Teen Second Life

» see secondlife.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Teen Second Life opened on 14 February 2005 and its age gate was thirteen to seventeen. I was twenty-one that February, four years past the door on the day it opened.

The day before opening, Linden Lab did something slightly unusual. It offered amnesty to the underage residents who were already on the adult grid in breach of the rules, and invited them to come and beta test the new one instead. Teen Second Life ran the same software as Second Life and looked identical from inside, but it was a physically separate grid with its own rulebook. The Teen Community Standards banned mature content and strong language. Adults could not get on at all without passing a background check, and even then only for limited purposes.

It grew slowly. A thousand residents by 21 December 2005, when the population was small enough that the teenagers counted down to the number together. Opening hours were restricted at first and went to 24 hours a day on 1 January 2006. By 2009 there were roughly fifty thousand registered accounts with two or three hundred people on at any given moment, and at the start of 2010 the grid held 93 mainland regions plus 104 private estates, 97 of which belonged to schools and projects.

~ the dossier ~

~ the schools ~

The education side is what made the closure land badly. Campus:TSL handed free land to teachers, Global Kids opened an island in March 2006, and by 2010 there were eight K-12 islands running class projects inside the grid. Peggy Sheehy, who ran the Suffern Middle School island, had put more than 2,500 middle schoolers through it over the years.

When the announcement came, those teachers had nowhere obvious to go. Their students were under sixteen and therefore barred from the adult grid, and the hours and money already spent building the islands did not transfer anywhere. Some of them went to OpenSim installations and ReactionGrid, which meant running their own server infrastructure on a school budget.

~ the handover ~

Philip Rosedale announced it on 14 August 2010, on stage at the sixth Second Life Community Convention in Boston. The reason was economics and Linden Lab said so directly: supporting and developing two separate grids had been a drag on the company, and it wanted its resources going into the main one. The date given was 31 December 2010, and the date held.

The unwinding was less tidy. On 21 January 2011 Linden Lab moved the accounts and inventory of residents aged sixteen and over onto the adult grid, where they were restricted to general-audience regions. Anyone under sixteen was put on hold until their sixteenth birthday. Land owned by the ones left waiting was auctioned off.

So a teenager who joined at thirteen in 2008 and was fifteen when the announcement came spent a year holding an account they were not allowed to use, waiting to age into a world they had already been living in. That was the mechanism, not a flaw in it.

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