Open Life: A New World

Me and Maz in the Second Life alternative, Open Life

After our Discussion yesterday about the changes coming to Second Life's adult content, Maz and I went on the hunt for alternative worlds. After all, there is the very real and scary possibility that adult content is going to be eradicated in Second Life, at least as much as the Lindens can eradicate it. I said to Maz, "Why would the Lindens go to all the trouble of moving adult content to one continent if they were just going to get rid of it?". To which he replied, "To gather it all up. Once its all together they can just flick one switch and have it be gone." Now, I don't want to fearmonger, but we all know what happened with gambling in Second Life; it was just simply gone one day. It is not inconceiveable that it could happen with adult content too. Plus Maz has been in various virtual worlds for years and has seen things like this happen before, so it really does have me concerned that we could lose it all.

So that was the state of mind I was in when we went looking for SL alternatives last night, and let me tell you, it's not pretty. We came across Open Life, which does look exactly like Second Life, including the lovely introductory 'ruth' characters, however there is virtually no content there as of yet, and very few people. The search engine is not even active, so when you land in world you cannot look for places to go. The sims I visited seemed extremely laggy, even without much on them, probably due to substandard servers. However, with few people invested in it as of yet, it is understandable. This is Second Life circa 2003.

There are some appealing aspects. One is the familiarity. The viewer has all the buttons and options you are used to seeing, even if some of them don't work. Also, you can buy a sim for 145 us dollars and access 45000 prims. Very appealing idea, but of course until there are content and people, as well as better servers, very few will want to invest any energy or money in to being there.

That all being said, it is good to know there are options. I made my own little Evangeline avatar, just in case. If adult content is abolished in Second Life, many of us will be moving on, but it won't be enough to stop me or Dominion. We just might not be so beautiful to look at for a while.