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Second Life Shuts Down Gambling
Tech.Luver sends us to The Inquirer, which notes the banning of all gambling in Second Life. Here is the Linden Labs blog post about the change in policy, which is, to say the least, not popular. From the article: "[T]he large chunk of users that enjoyed using in-world casinos and betting Linden Dollars on events both inside and outside the game world will now have nothing left to do. Perhaps more to the point for Linden, the move will cut off the revenues earned from those owning Casino-style islands in the game, the owners of which are some of the top contributors to the Linden coffers through currency fees and land rental."
That cuts the attractions of SL by 50%...When the "Think of the Children" crowd gets 'em to ban sex, Second Life will become officially pointless.
On the one hand, I get it. Since the Linden actually has a conversion rate with "real" money, the gambling is gambling for "real" money and there are all kinds of laws about that, including last years
Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which is directed at the companies that host gambling sites, rather than the players, making it much easier to enforce. I can't see Linden bucking that, though a sneaky gambling "underground" would be awesome, far far cooler than actual legal gambling.
On the other hand, what a bunch of nanny-state crap.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Where we will allow gambling and all other vices not available in Second Life.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Well at least they can still buy and sell genitals. If LL ever shut that down... that would be a low blow.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Since this paticular MMO happens to involve large amounts of real money.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
I bet $100 that people will continue to gamble anyways, anyone want to bet against?
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
1) Move to country with no Internet gambling laws 2) Start an online game like Second Life, but with gambling allowed 3) Profit! Seriously, I think the only reason the government banned online gambling was because they couldn't effectively tax it.
Protesting in Second Life about stupid laws passed by Congress is as useful as protesting in Australia about stupid laws passed by Congress. It's possible (if unlikely) that other people will notice you and report it to someone whose opinion matters, but you can't blame Linden Labs for following the law any more than you could blame Australia's Prime Minister for being unable to change U.S. policy.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Other MMOs have (player-run) casinos, because they don't support exchange between their virtual currencies and real-world cash. Now, here's a couple questions.
If Linden introduced a "play money" currency in the game that wasn't officially convertible to cash, but allowed players to decide to accept it for whatever they wanted (including in-game cash), would that also be illegal in the US?
Sony Online games are divided into two, with a minority of servers for games like EQ2 allowing real-money transactions and the majority disallowing it. Is gambling legal on the majority of those servers, but illegal in the minority?
This really does push the question of how virtual these virtual worlds really are.
To summarize my recent rambling journal post on the subject, there are many SL residents (including myself) who appreciate this move. The casinos really tended to trash the sims in which they set up shop, in both functional and aesthetic ways.
It's worth noting that online gambling has been illegal in the US for a while now, and it's something of a surprise that Linden let things continue for so long.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Anyone remember Friendster? It was MySpace before MySpace existed. Then the founder tried to intrusively control how people related to each other. Result?: Friendster died, and MySpace, amongst a host of impersonators, but one that wasn't so intrusive (at least socially, nevermind MySpace's instrusive assault on your sense of web aesthetics) catapulted into popularity. Read all about it in detail.
So if I were a betting man (no pun intended), I would abandon Second Life now, and look into the most promising of Second Life's impersonators that doesn't intrude on your freedoms like Second Life.
People do not like unnecessary intrusions on their freedoms, in real life or on the Internet. However, unlike real life, people can vote with their feet a lot more effectively on the Internet, and simply leave and encamp somewhere else, en masse. Carpe Diem, Website investors.
The promise of Second Life, if there is any at all, is that it would allow you to do things you can't do in real life. So what does Second Life do? Make it more just like real life, and kill off what would make Second Life attractive to anyone who would want to go there in the first place, and/ or stay there. (Smacks forehead.)
In Second Life's defense, perhaps they are under political pressure to abandon online gambling, which would make sense owing to being based in the USA and the USA's current retarded attitude towards online gambling.
Well then relocate your servers to Antigua.
Or make a poor policy choice, piss off your users, and wither and die.
Study the Friendster warning example carefully, dear Second Life executives.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So if logic follows regarding gambling, Linden $ and real world money in Second Life, would virtual sex in Second Life for Linden $ be prostitution?
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
Prohibitions against gambling work just as well as prohibitions against alcohol and other mind-altering substances. i.e. not at all, in either the real world or a virtual one. It's a losing battle, and Linden Labs will eventually lose this one.
I'd suspect that Linden is under some pressure from some government somewhere, and that's the real reason they're doing this.
There will always be people willing to trade their hard-earned Linden dollars for the thrill of possibly winning a lot more from someone else, no matter how long the odds. Those people will now take their money elsewhere, to the detriment of Linden Labs and all the denizens of Second Life.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Blizzard no longer allows you to roll for epic drops in WoW... duel flags are immediately set for all players clicking "need"
More music, fewer hits
I'm pretty sure it has less to do with 'sin regulation' and more to do with tax evasion and money laundering. Governments have proven time and again that 'sin taxes' are a viable source of income.
No, because "virtual sex" isn't even close to the real thing whereas "virtual gambling" is actually real gambling.
It's a benign one, but in the end, you have no rights. They can do anything they want to you without notice at any time and your only option is to stop participating.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
From the article:
"The large chunk of users that enjoyed using in-world casinos and betting Linden Dollars on events both inside and outside the game world will now have nothing left to do."
This assumes that those users are ONLY into casinos. There is plenty left to do other than gambling. Yes, obviously some people will pack up and go away, but others will simply find new ways to amuse themselves in-world. After all, lots of these same people have significant emotional investment in their in-world persona's and dumping them at the first obstacle will be unlikely.
Also, I'd bet that underground gambling rings spring up, if they haven't already. God knows prohibition didn't stop drinking, and this won't stop gambling.
http://www.freecitizen.com/
I never said that the PM was subject to U.S. policy, but he's certainly affected by U.S. policy. For instance, gambling operations in the U.K. catering to U.S. customers have been driven out of business by U.S. law, just like the gambling in Second Life has been driven out of business by the very same law. Countries are interconnected through trade, diplomacy and tourism, so policy in one country can have serious effects on another.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
It's clear that all gambling does is facilitates terrorist organizations and funds their causes. Every terrorist I know spends time on fulltilt.com taking money away from hardworking people of the world in order to build the BOMB. Now we should be vigilant to fight not only real, but also virtual terrorism.
Having sex with a puppy in SL doesn't feel, look, or smell like having sex with a puppy in real life.
Hey come on! Leave my sex life out of this! Geez, I'm not speculating about sex with rodents am I?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Also, another mistake in the article is that all gambling is banned.
In fact, only specific types of wagering is banned.
From the Blog:
It is a violation of this policy to wager in games in the Second Life (R) environment operated on Linden Lab servers if such games:
(1) (a) rely on chance or random number generation to determine a winner, OR (b) rely on the outcome of real-life organized sporting events,
AND
(2) provide a payout in
(a) Linden Dollars, OR
(b) any real-world currency or thing of value.
I don't bring this up to split hairs, only to point out that personal contests seem to still be allowed. It seems reasonable, based upon the above, that one could wager on games where the participants compete directly with each other, such as races, tic-tac-toe and so on.
Also, the ban seems to be specific to sporting events, wagers on other events still seem acceptable (elections, the Dow Jones, weather patterns, etc.)
I'm not a lawyer, and stories of Linden Labs capricious application of their rules exist, and I'm not even sure Linden Labs has to actually be accountable to any legal authority about how it administers its TOS, so in the end you have to wager at your own risk.
http://www.freecitizen.com/
Hey Slashdotters, let's stop applauding Second Life and move on. They arn't the first "real life" simulator, they claim to be the biggest but almost anyone who actually has tried to market a business in Second Life has come to the same conclusion, the numbers that Linden posts (the millions of subscribers) are vastly inflated. The consensus is there's around 40 thousand active users and with this move I'm guessing that might drop to 30 thousand.
This is just a PR move by Second life to get more attention but instead we should just move on to other stuff. We moved from too many WoW stories to too many Second Life stories, and now we just seem to be stagnating, anyone have an idea for the next "big thing"?
When you're in a long-distance relationship, having shared fantasies about sex and closeness can make the longing and yearning a lot easier.
You and your partner need to have strong imaginations, though. It's amazing what well written words can do to arouse and stimulate the mind... and other places on the body too.
Yes, it's not as good as real sex. But for folks who are far from those they really love, it can come close in an emotional way.
Well, that explains all the gambling and sex ;)
If you are pretending to do the things you would never do, are you still doing them?
:)
No, you're doing safe, legal alternatives to them. Which is a significant advantage over the real thing.
Me, I'd rather *do* the things I'd never do.
Have you looked at a list of popular internet fetishes lately? They include rape, torture, suicide and worse. Me, I'd rather not *be* a monster, even if pretending to be one every now and then is relaxing.
And that's without touching on fantasies that are physically impossible to do in real life -- vampirism, zero gee, vore, etc, all of which can be found in Second Life. Internet sex is all about the fantastical nature of it. Making it real would make the people who enjoy the fantasy run away screaming.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Two comments:
1. Independent of any legal issues, SL players have no way of verifying that the operations of a "casino" are legitimate. I can't imagine why anyone would give in-game currency to a "slot machine" that has almost certainly been programmed to make sure that the house always wins. From this standpoint, banning such activities isn't necessarily a bad thing. (Indeed, games like World of Warcraft that have banned "casinos" have done so because players tend to spam to advertise games which are so stacked against their customers to count as scams, not because they felt that gambling for in-game currency violated federal law.)
2. Notably, the blog post also declares that there will be NO REIMBURSEMENT for second life "property" removed in order to enforce this policy, much less for devaluation of in-game "land" that used to host a high-traffic casino. I'm half curious whether we're going to see any lawsuits over this, and, in the longer term, whether this will affect peoples' willingness to purchase virtual assets from Linden Labs. I find it remarkable that anyone would willingly purchase "property" that can be rendered valueless at the discretion of the service providers under the terms of service. (Indeed, a court has already ruled against the TOS' arbitration clauses, arguing that they were too one-sided to be enforcible, so perhaps there is an open door to raise just such a challenge here.)
I was an operator (with two partners) of a nightclub in SL until a few days ago. We shut down because we just didn't have enough time to put into it, but we were marginally profitable even though we never had gambling of any kind. We decided not to have gambling for two main reasons, first, we considered it unethical, and second, it is obviously illegal being that we are all based in the US. We sold our land to another resident who will be putting in his own nightclub, and I hope for his sake that gambling wasn't part of his business plan. I guess we sold the land at the right time, I expect land prices to take a dive with all the casino operators selling.
I guess I'm not really sad to see gambling go, but I'd like to see the law changed because it clearly is all about patronage for the big brick and mortar casino interests. Regardless, it is the law and Linden Labs has to obey it if they want to remain in business. Like it or not, that's a fact.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."