SL” on some forums and in-world discussion groups. However, this time, we have “digital terrorism” - the equivalent of real-life crackers. But they are much worse. Crackers usually target a specific system or service, either for their own benefit, or just to annoy; digital terrorists in SL usually target everybody, intended victims and innocent bystanders alike.

They are very ingenious, and the following example should show you the incredibly difficult moral dilemmas that Linden Lab has to face. Peaceful Resident Adam Avatar buys a tiny plot of First Land at the edge of a new sim, a pretty new one, so it’s unusually fast. Quickly the nearby plots are filled with new residents, buying happily their First Land. Since they’re filled with a certain naivity common to new residents, they happily talk to each other, bonding, creating a happy community, a nice neighbourhood to live in.

Suddenly, the real estate terrorists target this particular sim - maybe it’s conveniently located near a telehub, or perhaps it has escaped yet the attention of the bigger landowners, or perhaps the ethical real estate agents think it takes too much time to buy all the tiny plots, one by one, in order to create a megamall. So, the real estate terrorists - let’s call them “land sharks” - enter this sim, and start bullying some of the newer residents with their tiny plots: “you either sell and go, or else…”. “Or else” is usually much more than a simple threat. They can buy neighbouring plots, and set a “griefing tower” - something which creates lag, fills the screen with particles or lights, disturbs the landscape, whatever. Soon one or two residents pack up and go, and the sharks eagerly add a few more parcels to their growing plots. Now it’s the old “divide & conquer” strategy: you surround the tiny plots with your own terrain, put the names of the small landowners in your ban list, and effectively prevent them from going into their land (except through the “teleport home” feature), and, worse, people can’t visit them at all. Since this is a borderline behaviour regarding the ToS, it means that the Lindens will not intervene happily. And at this time, the small landowner also understands that abuse reports take half a year to be processed, so it’s better to leave the land for the sharks, and move on.

The original community of happy residents dwindles to a few seelcted ones, who stubbornly remain, eventually because their plot is not easy to “surround” or is away from the “particle towers”. In any case, the land sharks can’t take too much time to get a profit from their land - they know that sooner or later, repeated “abuse-like” behaviour will attract attention from the Lindens - so they invest in their mega-mall instead, with a thousand active scripts, and tons of events. The few scattered First Land owners suddenly find themselves in a pretty laggy region, full of towers blocking the view, and understanding that no one will like to visit or attend any sort of event there.

The last ones to go may, thus, easily be turned over to the Dark Force as well. After all, if you go, it’s good to go with a revenge. Adam Avatar now creates a new alt, Caim Avatar, and buys a few tons of “sim bombs”, push guns, earthquake devices, or whatever may be the fashion in terms of “terrorism warfare”. By timing things carefully whenever there are many people in the megamall/club/casino, Caim Avatar now plants his doomsday device, and runs away, cancelling his account. The sim blows up repeatedly, or people get harassed in other ways, and the land sharks get really pissed off. They start to gather evidence (often illegally) about Adam, and spread slander and libel about Adam - who, in turn, having gotten rid of Caim, will denounce the “land shark campaign” against “a poor First Land owner”. Adam has actually a pretty good chance in the forums, for instance - he’ll present himself as a “poor victim” and earn the credibility and respect of SL’s virtual community (since everybody loves the David vs. Golias story). The “war” escalates. At some point in time, Linden Lab has to intervene.

The question is, who is guilty in this case?

Poor Adam just shrugs his shoulders and, after being “exposed” as Caim Avatar (”ah-HAH!”, yell the land sharks. “We ALWAYS knew it!”), he would plead that he never would have become a digital terrorist if the land sharks would assume a more ethical behaviour. After all, Adam was the only one of the “innocent victims” that fought back - he’ll be able to give a long list of people living at that sim who went away in disgust, thanks to the “domination tactics” employed by the land sharks. And he’ll be able to accuse them of almost everything - scams, unethical behaviour, bullying, mobbing, divide & conquer tactics, and so on. He, Adam Avatar, only employed force when reasoning was impossible. And so many others hailed him as a brave “fighter” against the land sharks, when so many simply abandoned the field, shaking their heads.

What a tough time for dealing out Linden justice…

People in SL are cunning and devious well beyond what they would be in RL, and the reason is pretty simple: judgement is slow, punishment is light, and by stressing that you have “freedom of expression”, you will be able to override the ToS most of the time, except for those clear-cut cases. But there are increasingly less clear-cut cases - more are on the “shady” region, where it’s hard to decide who has acted wrongly first.

So, what is the natural reaction? Push people too far, ignore their pleas, and they’re going to take the matter of justice with their own hands.

A small group (which shall remain unnamed) started a few months ago a “newbie protection system”, mostly for dealing with violence, abuse and harassment in the public sandboxes. Since some new residents have to use the public sandboxes - having no other place to go - and you can use all sorts of scripts there, it’s pretty easy to get abused. Liaisons can’t be at all places at the same time, so it’s mostly the Mentors who try to go there and sort things out - which almost always doesn’t work, since the “Mentor title” is just a different way to yell “Shoot me!”. So, this group started to use heavy weaponry instead - super-strong push weapons, unmoveable “anchor” fields, and shiny armour acting as a shield and giving you immunity to several other weapons. They were “Mentors on steroids” - dealing with abuse with force, not with nice words - and with a Code of Honour (if you failed to comply with that Code of Honour, you’d be dropped from the group). So, for a while, this self-proclaimed SWAT team roamed the sandboxes, and I guess that they were slightly successful. The question is, is this the sort of environment we want to live in?

Others are starting to join forces and simply leave the mainland. Some previous articles showed a few examples of “private communities” which are appearing spontaneously all over the place. People need protection, and inside private sims they can get it. Of course, you lose one of the most fascinating aspects of living in the mainland, which is - for me at least - the ability to relate with your neighbours, people that you probably never met before but which live next to your door, and now have a pretext for getting together and have fun, even if their experiences are completely different. Exchanging different experiences and points of view is intellectualy stimulating, and this was the hard-selling point of the mainland. Whereas on the private sims, you come with your own neighbourhood, or you join a neighbourhood that has its own rules (which you agree with - or not, and move away). This is the same sort of philosophy behind the closed condominiums - “we cannot care what goes on in the outside world, as long as we are safe from it”. I find this a bit disturbing, although, honestly, I cannot condemn that idea.

This “first step” is definitely catching on - if you can’t fight them, isolate yourself from them. Even the Cabinhead project - a sort of a “Greeter Island”, under private rule and control, to avoid griefers to annoy newcomers - is due to be launched soon. Basically, this will allow newcomers who benefit from the Greeter program to get an instant teleport to a newbie-friendly zone - sort of a “real” welcome area, and not a “griefing area” - where they can get further information and real help, as well as an advise telling them that they’ll be able to log in at the welcome area, but explaining to them that this area is everything but “welcoming” these days.

Of course, this is polemic - after all, this is still going to be a “private island” with its own access rules, and not open to the public. These days, Mentors, Instructors, and Greeters are as easily griefers themselves, or at least abusers of the system - taking advantage of their “status” to scam newbies - so, Cabinhead will need to screen them properly. But the owners are just residents - thus, targets for accusations of favouritism (of course they will “favour” people they know over others with an unknown reputation!).

And lastly you have all sorts of proposed “regulation authorities” - bodies of residents trying desperately to organize themselves against the griefers/scammers, promoting ethical business, and voicing their opinions against the Dark Side of the Force publicly. They set up sites to promote their goals; they annouce and discuss their ideas on the forums; they set up in-world meetings to argue about ways of organizing themselves against the threat of griefing/scamming. Sometimes these groups grab the attention of the Lindens themselves, or of very old residents. Naturally enough, these groups are viewed wirth suspicion - both by the griefers/scammers, who are afraid that these groups are able to change anything, but also by the more common variety of residents who always suspect about the hidden agendas of “residents organizing themselves”. Throw in a Linden or two, or one of the older residents, and immediatly a a new paranoid conspiration theory is born, and for weeks the forums will denounce that group as being more harmful for the SL society than beneficial.

However, I really think that there is no other way out.

SL organizations are desperately needed

The problem right now is that any group that organizes itself to promote “ethical behaviour” in SL will have two different battles to fight. First, of course, the battle against the griefers/scammers. This is an easier battle - almost everybody is against griefing/scamming, although so many are confused about what griefing/scamming really is. The first issue of these groups is to try to define ethical behaviour. I must admit that people were arguing in-world if buying land for L$ 1 per square metre is or not “ethical”. Both sides of the argument often sit on the same meeting, both claiming to be right. It’s hard to “define” a rule that will please both camps, and on several other “shadier” examples, things are much harder (ie. think about the Adam Avatar above).

The harder battle, of course, will be to convince the larger part of the SL community to accept these groups as useful. You can view the current SL population as a bell-shaped curve. On one extreme, you have 5% of griefers, scammers, abusers, and all sorts of people relying on unethical behaviour to make their way through SL. On the other extreme, you have another 5% of people worried about the state of things in SL, and wishing to suggest and propose ideas to limit and contain the amount of unethical behaviour in SL. These are the ones that self-organize in different ways. In the middle you have the 90% who either don’t care, or, much worse than that, think that the 5% of “organizers” are much more dangerous than the 5% of “griefers”, and voice this opinion publicly. Their reasoning is simple: those 5% want to “rule the world” with their ideas, and this is dangerous. Since that type of claim actually touches a tender nerve on all of us - who still dream every day about the “freedom of expression” - they easily get public support, to a point where even the Lindens must admit that they cannot allow something to exist which displeases the community at such a vast scale.

Don’t neglect the anti-organizing faction. They’re very, very strong; mostly, very intelligent people who draw a lot of support, and have had a lot of experience with online communities. They know that in almost all cases, organized communities will fail, due to “favouritism” and corruption. There are exceptions, yes, but they are very few, and the risk far outweights the eventual benefits. They promote the idea that griefers should be addressed by Linden Lab, and urge LL to increase their vigilance, to change their ToS/Community Standards to encompass more guidelines, and demand faster replies to abuse reports. A failure of LL to comply with those demands will mean that more griefers go unpunished, and that more “elitist” groups will form, trying to defend their “rights” and their “views” of what “ethical behaviour” means.

It’s very hard to fight these well-constructed arguments. Imagine someone proposing the use of nuclear energy in the middle of an ecologist meeting. You’d argue that with one single nuclear power plant, you could get rid of dozens of coal/oil power plants, which are much more polluting, and even argue that you wouldn’t need so many dams, whih create artificial lakes, changing habitats and disturbing the ecology. It would be both cheaper and safer, and even the byproducts of a nuclear plant - clean, warm water - could be recycled and used directly. But you could argue with all the statistics you wished, and no matter how well intentioned you were with your opinions, there is simply no way a group of ecologists would listen to you.

That’s the same thing that happens to the self-organizing groups in SL. The secret of their success won’t be in the way they can convince the 5% of their “cause” - or even Linden Lab, who never hided that they would prefer the community to enforce their own rules - but how they will get 90% of the population to accept their ideas. They view both “griefers” and “organizers” as threats to their own status quo - and are not interested in siding with either extreme. Like in real life, I think that things must become much worse before they can improve; right now, 90% of the population is not really so worried with griefers/scammers (”after all, their schemes do not affect me, and let LL deal with the rest”), since Second Life apparently has a much lower griefer ratio than other platforms. Thus, organizers are viewed with suspicion, since they are seen as more harmful than beneficial to the community.

My personal opinion is very simple. The best we have in Second Life is not “freedom of expression” (since that sadly means you can abuse it), but more “freedom of choice”. Organization is “good” in so far as you can opt-in for organization, but leaving you the choice of keeping away from it. This, I think, is the first important step - making sure that organizations are voluntary. If you join them, you get extra protection; if you don’t think you need that extra protection, you are able to say “no”.

Thus, I envision things like private islands with megamalls where a strict code of business practices is actively enforced (yes, they do exist). People will shop there because it’s safe to do so - no griefers, and no shopkeepers scamming you. The same already applies with the renting or leasing options on private sims. A group oversees that the land in those communities is properly planned and the buildings upon them are strictly following the guidelines. In both cases, if you don’t like so many rules - buy in the mainland.

A similar approach can be done towards “ethical business practices”, which are not tied to a particular sim. A group of people may voluntarily agree to a certain code of conduct. The ones that follow it will be able to promote their wares and services, announcing their compliance with a “business code of honour”. If they fail to follow that code, they will be punished by their own organization - which, in turn, will be “punished” by the population at large if they fail to deal sanctions to members of the group who did not follow the code.

Also, some groups definitely could need more self-organization. For some reason, the Mentors have had a “special” status - it comes from a time where being accepted as a Mentor was not easy, you really had to have a pretty good SL reputation. Some people, like Malana Spencer, are actively promoting some sort of organization between Mentors - getting them to regularly do events at the same spots, for instance, so that they are easier to spot on the Event list. Also, by spreading the news that a certain spot always has some sort of class going on, will be known by word-of-mouth, and people will refer new residents to that spot - no matter who is running the class at the moment. It will be a SL reference. Other Mentors are involved in the above mentioned Cabinhead project; others meet spontaneously in-world, exchange ideas for classes, warn other fellow Mentors about known griefers or “negrate freaks”, and so on. Although the Mentor community traditionally was very unorganized, this is slowly changing.

Grouping together to bring order to SL seems to be a new fad. After all, we cannot fail to remember that many griefers are organized as well - to the point of having their own identity and culture. The Second Life Herald sometimes write about that culture, at the same level of RL graffiti artists, for instance. They can also form groups to collectively present a stronger force when doing a “griefing attack” - most of us have successfully dealt with a single griefer in one event, but get 5 or 6 together, and the event is definitely ruined. So, if griefers organize, we must organize as well.

Will we have a strongly organized SL after all? It will be interesting to watch. As slowly my first SL year comes to an end, I have definitely changed my views over time. From open skepticism about any sort of “organization”, I have come to see “organization” as being tolerated, then accepted, and nowadays as a “need”, although people are still struggling with the “best” way to organize themselves.

Law comes to the Wild West? We shall see.