I’ve been following the discussion about segregating adult content with considerable interest. I keep hearing discussions of BDSM displays in infohubs and so on. Often they don’t jibe with my experience of SL. So I decided to make a more neutral analysis of what’s actually IN the mainland. Method: I used the map and by eye clicked in the center of each region tested. I turned off all overlays so that I wouldn’t, for example, be influenced by green dots (people) to tp in away from or close to them. I teleported in with my camera in the default setting (hit esc twice), used the arrow keys to make a 360 degree circuit after everything had rezzed, and scored what I saw. I chose a random start point (the pathways training area), went north visiting each sim until there wasn’t one, and at that point moved east one sim, then went south until I couldn’t go any more, and proceeded in a zig zag raster scan. I surveyed 28 sims. I scored the areas by these criteria:
Adult -
If I saw anything that would be considered ‘too adult’ for display in a public space (say a shop window) in real life, or if it implied ‘more inside’, I scored it as adult. Note that this is an extremely loose definition of ‘adult’. 3 (11 percent) tested positive by my criteria. Interestingly, all of these are qualified. I found a bland entryway and triggered a chat greeter that invited me to a sex orgy. I found a store that sold fetish goods – high boots and gags. And I found a store selling skins, displayed in the nude in non sexual poses. Using the proposed linden criteria only the greeter would be ‘adult’, and it is questionable.
Art -
25% of all test positions revealed art. By art I mean objects created for their aesthetic, rather than functional, qualities. I included anything one would naively include in ‘art’- paintings, etc. and anything created in a spirit of playfulness and experimentation. I did not include objects which, while beautiful, were created as decoration or whose beauty was primarily craft. So a nicely done home is not ‘art’, though if a painting is on the wall that is ‘art’ even if it’s an insipid and poorly technically executed landscape. I was suprised not only by the amount of art, but by the evidence that much of it was done by the owners themselves, and by the imaginative quality of much of it.
Natural or Landscaped Beauty
11 sites (39%) contained non trivial amounts of landscaped or ‘natural’ beauty. I tried to infer intent – if the intent was to create a beautiful area, I scored it, even if poorly executed. As an aside, I don’t recommend a plants store as a business, I landed in no less than 3 of them. I found only one edge case – I landed underwater on two occasions. I scored the empty one zero, but the other had a school of sharks swimming.
Violence
I’m puzzled by the vast concern with depictions of BDSM and the issues of violence against women it creates, and the bland acceptance of depictions of violence against everybody. So I decided to score depictions of violence or the tools of violence (guns, military items, etc). I found 2 (7%) sites that had such items, both rather weak edge cases. In a neglected parcel I found a griefer’s cage, and in I found a goth themed store, which I scored because of depictions of a battle axe in it’s logo. I did not score a piece of land set to damage for no obvious reason, or a store whose logo was a pirate like ‘deaths head’ with bunny ears.
Ugliness
I suspect some of the concern about adult is actually a coded complaint about ugly. So I scored for general ugliness. This was purely a subjective impression that the area was ugly and that I wouldn’t want to be neighbors and look at it all the time. I found 8 sites (29%) were ugly. There were two edge cases – one wasn’t truly ugly, just overcommercialized, and one was a casino. I wasn’t able to separate feelings of discomfort with the gambling from purely aesthetic concerns, and fell back to my ‘would I want to be neighbors?’ rule.
Educational Value
Since I’m interested in education in SL I decided to add a category for educational value. Suprisingly I found 2 sites, (7%). One was an origami center that was explicitly educational. The other was a potter.
Conclusions:
My sample was not random by any means. The sample was taken from a single restricted area on relatively old land. My personal experience is that ugliness, violence, and adult scores are likely to be far higher on new land. (Repeating the traverse on new land would be an interesting experiment).
I encountered no major attractions during my traverse. I suspect I might have had higher scores had I traversed high traffic areas.
I encountered a number of other residents. One engaged me to the extent of requesting a copy of the survey. Non were doing anything that triggered any of the categories. (debatably, the woman who asked for the survey could have triggered ‘educational content’, but that seemed an obvious experimental effect).
My data seems at variance with the general tone of the discussion – that SL is a vast sex shop. Rather it seems that people feel free to express sexual identity on SL, as a large part of the self expression SL affords.
It’s interesting that the one explicit invitation to sexual activity was self policing – they presented a bland facade at ground level with a invitation to visit a sex parlor (presumably in a skybox).
I also note the complete absence of scores caused by adult advertisements. I scored vendors twice when I actually landed in the stores, and both of those were questionable edge cases – fetish boots and a single vendor of gags in one case, and nonsexual display of skins in another.
I encountered, suprisingly, no adult ads from ad farms (I did not score for advertising.)
Were I to repeat the experiment I might choose to also score commercial activity, advertising, and abandoned/apparently unused land. I would definitely conduct traverses that included old and new areas.
![Four in a Row [Explored]](http://static.flickr.com/7018/6782703137_25b3b3b811_t.jpg "Four in a Row [Explored]")
