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.