How Second Life's ageplay scandal that isn't even so much about there being ageplay increases "underage" avatar paranoia in OpenSim

Breaking news yesterday was an article on Medium about ageplay in Second Life. Sexual ageplay. As in sexual encounters between adult-looking avatars controlled by adult users and underage-looking avatars controlled by adult users. And how Linden Lab not only seem to ignore it to such degrees that they're allegedly doing so intentionally, but some Lindens are allegedly involved in it themselves. I won't link to the article, but here's the thread in the Second Life subreddit about this article and its impact.

To make one thing clear: Yes, we're definitely talking about adult users in all cases. For those of you who don't know Second Life: First of all, Second Life has a content rating system for sims. General is PG which means pretty much squeaky-clean. Moderate is 18+ and allows for stuff like public nudity and sexual actions in private unless a sim owner explicitly forbids it. Adult is 18+, too, and allows for everything in public.

Besides, Second Life has age verification. You have to send in a copy of your ID or something similar to prove your real-life age, otherwise your avatar will be restricted to General-rated sims. And General-rated sims, by definition, don't allow for sexual encounters because the scripted furniture necessary for acting out sexual activities is not allowed to be installed on General-rated sims in the first place.

So in this scandal, everything is vague so far. But the impact is the bigger already. In Second Life, not few users have been sceptical about the nature of avatars that look like children. But now this has turned into a veritable witch hunt against anyone and everyone who doesn't look "grown-up" by Second Life standards, also because Second Life Residents feel like they have to take matters into their own hands if the Lindens have actually been proven to do diddly-squat time and again.

The situation in OpenSim

But I don't want to talk about the Second Life side. I want to talk about how this affects OpenSim, for the vast majority of OpenSim users are Second Life users as well and closely follow Second Life news and Second Life blogs.

In OpenSim, apart from most of the underlying technology, things are a lot different from Second Life. OpenSim is as decentralised as can possibly be, and it has been since its very inception in 2007 and the introduction of federation in the shape of the Hypergrid in 2008.

OpenSim doesn't have a central authority in any shape or form. OpenSim doesn't have any centralised rules or rule-making in any shape or form either. The only reason why OpenSim has the exact same three content rating levels as Second Life is because it's used with Second Life viewers, and thus, it has to be compatible with Second Life.

But even these content rating levels become meaningless without a central authority that defines them and enforces them. And the only thing that's central in OpenSim is the development of the vanilla OpenSim server software. In OpenSim, rules only matter if you're in a place where someone else makes the rules. But you don't have to. Anyone can launch their own private or public grid and make their own rules or none at all, and as long as they're on their own grid, they live by their own rules or the lack thereof.

In fact, the only grid I know that has written-down definitions for the content rating levels is the commercial grid DigiWorldz. Even DigiWorldz allows these rules to be used "liberally" on the side of making them stricter. You may have an Adult-rated sim which, at the same time, is G-rated.

On top of that, the content rating levels are half-useless in OpenSim anyway. There is no central avatar registry either. There is no central authority that does more or less mandatory age checks for avatars. In fact, almost no grid has ever had any age verification, and even if there was something like that, it was limited to that one grid and to its own residents. OSgrid couldn't possibly automatically inquire from Metropolis if an avatar that Hypergridded in from Metropolis to OSgrid had a verified adult user. So a mechanism that could keep underage users away from Moderate-rated or Adult-rated sims doesn't exist because it's impossible to implement, much less make it as 100% water-tight as in Second Life.

Thus, the content rating levels aren't much more than "decorative" and could theoretically serve as not much more than a content warning.

So much about the OpenSim background.

No central authority means a safe haven

Now, due to this decentralised, inherently borderline anarchist ecosystem, OpenSim became a new home for people who were banned from Second Life for whichever reasons. After all, even if they also ended up being banned from several OpenSim grids, they could always start their own grid. And if too many grids blocked their grid, they could start a new one with a new identity. And so forth. But many don't even have to go that far because grid-hopping and having more than one identity slows down actions against them.

This doesn't only apply to notorious troublemakers. It applies to paedophiles just as well. Only newbies are completely unaware that there are paedos in OpenSim, but then again, many newbies who haven't been in Second Life before coming to OpenSim can't imagine that there's virtual sex in OpenSim at all. Even if they discover that all technical requirements are fulfilled.

In particular, there have been two particularly infamous cases of paedophiles in OpenSim. One was a guy from Texas who always rejected the rules of sims, the rules of entire grids and even local and national laws and substituted his own. Or rather, he claimed that whatever he did did not break any rules because of some specifics in the wording or something.

For one, he tried to talk nude adult female avatars into ageplay while remaining fully dressed himself at first. In this case, ageplay would have meant an adult user of an adult male avatar acting as an adult man and an adult user of an adult female avatar acting like a little girl. Essentially, to get around anti-ageplay or anti-child-avatar ruling, he aimed for daddyplay with grown-up counterparts, something he would have been able to claim to be perfectly legal on the sim, in the grid and in all real-life jurisdictions involved and thus unsanctionable.

Besides, however, he was repeatedly caught butt-naked next to child avatars on General-rated sims. It couldn't ruin his reputation anymore, no matter how many identities he had. But it could completely destroy that of the sims and their owners for "allowing" this to happen.

The other case was a convicted English paedophile with a different modus operandi. All his avatars were little girls as in children. He had a whole number of identities readily available for them so he could quickly register new avatars.

This was obvious from a number of points: So there were these little girls randomly appearing on sims where there was at least one more avatar. They had different names. They came from various grids. But sometimes girls from different grids had the same name. And they all acted exactly the same.

They landed on the sim. They stayed on the landing-point. It was usually or always a sim which, if it was an event location, didn't have the landing-point right next to the party. They picked out one of the avatars on the sim. And then they got into contact with that avatar via IM. The wording was always exactly identical. That guy had a notecard or a text file or a Word document or something from which he copy-pasted not only avatar names, but also always the same dialogues. I wouldn't wonder if even the intended ageplay would have acted out along pre-defined lines that he would have copy-pasted.

And this guy certainly had enough avatars to keep going for months. He could always make new avatars by registering one on another grid, copy-pasting in the forename and the surname, then having the brand-new avatar meet one of his already existing avatars and the existing avatars sending over a bunch of items to the new avatar's inventory. He eventually vanished altogether, either because OpenSim became uninteresting, or because it became too much of an effort compared with whatever else he discovered, or because he was convicted in real life once more.

OpenSim's war on child avatars

It's due to such happenings that many OpenSim users, sim owners and owners of not-exactly-tiny public grids in particular, have been up in arms against ageplay for a couple of years already. And as there's no central authority in OpenSim that could make rules against ageplay and combat it, there's no central authority to keep individuals' efforts in this direction from going completely out of hand.

One attempt at a countermeasure is the attempt at re-defining the Adult rating. The "Adult" part is to refer to the visual age of the avatars visiting a place, and the Adult rating is to mean that no child avatars are allowed. This sounds like a given, but at the same time, Adult-rated sims are often not PG-rated, but G-rated at the same time, not allowing nudity or even only scanty clothing anywhere. Sometimes, entire grids do that, but it's mostly the owners of sims having such a re-defined Adult rating who defend their one-sided re-definition.

A nasty side-effect of this, however, is that the Adult rating loses its effect as a content warning. More and more OpenSim users simply don't expect anything naughty on Adult-rated sims anymore, and they're highly irritated when they come to an on-going event on an Adult-rated sim such as Stark and see naked avatars. At the same time, nudists can't count on nudity being allowed on Adult-rated sims anymore. And there have actually been cases of avatars being permanently banned from Adult-rated sims that nonetheless don't allow nudity, but that don't announce their ban on nudity anywhere.

Another attempt is the infamous Childgate. It's a script that checks the height of an avatar, and if it's below a certain threshold, the script automatically both kicks and permanently bans the avatar. So far, so good.

Collateral damage: realistic and non-sexy avatars

But the Childgate is pre-configured to kick and ban any and all avatars under 6 feet which is 1.83m. That's taller than most women in real life, and it's even taller than many men in real life. But due to Second Life's unreliable avatar height measuring, namely up to the eyes rather than the top of the head, Second Life users quit paying attention to the height indicated by their shapes which quickly led to ludicrously tall avatars becoming the standard. This, of course, bled into OpenSim which does not have that quirk, but few people know OpenSim doesn't have it. Still, if you have a realistically-sized avatar, chances are good that you'll be kicked and banned from sims with a Childgate on the spot.

I'm not even sure if the Childgate measures an avatar's height the OpenSim way or the Second Life way. And I've read somewhere that some sim owners have configured the Childgate to kick and ban everyone under 7 feet which is 2.14m because they unironically consider avatars of that height underage.

And then there are less voluptuous versions of popular mesh bodies, especially Athena Petite. Athena Petite is basically a variant of the Athena mesh body for more realistic avatars. Athena is much more on the "sexy" side with breasts which, even at small settings, would be very likely to be inflated with silicone in real life, so big are they. Athena Petite has realistically-sized breasts. The original target audience are the same people who adjust their avatar's height to something realistic; if they're women in real life, it's often their real-life height.

However, the average OpenSim user isn't used to that. The average OpenSim user is used to completely distorted female avatars as the standard. 7' or taller. BBBBBL (big butt, big boobs, big lips, referring to a large derriere, a pair of unnaturally-sized breasts and a mouth with unnaturally enormous lips in a perpetual kiss shape not unlike a duckface). A skin tone that'd require you to sleep in a tanning-bed, but still with bright red lipstick. The avatar being nine or ten times as tall as the head is big when seven and a half or, at most, eight times would be realistic. 60% of the body height being the legs, not even necessarily including the feet which are permanently fixed in a position for 6-inch heels. And, of course, arms that are so short that the fingertips don't reach farther down than the crotch.

Athena is being perceived as a "normal" woman because over 90% of all female avatars roaming the Hypergrid since 2015 have been Athenas, often with hardly modified shapes. "Sexy" starts with Legacy which has an absolutely unnatural waist-to-hip ratio, and if that doesn't suffice, there are the various HG bodies which have an even more ridiculously huge butt and hips that are three times as wide as the waist. Well, and if there's something that's less voluptuous than bone-stock, standard, everyday, off-the-shelf Athena, it's automatically perceived as probably underage.

Even before the current situation, there have been known cases of sim owners kicking and banning avatars with Athena Petite bodies in the course of enforcing their "no child avatars" policy because they consider Athena Petite to be 14 years old at most.

But there have also been cases of avatars being kicked and banned for looking underage because they didn't check enough "sexy" marks. Realistic height plus realistic shape which results in a "bubble head". Toned-down lips, even though hardly anyone does that. Too pale skin tone. Freckles, only kids have freckles. No make-up. Hairstyle other than long flowing locks. Wearing too much pink without at the same time looking like a total slut. Wearing too much pastel. Wearing too bright colours. Wearing flat sneakers because female avatars are expected to always only ever wear sandals or high boots, in both cases with at least 6-inch heels. Wearing socks because female avatars are expected to wear black nylon stockings or no hosiery at all. Sometimes only one of these is enough for a female avatar to be flagged a child avatar.

Bleak future

Again, this has been the status quo up until that article on Medium. And it isn't like the article doesn't have any effect on OpenSim. In fact, it has already started. And I expect it to escalate further.

Soon, you'll have to max out the sexiness of your avatar everywhere all the time. Sim owners will raise the threshold of what's considered a grown-up avatar. Not only will they ban even more avatars that aren't sexy enough on sight, but avatar attachment gates will spread. These things can and do remove avatars based on what the avatars wear. And I expect these gates to be fed with more and more content which, according to OpenSim sim owners, is typical for child avatars. It already starts with all known kid mesh bodies and all known kids' clothes. I think Athena Petite will quickly be added to most of them. And I actually expect them to soon include keywords like "sneakers" or "freckles" or the like.

So you think you'll have your metaverse under control? Think again! (CW: nudity mentioned, sex mentioned, BDSM mentioned)

Okay, so you're working on creating a metaverse. Maybe proprietary, non-free and closed-source, maybe free-as-in-freedom and open-source. Maybe a walled garden, maybe something actually decentralised with worlds that are federated with one another, maybe even "the Metaverse" that shall become an Internet-wide standard or a least a part of it.

Of course, you're a professional. You think you've got everything down pat. No, you've never been in a virtual world. Or maybe you've worn a VR headset for a couple minutes once or twice before you've started your development. But you think you're as much of a virtual worlds expert as they ever come, simply because you've grokked the technology, and technology is all there is to virtual worlds.

And you think that you, as the creator of this platform, have everything fully under control.

My prediction as a several-years-long user of virtual worlds: You'll fall flat on your face. You'll be caught off-guard by and overrun with unexpected user-driven developments in your virtual worlds that neither you nor your worlds are prepared for. And you will have to doubt the two above paragraphs.

And here's why:

• Virtual worlds that absolutely require a VR headset won't become popular. Virtual worlds that absolutely require a VR headset from one specific brand will become even less popular. All the popular worlds out there can be used as "pancakes" on a run-of-the-mill desktop or laptop computer with a run-of-the-mill 2-D screen that folks have at hand anyway.
• The more limited your avatars are (e.g. no lower body/legs or no limbs, just hands and feet), the higher the probability that everyone will laugh about them. And compare them to Second Life.
• At this point, you'll find out that Second Life itself is not only unexpectedly still alive after two decades, but it has evolved a lot since 2008. At least on the desktop, that's your competition. Soon on phones as well. And it doesn't need simplified, cartoonish avatars in simplified, cartoonish worlds because it isn't made to always deliver 60fps on fanless mobile hardware, so it can go all the way with graphical details.
• If you leave world-building to corporate world owners and their paid designers, you have to pay your designers well for years and decades to come so they keep on building. Otherwise, your world will go stale because everyone will have seen everything, and nobody will want to come visit it anymore except for newbies. The key to successful virtual worlds is giving users the opportunity to build. And "users" doesn't only mean rich celebrities who pay virtual land admins to plop down their designer-built mansions on their ten-million-dollar parcels.
• And even building won't happen if you make it too difficult for users to build. Guess why Second Life and OpenSim are so popular.
• Virtual headquarters of cool brands only stay cool and exciting and interesting for so long and for so many people. Especially if they can't enter them. Ditto virtual mantions owned by celebrities.
• If there's the possibility to attach anything to an avatar, people will make avatar design more flexible than what the designers have planned.
• If you have professionals as your target audience, and your avatars have lower bodies, female users will demand appropriate business attire. This means you'll have to make skirts possible.
• Your standardised skirts which have worked pretty well under your lab conditions will show rampant leg clipping in daily use. You'll learn that Sinespace, Vircadia and Overte exist by finding out that they've got their own physics-based solution for skirts. And for long hair.
• Speaking of business attire, high heels. If avatars have feet, high heels will be requested. And not necessarily with only one height. Both the virtual world standard you're building on and your engine will only support flat feet from the beginning because who could really expect this?! So implementing high heels requires either re-writing half the avatar standard and half the avatar engine, also to account for the avatar being "taller" on heels, or an ugly kluge that nobody really is happy with.
• Alts. People will have alts.
  If you ask someone interested in virtual worlds who has never been in a virtual world or maybe just for business purposes, they'll tell you that everyone will have a "digital twin" avatar in The Metaverse in the future. As in exactly one avatar.
  Ask actual spare-time users of virtual worlds, and many will laugh and tell you they've got several avatars already now. In one and the same world.
  In a decentralised metaverse, this will be even more likely and impossible to prevent. Just look at OpenSim where almost everyone who has been around for at least a couple of months has avatars in multiple worlds, multiple grids, even though you can teleport between grids, between servers with different owners and operators running different versions of OpenSim, using the same avatar. And having multiple avatars with different identities isn't rare either, even within the same grid.
• Crossplayers. If the avatar looks female, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a female user behind it. Especially not if text chat is used instead of voice.
• If kids can use your metaverse, and there's any incentive for kids to use your metaverse, kids will use your metaverse. Especially if it can work as a "pancake" without requiring a headset. And they're very likely to get themselves cool "grown-up" avatars, regardless of whether or not underage-looking avatars are possible/available or not. They're kids after all. Why should they only play themselves in-world if they can also play someone else just like they often do in real life?
• Vice versa, just because an avatar looks like a kid, doesn't mean the user behind the avatar is one.
• Nudity. And naughty stuff all the way to virtual sex. It will happen. Users will find a way. Maybe not right away, but they will.
  You may design your world for people to build virtual office spaces, virtual after-work dance clubs and virtual live music venues. But they will build fully-functional virtual swinger clubs and virtual BDSM dungeons once they figure out how.
  And you'll be so unprepared that banning everything remotely naughty out-right, while being a game of Whack-a-Mole itself and not even backed by actual rules at first, will be vastly easier than implementing content ratings, especially regional content ratings.
• A free, open-source, decentralised metaverse will not only consist of worlds operated by staffs of hired full-time professionals. There will be private people running their own worlds, either on a machine at home or on rented Web space.
• This also means that you can't bet on land scarcity and ask premium prices for your land in a free, decentralised metaverse. Why should people spend ridiculous amounts of money on chunks of your land if they can make their own land anytime?
• The easier it becomes for private individuals to set up their own worlds in a decentralised metaverse, the more people who really shouldn't operate any kind of server will do so nonetheless. And the more people will do so just to circumvent bans because nobody can ban them from their own worlds. Another two lessons OpenSim has learned, but nobody will learn from OpenSim as long as nobody knows that OpenSim exists, and as long as everyone only acknowledges virtual worlds that have a CEO.
• Different worlds, different rules. You'll find out quickly enough how this applies to decentralised networks of virtual worlds. The OpenSim community already did: Second Life's General/Mature/Adult content rating definitions are pretty much useless if each grid can re-define them as it pleases. General-rated clothing-optional beaches are just as real as places that are both Adult-rated and G-rated and only use the Adult rating to keep avatars looking like children out.
• Different worlds, different server software versions. In a decentralised metaverse based on anything designed or developed centrally, be it the server software, be it the standards definition, it's impossible to guarantee that all worlds always run the exact same version. You'll find out the hard way when a compatibility-breaking upgrade creates a rift through your precious metaverse between the worlds that have upgraded and those that haven't.
  Don't count on all worlds upgrading ASAP either. There will be worlds several years worth of new releases behind for whichever reasons, and be it because world owners disappear under a rock for years while keeping their worlds online.
• A decentralised and truly open-source metaverse will inevitably mean forks. And the forks want to stay compatible with the original. This also means that if you mess up, and you refuse to admit and fix your mistake, world owners may increasingly switch to forks and abandon your original project altogether.
• If you implement the possibility for one world to completely block another world, in-bound, out-bound or both, this feature will be used in feuds and other kerfuffles between worlds. Or between their admins. Or between the admin of one world and one user of another.
  If you don't implement it, users of rogue worlds can run rampant, and stopping them will be difficult or out-right impossible.
• Any innovation, any new feature you add to your virtual world system will not necessarily only be used the way you intended and designed it for. Never underestimate the creativity of your users.

Those who really know their way around virtual worlds can tell you all this and more.

But they aren't other creators of new virtual worlds. They aren't virtual world CEOs. I guess they aren't even Philip Rosedale, and on top of inventing, creating and leading Second Life, this guy has also actually read Snow Crash.

They aren't academic researchers either who interview virtual world designers and virtual world CEOs and other virtual world researchers and occasionally read what mass media or tech media write about virtual worlds without ever spending more than 15 minutes in a virtual world themselves.

No, they're the people who actually use virtual worlds. Regularly. A lot. And I don't mean the newfangled proof-of-concept stuff or small worlds specialised for exactly one purpose, one task.

The actual virtual world experts are the veterans of big, established, popular worlds like Second Life, including those Lindens who actually go in-world and thus have stories to tell. And the real experts on free, open-source, decentralised virtual worlds are the OpenSim veterans.

They haven't just heard or read about something being done in virtual worlds. They've witnessed it being done first-hand. Or they've actually done it themselves.

Whenever I describe a picture from a virtual world, the description grows far beyond everyone's wildest imaginations in size; here's why

I rarely post pictures from virtual worlds anymore. I'd really like to show them to Fediverse users, including those who know nothing about them. But I rarely do that anymore. Not in posts, not even in Hubzilla articles.

That's because pictures posted in the Fediverse need image descriptions. Useful and sufficiently informative image descriptions. And to my understanding, even Hubzilla articles are part of the Fediverse because they're part of Hubzilla. So the exact same rules apply to them that apply to posts. Including image descriptions being an absolute requirement.

And a useful and sufficiently informative image description for a picture from a virtual world has to be absolutely massive. In fact, it can't be done within Mastodon's limits. Not even the 1,500 characters offered for alt-text are enough. Not nearly.

Over the last 12 or 13 months, I've developed my image-describing style, and it's still evolving. However, this also means my image descriptions get more and more detailed with more and more explanations, and so they tend to grow longer and longer.

My first attempt at writing a detailed, informative description for a picture from a virtual world was in November, 2022. It started at over 11,000 characters already and grew beyond 13,000 characters a bit later when I re-worked it and added a missing text transcript. Most recently, I've broken the 40,000-character barrier, also because I've raised my standards to describing pictures within pictures within a picture. I've taken over 13 hours to describe one single picture twice already.

I rarely get any feedback for my image descriptions. But I sometimes have to justify their length, especially to sighted Fediverse users who don't care for virtual worlds.

Sure, most people who come across my pictures don't care for virtual worlds at all. But most people who come across my pictures are fully sighted and don't require any image descriptions. It's still good manners to provide them.

And there may pretty well be people who are very excited about and interested in virtual worlds, especially if it's clear that these are actually existing, living, breathing virtual worlds and not some cryptobro's imagination. And they may want to know everything about these worlds. But they know nothing. They look at the pictures, but they can't figure out from looking at the pictures what these pictures show. Nothing that's in these pictures is really familiar to them.

So when describing a picture from a virtual world, one must never assume that anything in the picture is familiar to the on-looker. In most cases, it is not.

Also, one might say that only sighted people are interested in virtual worlds because virtual worlds are a very visual medium and next to impossible to navigate without eyesight. Still, blind or visually-impaired people may be just as fascinated by virtual worlds as sighted people. And they may be at least just as curious which means they may require even more description and explanation. They want to know what everything looks like, but since they can't see it for themselves, they have to be told.

All this is why pictures from virtual worlds require substantially more detailed and thus much, much longer descriptions than real-life photographs.

The medium

The wordiness of descriptions for images from virtual worlds starts with the medium. It's generally said that image descriptions must not start with "Picture of" or "Image of". Some even say that mentioning the medium, i.e. "Photograph of", is too much.

Unless it is not a digital photograph. And no, it isn't always a digital photograph.

It can just as well be a digitised analogue photograph, film grain and all. It can be a painting. It can be a sketch. It can be a graph. It can be a screenshot of a social media post. It can be a scanned newspaper page.

Or it can be a digital rendering.

Technically speaking, virtual world images are digital renderings. But just writing "digital rendering" isn't enough.

If I only wrote "digital rendering", people would think of spectacular, state-of-the-art, high-resolution digital art with ray-tracing and everything. Like stills from Cyberpunk 2077 for which the graphics settings were temporarily cranked up to levels at which the game becomes unplayable, just to show off. Or like promotional pictures from a Pixar film. Or like the stuff we did in PoV-Ray back in the day. When the single-core CPU ran on full blast for half an hour, but the outcome was a gorgeous screen-sized 3-D picture.

But images from the virtual worlds I frequent are nothing like this. Ray-tracing isn't even an option. It's unavailable. It's technologically impossible. So there is no fancy ray-tracing with fully reflective surfaces and whatnot. But there are shaders with stuff like ambient occlusion.

So where other people may or may not write "photograph", I have to write something like "digital 3-D rendering created using shaders, but without ray-tracing".

The location

If you think that was wordy, think again. Mentioning the location is much worse. And mentioning the location is mandatory in this case.

I mean, it's considered good style to always write where a picture was taken unless, maybe, it was at someone's home, or the location of something is classified.

In real life, that's easy. And except for digital art, digitally generated graphs and pictures of text, almost all pictures in the Fediverse were taken in real-life.

In real life, you can often get away with name-dropping. Most people know at least roughly what "Times Square" refers to. Or "Piccadilly Circus". Or "Monument Valley". Or "Stonehenge". There is no need to break down where these places are. It can be considered common knowledge.

In fact, you get away even more easily with name-dropping landmarks without telling where they are. White House. Empire State Building. Tower Bridge. Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Fuji. Eiffel Tower. Taj Mahal. Sydney Opera House which, admittedly, name-drops its rough location, just like the Hollywood Marquee. All these are names that should ring a bell.

But you can't do that in virtual worlds. In no virtual world can you do that. Not even in Roblox which has twice as many users as Germany has citizens. Much less in worlds running on OpenSim, all of which combined are estimated to have fewer than 50,000 unique monthly users. Whatever "unique" means, considering that many users have more than one avatar in more than one of these worlds.

Such tiny user numbers mean that there are even more people who don't use these worlds, who therefore are completely unfamiliar with these worlds. Who, in fact, don't even know these worlds exist. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single paid Metaverse expert of any kind who has ever even heard of OpenSimulator. They know Horizons, they know The Sandbox, they know Decentraland, they know Rec Room, they know VRchat, they know Roblox and so forth, they may even be aware that Second Life is still around, but they've never in their lives heard of OpenSim. It's that obscure.

So imagine I just name-dropped...

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library.

What'd that tell you?

It'd tell you nothing. You wouldn't know what that is. I couldn't blame you. Right off the bat, I know only two other Fediverse users who definitely know that building because I was there with them. Maybe a few more have been there before. Definitely much fewer than 50. Likely fewer than 20. Out of millions.

Okay, let's add where it is.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde.

Does that help?

No, it doesn't. If you don't know the Sendalonde Community Library, you don't know what and where Sendalonde is either. That place is only known for its spectacular library building.

And you've probably never heard of a real-life place with that name. Of course you haven't. That place isn't in real life.

So I'd have to add some more information.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid.

What's the Discovery Grid? And what's a grid in this context, and why is it called a grid?

Well, then I have to get even wordier.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

Nobody, absolutely nobody writes that much about a real-life location. Ever.

And still, while you know that I'm talking about a place in a virtual world and what that virtual world is based on, while this question is answered, it raises a new question: What is OpenSimulator?

I wouldn't blame you for asking that. Again, even Metaverse experts don't know OpenSimulator. I'm pretty sure that nobody in the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, in the Open Metaverse Alliance and at the Open Metaverse Foundation has ever heard of OpenSim. The owners and operators of most existing virtual worlds have never heard of OpenSim except those of Second Life, Overte and maybe a few others. Most Second Life users, present and past, have never heard of OpenSim. Most users of most other virtual worlds, present and past, have never heard of OpenSim.

And billions of people out there believe that Zuckerberg has invented "The Metaverse", and that his virtual worlds are actually branded "Metaverse® ("Metaverse" is a registered trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc. All rights reserved.)" Hardly anyone knows that the term "metaverse" was coined by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash which, by the way, has inspired Philip Rosedale to create Second Life. And nobody knows that the term "metaverse" has been part of the regular OpenSim users' vocabulary since before 2010. Because nobody knows OpenSim.

And that's why I can't just name-drop "OpenSimulator" either. I have to explain even that.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life.

That alone would be more than your typical cat picture alt-text.

But it'd create misconceptions, namely of OpenSim being another walled-garden, headset-only VR platform that has jumped upon the "Metaverse" bandwagon. Because that's what people know about virtual worlds, if anything. So that's what they automatically assume. And that's wrong.

I'd have to keep that from happening by telling people that OpenSim is as decentralised and federated as the Fediverse, only that it even predates Laconi.ca, not to mention Mastodon. Okay, and it only federates with itself and some of its own forks because OpenSim doesn't run on a standardised protocol, and nobody else has ever created anything compatible.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and most of it became a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.

This is more than most alt-texts on Mastodon. Only this.

But it still leaves one question unanswered: "Discovery Grid? What's that? Why is it called a grid? What's a grid in this context?"

So I'd have to add yet another paragraph.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and most of it a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.

Just like Second Life's virtual world, worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because they are separated into square fields of 256 by 256 metres, so-called "regions". These regions can be empty and inaccessible, or there can be a "simulator" or "sim" running in them. Only these sims count a the actual land area of a grid. It is possible to both look into neighbouring sims and move your avatar across sim borders unless access limitations prevent this.

I'm well past 1,000 characters now. Other people paint entire pictures with words with that many characters. I need them only to explain where a picture was taken. But this should answer all immediate questions and make clear what kind of place the picture shows.

The main downside, apart from the length which for some Mastodon users is too long for a full image description already, is that this will be outdated, should the decision be made to move Sendalonde to another grid again.

And I haven't even started actually describing the image. Blind or visually-impaired users still don't know what it actually shows.

The actual content of the image

If this was a place in real life, I might get away with name-dropping the Sendalonde Community Library and briefly mention that there are some trees around it, and there's a body of water in the background. It'd be absolutely sufficient.

But such a virtual place is something that next to nobody is familiar with. Non-sighted people even less because they're even more unlikely to visit virtual worlds. That's a highly visual medium and usually not really inclusive for non-sighted users.

So if I only name-dropped the Sendalonde Community Library, mentioned where it is located and explained what OpenSim is, I wouldn't be done. There would be blind or visually-impaired people inquiring, "Okay, but what does it look like?" Ditto people with poor internet for whom the image doesn't load.

Sure they would. Because they honestly wouldn't know what it looks like. Because even the sighted users with poor internet have never seen it before. But they would want to know.

So I'd have to tell them. Not doing so would be openly ableist.

And no, one sentence isn't enough. This is a very large, highly complex, highly detailed building and not just a box with a doorway and a sign on it. Besides, remember that we're talking about a virtual world. Architecture in virtual worlds is not bound to the same limits and laws and standards and codes as in real life. Just about everything is possible. So absolutely nothing can ever be considered "a given" and therefore unnecessary to be mentioned.

Now, don't believe that blind or visually-impaired people will limit their "What does it look like?" to the centre-piece of the picture. If you mention something being there, they want to know what it looks like. Always. Regardless of whether or not they used to be sighted, they still don't know what whatever you've mentioned looks like specifically in a virtual world. And, again, it's likely that they don't know what it looks like at all.

Thus, if I mention it, I have to describe it. Always. All of it.

There are exactly two exceptions. One, if something is fully outside the borders of the image. Two, if something is fully covered up by something else. And I'm not even entirely sure about the latter case.

Sometimes, a visual description isn't even enough. Sometimes, I can mention that something is somewhere in the picture. I can describe what that something looks like in all details. But people still don't know what it is.

I can mention that there's an OpenSimWorld beacon standing somewhere. I can describe its looks with over a 1,000 words and so much accuracy that an artist could make a fairly accurate drawing of it just from my description.

But people, the artist included, still would not know what an OpenSimWorld beacon is in the first place, nor what it's there for.

So I have to explain what an OpenSimWorld beacon is and what it does.

Before I can do that, I first have to explain what OpenSimWorld is. And that won't be possible with a short one-liner. OpenSimWorld is a very multi-purpose website. Explaining it will require a four-digit number of characters.

Only after I'm done explaining OpenSimWorld, I can start explaining the beacon. And the beacon is quite multi-functional itself. On top of that, I'll have to explain the concept of teleporting around in OpenSim, especially from grid to grid through the Hypergrid.

This is why I generally avoid having OSW beacons in my pictures.

Teleporters themselves aren't quite as bad, but they, too, require lots and lots of words. They have to be described. If there's a picture on them, maybe one that shows a preview of the chosen destination, that picture has to be described. All of a sudden, I have an entire second image to write a description for. And then I have to explain what that teleporter is, what it does, how it works, how it's operated. They don't know teleporters because there are no teleporters in real life.

At least I might not have to explain to them which destinations the teleporter can send an avatar to. The people who need all these descriptions and explanations won't have any use for this particular information because they don't even know the destinations in the first place. And describing and explaining each of these destinations, especially if they're over a hundred, might actually be beyond the scope of an image description, especially since these destinations usually aren't shown in the image itself.

Avatars

Just like in-world objects, avatars and everything more or less similar require detailed, extensive descriptions and explanations. People need to understand how avatars work in this kind of world, and of course, blind or visually-impaired people want to know what these avatars look like. Each and every last one of them. Again, how are they supposed to know otherwise?

I'm not quite sure whether or not it's smart to always give the names of all avatars in the image. It's easy to find them out, but when writing a description especially for a party picture with dozens of avatars in it, associating the depictions of avatars in the image with identities has to be done right away before even only one of these avatars leaves the location.

One thing that needs to be explained right afterwards is how avatars are built. In the cases of Second Life and OpenSim, this means explaining that they usually aren't "monobloc" avatars that can't be modified in-world. Instead, they are modular, put together from lots of elements, usually starting with a mesh body that "replaces" the default system body normally rendered by the viewer, continuing with a skin texture, an eye texture and a shape with over 80 different parameters and ending with clothes and accessories. Of course, this requires an explanation on what "mesh" is, why it's special and when and why it was introduced.

OpenSim also supports script-controlled NPCs which require their own explanation, including that NPCs don't exist in Second Life, and how they work in OpenSim. Animesh exists both in Second Life and OpenSim and requires its own explanation again.

After these explanations, the actual visual description can begin. And it can and has to be every bit as extensive and detailed as for everything else in the picture.

The sex of an avatar does not have to be avoided in the description, at least not in Second Life and OpenSim. There, you basically only have two choices: masculine men and feminine women. Deviating from that is extremely difficult, so next to nobody does that. What few people actually declare their avatars trans describe them as such in the profile. The only other exception are "women with a little extra". All other avatars can safely be assumed to be cis, and their visual sex can be used to describe them.

In virtual worlds, especially Second Life and OpenSim, there is no reason not to mention the skin tone either. A skin is just that: a skin. It can be replaced with just about any other skin on any avatar without changing anything else. It doesn't even have to be natural. It can be snow white, or it can be green, or it can be the grey of bare metal. In fact, in order to satisfy those who are really curious about virtual worlds, it's even necessary to mention if a skin is photo-realistic and has highlights and shades baked on.

Following that comes a description of what the avatar wears, including the hairstyle. This, too, should go into detail and mention things that are so common in real life that nobody would waste a thought about them, such as whether there are creases or crinkles on a piece of clothing at all, and if so, if they're actually part of the 3-D model or only painted on.

Needless to say that non-standard avatars, e.g. dragons, require the same amount of detail when describing them.

Now, only describing what an avatar looks like isn't enough. It's also necessary to describe what the avatar does which means a detailed description of its posture and mimics. Just about all human avatars in Second Life and OpenSim have support for mimics, even though they usually wear a neutral, non-descript expression. But even that needs to be mentioned.

Text transcripts

They say that if there's text somewhere in a picture, it has to be transcribed verbatim in the image description. However, there is no definite rule for text that is too small to be readable, partially obscured by something in front of it or only partially within the borders of the image.

Text not only appears in screenshots of social media posts, photographs of news articles and the like. It may appear in all kinds of photographs, and it may just as well appear in digital renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. It can be on posters, it can be on billboards, it can be on big and small signs, it can be on store marquees, it can be printed on people's clothes, it can be anywhere.

Again, the basic rule is: If there's text, it has to be transcribed.

Now you might say that transcribing illegible text is completely out of question. It can't be read anyway, so it can't be transcribed either. Case closed.

Not so fast. It's true that this text can't be read in the picture. But that one picture is not necessarily the only source for the text in question. If the picture is a real-life photograph, the last resort would be to go back to where the picture was taken, look around more closely and transcribe the bits of text from there.

Granted, that's difficult if whatever a text was on is no longer there, e.g. if it was printed on a T-shirt. And yes, that's extra effort, too much of an effort if you're at home posting pictures which you've taken during your overseas vacation. Flying back there just to transcribe text is completely out of question.

This is a non-issue for pictures from virtual worlds. In most cases, you can always go back to where you've taken a picture, take closer looks at signs and posters and so on, look behind trees or columns or whatever is standing in front of a sign and partly covering it and easily transcribe everything. Or you take the picture and write the description without even leaving first. You can stay there until you're done describing and transcribing everything.

At least Second Life and OpenSim also allow you to move your camera and therefore your vision independently from your avatar. That really makes it possible to take very close looks at just about everything, regardless of whether or not you can get close enough with your avatar.

There are only four cases in which in-world text does not have to be fully transcribed. One, it's incomplete in-world; in this case, transcribe what is there. Two, it's illegible in-world, for example due to a too low texture resolution or texture quality; that's bad luck. Three, it is fully obscured, either because it is fully covered by something else, or because it's on a surface completely facing away from the camera. And four, it isn't even within the borders of the image.

In all other cases, there is no reason not to transcribe text. The text being illegible in the picture isn't. In fact, that's rather a reason to transcribe it: Even sighted people need help figuring out what's written there. And people who are super-curious about virtual worlds and want to know everything about them will not stop at text.

But why?

Yeah, that's all tough, I know. And I can understand if you as the audience are trying to weasel yourself out of having to read such a massive image description. You're trying to get me to not write that much. You're trying to find a situation in which writing so much is not justified, not necessary. Or better yet, enough situations that they become the majority, that a full description ends up only necessary in extremely niche edge cases that you hope to never come across. You want to see that picture, but you want to see it without thousands or tens of thousands of worlds of description.

Let me tell you something: There is no such situation. There is no context in which such a huge image description wouldn't be necessary.

The picture could be part of a post of someone who has visited that place and wants to tell everyone about it. Even if the post itself has only got 200 characters.

The picture could be part of an announcement of an event that's planned to take place there.

The picture could be part of a post from that very event. Or about the event after it has happened.

The picture could be part of an interview with the owners.

The picture could be part of a post about famous locations in OpenSim.

The picture could be part of a post about the Discovery Grid.

The picture could be part of a post about OpenSim in general.

The picture could be part of a post or thread about 6 obscure virtual worlds that you've probably never heard of, and number 4 is really awesome.

The picture could be part of a post about virtual architecture.

The picture could be part of a post about the concept of virtual libraries or bookstores.

The picture could be part of a recommendation of cool OpenSim places to visit.

It doesn't matter. All these cases require the full image description with all its details. And so do all those which I haven't mentioned. There will always be someone coming across the post with the picture who needs the description.

See, I've learned something about the Fediverse. You can try to limit your target audience. But you can't limit your actual audience.

It'd be much easier for me if I could only post to people who know OpenSim and actually lock everyone else out. But I can't.

On the World-Wide Web, it's easy. If you write something niche, pretty much only people interested in that niche will see your content because only they will even look for content like yours. Content has to be actively dug out, but in doing so, you can pick what kind of content to dig out.

In the Fediverse, anyone will come across stuff that they know nothing about, whether they're interested in it or not. Even elaborate filtering of the personal timeline isn't fail-safe. And then there are local and federated timelines on which all kinds of stuff appear.

No matter how hard you try to only post to a specific audience, it is very likely that someone who knows nothing about your topic will see your post on the federated timeline on mastodon.social. It's rude to keep clueless casuals from following you, even though all they do is follow absolutely everyone because they need that background noise of uninteresting stuff on their personal timeline that they have on X due to The Algorithm. And it's impossible to keep people from boosting your posts to clueless casuals, whether these people are your own connections and familiar with your topic, or they've discovered your most recent post on their federated timeline.

You can't keep clueless casuals who need an extensive image description to understand your picture from coming across it. Neither can you keep blind or visually-impaired users who need an image description to even experience the picture in the first place from coming across it.

Neither, by the way, can you keep those who demand everyone always give a sufficient description for any image from coming across yours. And I'm pretty sure that some of them not only demand that from those whom they follow, but from those whose picture posts they come across on the local or federated timelines as well.

Sure, you can ignore them. You can block them. You can flip them the imaginary or actual bird. And then you can refuse to give a description altogether. Or you can put a short description into the alt-text which actually doesn't help at all. Sure, you can do that. But then you have to cope with having a Fediverse-wide reputation as an ableist swine.

The only alternative is to do it right and give those who need a sufficiently informative image description what they need. In the case of virtual worlds, as I've described, "sufficiently informative" starts at several thousand words.

And this is why pictures from virtual worlds always need extremely long image descriptions.

---

Set of hashtags to see if they're federated across the Fediverse:

#ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #AltText #Accessibility #Inclusion #Inclusivity #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds

An explanation for the landing point controls and how to make landing points act the way you want them to

There are many sims where the landing point is obviously misconfigured. This led me to believe that not exactly few users don't know how the landing point configuration works.

So let me try to explain how to configure it.


(A description of the image above can be found through this link.)

In Firestorm, click on "World" on the menu bar in the top left, then on "Parcel Details". Alternatively, right-click on bare ground so that the circle menu opens, then click on "About Land..." Either way, you'll get the window which the picture above shows.

The landing controls are at the bottom right; I've drawn frames around them.

Before I explain them, there's another important thing to know: There are two ways of landing on a sim or a parcel.  One is without coordinates. Copied hop addresses from OpenSimWorld are always without coordinates. And if you use the map to search for a sim, and you just click the sim mane, it's without coordinates, too.

The other one is with coordinates that define where the avatar should land. Landmarks are always with coordinates. Many sim-to-sim teleport scripts use coordinates. Hop addresses can contain coordinates. And if you use the map, and you click on a certain place on a sim, it's with coordinates, too.

Now to the actual controls:

The buttons in the blue frame are for the landing point. If one is defined, you see its coordinates above the buttons and the orientation angle. The menu in the red frame defines where avatars land; I'll get to that.

If no landing point is defined, avatars that come in with their own coordinates (e.g. by landmark) will land at these coordinates, and avatars that come in without their own coordinates (e.g. through OpenSimWorld) will land at 128, 128, x.

In order to define a landing point, go to where you want the landing point to be, turn into the desired direction, and click "Set". The landing point will be defined as where your avatar is plus how it's oriented.

"Clear" deletes the landing point setting. "Teleport" takes your avatar to the defined landing point.

The menu in the red frame under "Teleport Routing" defines where avatars land when they teleport in.

"Blocked" means that avatars cannot teleport onto this land at all. They may still walk in or fly in (if flying is allowed) or come by boat or train or bus or whatever, but they cannot teleport in. Careful: If used on an entire sim, "Blocked" renders landmarks and OpenSimWorld hop addresses useless because teleporting onto the sim is not possible at all.

"Landing Point" means that avatars are forced to always land at the landing point. This setting mercilessly overrides their own coordinates. Coordinates in landmarks become null and void. Even if avatars have carefully chosen a nice place to land, e.g. at a bus stop or on a wooden pier or something, and taken their landmark there, they won't land there; they will be forced to land at your landing point.

"Anywhere" means that avatars that come in without their own landing coordinates land at the landing point. This setting prevents them from landing at 128, 128, x. It does not override an avatar's own coordinates. So if avatars want to land in a particular place on the land, they can do so.

tl;dr: Where do avatars land?

No landing point defined:
Via OSW beacon: 128, 128, x
Via hop address without coordinates: 128, 128, x
Via hop address with coordinates: Coordinates at the end of the hop address
Via map, no place on the land selected: 128, 128, x
Via map, particular place on the land selected: Selected place
Via landmark: Landmark coordinates

"Blocked":
Via OSW beacon: No teleport allowed
Via hop address without coordinates: No teleport allowed
Via hop address with coordinates: No teleport allowed
Via map, no place on the land selected: No teleport allowed
Via map, particular place on the land selected: No teleport allowed
Via landmark: No teleport allowed

"Landing Point":
Via OSW beacon: Landing Point
Via hop address without coordinates: Landing Point
Via hop address with coordinates: Landing Point
Via map, no place on the land selected: Landing Point
Via map, particular place on the land selected: Landing Point
Via landmark: Landing Point

"Anywhere":
Via OSW beacon: Landing Point
Via hop address without coordinates: Landing Point
Via hop address with coordinates: Coordinates at the end of the hop address
Via map, no place on the land selected: Landing Point
Via map, particular place on the land selected: Selected place
Via landmark: Landmark coordinates

So when should you pick what?

"Blocked" is for if you don't want avatars to teleport in at all. If you want them to enter by walking or riding a horse or use a scripted ferry boat or something like this, but they must not teleport. Don't use it for private parcels/sims! For that, go to "Access" and uncheck "Anyone can visit".

"Anywhere" is the recommended setting. It lets avatars with landmarks land where they've taken their landmarks, and it has those who come through OpenSimWorld land where it's appropriate.

"Landing Point" is for forcing all avatars to land at your pre-defined landing point, no matter what. Only use this setting if it's really important to have everyone land at the same spot. That could be a role-playing/adventure sim with a pre-defined starting point, a story-telling sim (unless the story is so long that people are tempted to use landmarks like bookmarks in a book so they can come back later), a maze, any kind of parcours or your personal land where you want visitors to land at the entrance rather than in your bedroom or on your secret sky platform.

Do not use "Landing Point" for exploration sims or for shopping/freebie sims! And do not use "Landing Point" for party sims either! Yes, it may be convenient for visitors to land right next to the dancefloor. But not everybody wants to be FORCED HARD to land there. Some of us prefer to land somewhere more natural/somewhere where they can't be seen rezzing and then walk to the party location. If "Teleport Routing" is set to "Landing Point", they can't do that.

Troubleshooting Q&A:

Q: My visitors always land in the water!

A: That's because you have water at 128, 128, x, and you don't have a landing point set for your sim. Find a good landing spot for your visitors. Go there with your avatar. Turn your avatar so you're facing into the right direction. Open the settings as described above. Under "Landing Point" (see the red box), click "Set". Under "Teleport Routing" (see the blue box), pick "Anywhere" if you want to allow avatars with landmarks to land somewhere else or "Landing Point" if you want absolutely everyone to always land at the landing spot you've selected.

Q: My visitors complain that their landmarks don't work; they're always forced to land in one particular spot on my sim!

A: That's because you've set "Teleport Routing" to "Landing Point". Switch it to "Anywhere".

Why some virtual worlds succeeded and survived for many years while more recent ones failed miserably

Just a few months ago, it came in the news: "The Metaverse is dead."

Of course, "the Metaverse" referred to Horizons, the ill-fated virtual worlds that had Facebook, the corporation anyway, rename itself Meta. While Mark Zuckerberg might have learned the hard way that he can't exclusively and all-encompassingly trademark a term that already appears in Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, media and people kept calling his project "the Metaverse". However, it never managed to live up to the artificial hype created around it, and it never looked like the tens of billions of dollars that Meta had pumped into it.

And just this month, it came in the news: "Second Life celebrates its 20th birthday." Like, what now?

Second Life: not so dead after all

It must have been quite a revelation for those who are old enough already to remember the hype around Linden Labs' virtual world that occurred in 2006 and 2007. Real-life companies joined it to show their presence, to advertise and often even to try and sell virtual re-creations of their real-life products. News companies followed to always get the hottest stories from Second Life and write about them for real-life readers.

When the almost constant stream of mainstream news from Second Life died down in 2008, when mass media didn't report from Second Life anymore, many assumed that Second Life had been shut down. And they did so until Second Life announced its 20th anniversary which logically implied that it was actually alive and well.

The reality back then was somewhat different, of course. Those real-life companies tried to bring real-life culture and real-life products into Second Life. However, Second Life already had its own culture, and it had its own products, all made by its own residents. Second Life's "building materials" were much more limited back then than they are today. Attempts at making sufficiently detailed virtual representations of real-life products with these materials were bound to fail. In the meantime, creative Second Life residents had designed their products around these materials and along their limitations. Nobody wanted to buy virtual Nike sneakers; local products made by amateurs were actually better in practice.

Advertising real-life brands and real-life products in Second Life was bound to fail, too. Companies rented billboards and had their advertising textures placed on them. And Second Life residents not only ignored, but out-right de-rendered them. Besides, why advertise in a virtual world for something that isn't available in that same virtual world? When the real-life companies realised that their Second Life branches ran at a loss, they withdrew from Second Life entirely.

Media quickly followed suit. Without big companies to write about, there was nothing at all for them to write about. Well, there was still Second Life-specific news and gossip. But for one, people who weren't in Second Life weren't interested in it anyway. And besides, this was already covered by Second Life bloggers. And so, mass media withdrew from Second Life, too.

Nonetheless, Second Life carried on until today. In fact, it has changed a lot. It doesn't look anything like those crummy videos preserved from the hype years. If you look at the official website or the many Second Life pictures on Flickr (caution, some are not exactly safe for work), it's probably hard to believe that this is still the same world as back in 2007.

Causes for failure

But how come Second Life, created by a basically unknown company in 2003, became such a success while Horizons failed on an epic scale in spite of an eleven-digit budget, and none of the more recent virtual worlds has taken off yet?

That's because the recent virtual worlds all made the same mistake. They were all designed for making money first and foremost. Of course, especially if they're commercial worlds, they have to break even at least. But Horizons, just as well as those many crypto-based worlds, was conceived as a money printer with almost no regards to anything else. The business plan was to build virtual worlds, tell mass media about them and watch people flock into them by many millions.

The crypto-based worlds were often even worse offenders. They were only made for three purposes: for selling expensive land, for selling NFTs and for watching your own crypto money increase in value. Some at least had some celebrity's mansion or some corporation's headquarters as unique selling points; others didn't have any in-world images at all, making them seem like crypto banks with attached metaverses that might or might not work. The crypto crash actually forced some of them to shut down because they had all their financial assets stored in a cryptocurrency that other people were gambling with.

To get back to Meta: They relied too much on their own market power. Horizons was to become the Facebook or Instagram of virtual worlds. In fact, just like Facebook was to become the new Internet, Horizons was to become the new Internet, too. Meta placed high bets on virtual reality replacing the World-Wide Web or, to be more specific, Horizons replacing the World-Wide Web.

In fact, they thought they could get away with making Horizons exclusive to their own expensive brand of virtual reality headsets. People would have to buy them anyway sooner or later in order not to end up out of the loop. But Horizons being available neither on other brands of VR goggles nor on the desktop nor on mobile devices, instead requiring costly special hardware, wasn't the only reason why it failed.

Certainly, the lack-lustre, cartoonish avatars contributed to its demise. I'm pretty sure that some people actually took it upon themselves to compare them directly with contemporary Second Life avatars, even after Zuckerberg had announced the visuals upgrade that didn't really change that much. On top of that, the total lack of a lower body and legs, while actually halfway justified, made Horizons the laughing stock not only of the virtual worlds scene, but of the digital world in general.

Recipe for success

But neither Meta's market power nor its massive advertising nor Horizons' constant mass media presence managed to create what's actually essential for a virtual world to thrive. And that's an incentive for people to join it, especially if that requires overcoming an obstacle which, in this case, was acquiring a Meta VR headset and getting used to virtual reality. Even if Meta had given each Facebook or Instagram user a Horizons avatar, that wouldn't have meant that everyone had actually used it even once. Not even nearly everyone.

But what's even more important than people joining is people coming back. It's one thing to have lots of people try out your virtual world. It's another thing to have them return instead of visiting once and then never again. The number of registered users is not as good for bragging about as the number of active users.

It's one thing to make a virtual world interesting at first glance. It's another thing to keep it from getting old and boring eventually.

Apparently, there are virtual worlds which manage to do the latter and have sometimes managed to do so for more than a decade. But what is it that makes virtual worlds long-term successes?

There are three key elements for this. The first one is community. Visiting virtual worlds alone is not as interesting in the long run as meeting other avatars in them. This is also why virtual worlds grew significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic: If you can't meet people in real life, you may be able to meet them in a virtual world. Turned out you could.

The second one is the world itself and its content. This is important for attracting users. And in order not to lose them again, they have to be able to discover new things all the time. The world must never go stale, and visitors must never ask themselves what they're even supposed to do there because there's nothing much to do in the first place. Seeing some celebrity's mansion on a multi-million-dollar patch of land gets old quickly, especially if you can't even enter the land, much less the building because it's private property.

The third one is user creativity in-world. A world in which everything is made by the owners of the world plus maybe a few hired professionals, a world in which all other avatars can only consume and communicate, such a world will soon become boring for many. In fact, this is important for the second element: If users can fairly easily create in-world, if they can help shape the world, they can make it change, and they can keep it constantly interesting for others. The world owners don't have to take care of that.

Example for success: Second Life

Second Life managed to take off and become a huge success within three years, all that although it was ahead of its time, for in 2003, PC hardware had only just got capable of rendering 3-D virtual worlds, and the necessary broadband connections weren't available nearly everywhere. And it managed to do that because it quickly had all three elements down pat.

I guess one contributing factor was that Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life, had actually read Snow Crash. It actually inspired him to create Second Life. Of course, he didn't want to re-create Snow Crash's Metaverse which not only is as deeply dystopian as its real life, but also a vision of the future Internet from a point of view when the Internet was mostly walled gardens operated by AOL, CompuServe and the like. Remember Snow Crash was published in 1991, two years even before the Eternal September and three years before the launch of the World-Wide Web. For comparison, Ready Player One is 20 years newer; it was published when Google and Facebook were already big data giants.

Nonetheless, Snow Crash gave Rosedale an idea of what a virtual world would need.

Few virtual worlds offer in-world creativity to their users on levels similar to Second Life. Still today, almost everything in-world was made by residents. Interestingly, this was already the case when Second Life was opened to the general public in 2003. Before that happened, 3-D designers were invited as the first residents, and their task was to decorate the otherwise almost empty world. They really had to start from scratch, but capable as they were, they managed to pull it off, including making their own textures. That way, the Second Life grid already looked nice when it was opened.

Right away, there was enough to see for the first new residents and to get them going. But they were also given the opportunity to acquire land and build on it themselves, making the grid grow in the process and change constantly. Another incentive to come back was to finish the own builds. All this helped create and maintain communities.

Well, and of course, on top of it all came the novelty of having a public 3-D virtual world. Second Life wasn't the first of its kind, but it was the first to be covered by mainstream media and thus the first that was noticed by the general public.

Granted, it's only fair to mention that not everyone who tries out Second Life gets hooked for a lifetime. It was once revealed that four out of five people who create an avatar in Second Life only log in once and then never again. One reason may be false expectations. People may expect Second Life to be an MMO like, for example, World of Warcraft. But Second Life turns out not to be a game after all; it doesn't have a goal, and most importantly, it doesn't have quests that it tries to push you onto. Not being told what to do after logging in for the first time and having to find something to do oneself is what irritates many. But nonetheless, Second Life continues to have an average of over 50,000 monthly users.

Lastly, I dare say that Second Life is not popular although it isn't virtual reality of the kind that requires a headset. It is popular because it isn't that. It's popular because it's a "pancake" that runs on your PC or your laptop with a run-of-the-mill 2-D display, largely regardless of operating system even, that doesn't require you to shell out money for a set of goggles first, and that's accessible to people who can't use VR headsets for whichever reasons. And soon it'll come to phones.

Example for success: OpenSimulator

Another example is OpenSimulator which is not a virtual world per se. It's rather a free, open-source re-implementation of Second Life's technology built around its viewer API and available as a cross-platform server application. Still, its name is used as an umbrella term for the many worlds or, as they're actually called, grids that run on it.

OpenSim came out in January 2007, and in July, the first public grid was launched, OSgrid. While it has always been a testbed for OpenSim's development, OSgrid is not only the oldest grid, celebrating its 16th birthday this year, but also the biggest in user numbers and the largest in land area which is almost on par with Second Life.

OpenSim's big advantage was that it was entirely in the hands of its own community from the very beginning and never owned or operated by a for-profit corporation. Second Life had meanwhile switched from its early pay-to-use model to land rentals as its main source of income. OpenSim grids offered land for rent, too, but the rental fees only had to cover the server costs and not pay employees and a leading board, much less investors. And so OpenSim managed to have much cheaper land than Second Life. It still has today which explains why all OpenSim grids put together surpass Second Life's land area by the factor of four.

From the beginning, OpenSim had two main target audiences: Second Life residents, especially those who wanted to escape Second Life's increasingly rampant capitalism, and people who were interested in Second Life but unwilling or unable to invest real money in it. Cheap land, even the possibility of running your own grid, and not having to pay for anything else was the main incentive to join. Ironically, most word-of-mouth advertisement for OpenSim happened in Second Life.

However, it didn't start with a bunch of invited 3-D designers going around and decorating the new world so the first residents have something to behold and explore. OSgrid didn't, its official sims had to be built by and by as the grid was already open, and neither did any of the other grids. Typically, OpenSim grids start with nothing more than the grid owners deem necessary; this usually doesn't go beyond a welcome/landing sim.

So OpenSim managed to start with a community before having interesting worlds to visit. But this community was there primarily to build. For building, OpenSim is actually better than Second Life because land isn't nearly as expensive, and the limits of what can be placed on the land are much, much higher. Many came to OpenSim to build big, on a scale that Second Life would have made either outrageously expensive or completely impossible. At least early OpenSim was all about building. The result was impressive builds which lured more people over from Second Life where they couldn't possibly behold anything even similar.

2008 gave OpenSim a big push. This was the year when the Hypergrid was introduced. OpenSim had been decentralised from the very beginning, but each grid was its own walled garden. The Hypergrid introduced federation between grids because it made it possible for an avatar registered on one grid to travel to other grids, appearance, inventory and all. No longer was it necessary to create and maintain one avatar on each grid that you were interested in. Instead, you only needed one avatar to visit at least all grids connected to the Hypergrid. Only a small minority of grids stayed out of it. The others saw the formation of friendships and communities across grid borders.

This was also the year that freebie stores started taking off. Early on, most OpenSim users had the typical Second Life mindset of sharing their creations either for money with restricted permissions, which wasn't even possible because OpenSim didn't have a currency like the Linden Dollar, or not at all. They were afraid of people stealing their creations. So whatever you needed, were it objects for your sim or clothes for your avatar, you had to make them all yourself. But in 2008, full-perm freebies for everyone started emerging.

A key factor in this was when Linda Kellie, recently mobbed out of Second Life for offering full-perm freebies in direct competition with commercial creators, opened her Linda Kellie Designs sim which not only offered freebies for almost all purposes, but on which everything could be copied and shared with full permissions. It was technically impossible to steal from her because she had put everything she had made under Creative Commons CC0 which equals the public domain. As others didn't want her to have a monopoly on all these things, they followed suit and started offering their own creations for free, often even full-perm.

It was then that OpenSim also really had a check mark on content.

Still today, OpenSim is mostly targetted at Second Life converts which gets to the point that some users can't believe that anyone in OpenSim hasn't been in Second Life before. And so, it keeps up a monthly average of over 30,000 users, a steady long-term growth of this number and its enormous landmass even with little to no on-boarding assistance for new users.

Examples from the games area

When the word spread that Horizons is, in fact, not "the Metaverse", and that "metaverse" can be a general term for virtual worlds, many existing platforms jumped upon the bandwagon, or at least their communities did. Pretty much only OpenSim didn't have to because the OpenSim community has been using that term in relation to either OpenSim as a whole, the Hypergrid or single OpenSim grids since at least 2010, probably even longer. This is why the OpenSim community was so irked when Mark Zuckerberg wanted to brand his virtual world "The Metaverse".

But recently, even Second Life officially started to refer to itself as a "metaverse".

Even out-right games joined in. One example is Minecraft, the closest thing Microsoft has to an already functional metaverse. One of several descendants in spirit of the original voxel mining game, Infiniminer, while it's an open sandbox, it's a game all right, and it has introduced more and more elements of a game over the years. But while it can be run as a single-player game on a computer at home, it can also be played online.

Like all voxel miners, Minecraft takes care of staying interesting to its users at its very core. Of course, it's all about not only mining, but building. Each world is shaped by its users. But even before this building happens, Minecraft worlds are always interesting and exciting to explore because Minecraft generates them procedurally, another voxel miner standard. No staff, no admin, no developer is required to build all those landscapes with forests and meadows and deserts and even villages. What would take humans decades to build is automatically generated within seconds, chunk by chunk as the map is being explored, but still, and it's always generated differently.

And these worlds are huge. They stretch dozens upon dozens of kilometres across without being split into square regions like in Second Life or OpenSim. It takes weeks to explore them in full, even without ever mining or building. This enormous size also provides for enough space for thousands upon thousands of players on the same map.

Now, notice the plural: "worlds". Minecraft is actually decentralised which is unusual for a corporate product; anyone can create and run an online map, it just requires a machine with Minecraft on it that's online 24/7 and a sufficiently fast Internet connection. Remember that Minecraft was bought out by Microsoft, not created by Microsoft, and Mojang didn't have the means to host countless online maps for millions of users. I guess these sheer numbers alone might have Microsoft think twice about any plans of centralising Minecraft and only allowing multi-player maps on their own servers.

So if the map you're on bores you, you can always join another map. Or you can go back to single-player to return online later. Yes, there's still a single-player mode.

However, the best example of successful virtual worlds has to be Roblox with constantly way over 150 million monthly users. Like those various voxel miners, it's a game. And one with a long history. It can be traced back to a 2-D physics engine, and it started out itself as a 3-D physics engine as that had become feasible by 2004. Even that was only possible with rather blocky objects. This is why Roblox was being referred to as "virtual LEGO", especially as some creators went with the blocky style and added "studs" to the textures on top surfaces. Creators of avatar accessories drove this even further by making player avatars look as close to LEGO minifigs as they could get away with.

Of course, it couldn't be likened to LEGO without user creativity which has always been a big part of Roblox. However, it's here where Roblox really shows that it isn't a virtual world and not really a bunch of virtual worlds in the traditional sense either. For the worlds that can be created in Roblox, called "experiences", are mostly games. This gave it its own appeal, especially amongst children under 13, which didn't come from building, exploring or socialising, but from playing. There used to be a time when twice as many kids in the USA had a Roblox account than not.

Interestingly and unusually, while Roblox advanced technologically, it also matured along with its young target audience to keep its appeal as its users' preferences changed and generally appeal to an older audience. In 2015, it replaced its old block-based physics engine with one that could use free-form objects, a step in shedding the LEGO aesthetics. The scripting engine was enhanced to allow for even more complex games which were increasingly written for a teen or young adult audience. Avatars became more detailed within what Roblox still allowed, getting users to invest more in-world currency into customising their avatars.

Users from earlier times sometimes criticise Roblox for having turned from LEGO meets Minecraft with physics into LEGO Friends meets Second Life with physics that can be neglected in the second half of the 2010s. Also, the experiences have increasingly become either a few professionally developed games, non-professional lack-lustre games, the beloved games from way back which no longer worked or not even games at all. Still, Roblox had its huge user base, it kept gaining new young users, and at least some long-term users welcomed the offerings for older audiences.

Conclusion

If you look at these and other successful virtual worlds, you'll notice a few patterns. One of them is that all of them had something to offer their users pretty much right away.

When Second Life was opened to the general public, it was nicely decorated already, and it gave its residents an assortment of in-world tools to decorate it further with. Oh, and it already had a bunch of residents when it opened.

OpenSim recruits most of its target audience from Second Life with which it shares most of the UI/UX and the in-world building tools. However, it adds on top more and much cheaper land, hardly ever having to pay for anything else, no central rulers and the almost complete absence of commercialism.

Voxel miners like Minecraft managed to turn creativity into a challenge, often making construction on public servers a community effort, and they avoid empty barren land by having procedurally-generated, fully decorated landscapes.

Early Roblox made creativity playful by being a physics simulator which turned into minigame development and eventually into a huge gaming platform. Also, it was one of the first few virtual world platforms suitable for and popular with kids who at the same time were excluded from the on-going Second Life hype.

Horizons had nothing even remotely like this, and neither had any of these blockchain/crypto/NFT-based startups that tried to ride the hype train. They put their focus entirely on making money. The crypto worlds did because that was their very concept. And Horizons did because it was doomed so, being a project of a huge gigacorporation and still financed through venture capital. Investors and shareholders expected Horizons to generate revenue and pay back the investment plus ROI ASAP, so there was little else that could be taken care of.

Another pattern that isn't so obvious is the platform. All the successful examples were designed for run-of-the-mill desktop or laptop computers which people already had anyway. Many of the new virtual worlds from the 2020s, in contrast, at least those that were actually launched, went VR only and required a VR headset with no 2-D desktop frontend available. Horizons managed to top that by forcing aspiring users to buy an expensive Meta headset because Horizons wouldn't run on anything else.

Lastly, "the Metaverse" could have been a greater success, hadn't all who were involved in launching new virtual worlds since 2020 completely re-invented the wheel and acted as if wheels hadn't existed before the COVID-19 pandemic. Had they taken a look at Second Life, they would have seen what makes Second Life so popular, and they would have avoided the mistakes Second Life had made in the past.

Instead, younger project managers and developers had never even heard of Second Life. And those who were old enough that they should have remembered it had all but forgotten about it as they took it for dead and gone since 2008 or 2009. Even historical records wouldn't have been considered investigating because what had been in the 2000s would have been taken for hopelessly outdated by 2020's or 2021's standards and not worth looking at.

One can only hope that the remaining new metaverse projects have caught wind of Second Life's 20th birthday, that they learned through it that Second Life is alive and well, that it has evolved tremendously since 2007, that it is indeed worth studying, and that neither Second Life's experiences nor its history are copyrighted IP by Linden Labs, never to be used by anyone else.

In the meantime, the various "open metaverse" endeavours that want to create a decentralised, Fediverse-style network of interconnected virtual worlds are all doomed to make the same mistakes as OpenSim and not see what it has done right, simply because they've never even heard of it, and they probably never will.