Griefing, Harshing, Blurring --Sim going down...

I was in Second Life last night, wasting time, really. But having fun doing it. I was in Virtual Festival, watching the amazing costumes and dancers, and the newbies standing around gob-smacked having their first Second Life Sim experience. When suddenly this guy with green eyes and hands and a last name that is some kind of mnemonic for "demon" is wearing a house. It's a beach house on pylons, and he's wearing it on it's side. Believe me, it's huge and ugly and takes up most of the dance floor. Then the IMs start.

"Take off the house, man."

"Give me $5 and I will."

For a moment, I seriously considered it. Then someone asks green hair demon boy how old he is, and he says "11 yrs".

"Right, and you're a genius."

But I believed it. This is kind of typical 11 year old behavior, after all.

Problem is, with this kind of harshing, you can't throw someone out of the sim, or retroactively ban them. There's no button that you can push to jettison the kid into space, assuming he even is a kid or a he. And Virtual Festival doesn't have any bouncers. No weapons are allowed in this Sim. You can't even push someone, er--an avatar. No one could convince Demon Green Hair to leave. He was thriving on the angy interaction anyway.

So what happened? They shut down the sim. That way they could ban him before it came back up again. Not quite a real social experiment, since you can't really do that in real life. Burning Man doesn't get shut down and restarted just because someone is wearing a house. But in real life or 1L as some call it (not, you might note--RL) you can get your butt carted off to jail. You can even get killed, something that wearing a house shouldn't warrant, but then again, it's just a game.... or is it.

The other day I was wondering where I put my long blue scarf. Then I realized, in real life, I don't own a long, blue scarf. This is a scarf my avatar in second life owns. How blurred will it get?