Go check out the new Second Age blog over at http://www.greydawning.net/tsa ! It’s a new host, which means that I now have full control over the blog, so it will (in theory) be a lot better! Right. Yeah. >.>

It’s no secret to anyone in Second Life that the Teen Grid exists- it crops up on the forums weekly if not daily, and references can be heard- ‘You’re such a teen’ is often said as a complaint about someones maturity level. Some, maybe many, think that the Teen Grid should never have been created in the first place; “Too much of a liability!” or “They’ll ruin the game!” are used as excuses for blatant agism. But one inescapable fact of life is that people get older, and as the teens who play Second Life get older, they will eventually transfer from their small, hidden, safe grid into the wide open world that is the Main Grid of Second Life.

A week and a half ago, I watched eagerly as my 19 year old sister, home on vacation from college, finally agreed to create a Second Life account. She downloaded the client onto her aging white laptop, connected to the wireless access point at our home, and double clicked on the green hand icon that is so familiar to me, and yet completely new to her. I helped her change the basic settings, and then sat back to observe her progress, ready to offer help if she asked for it. I also wanted to see first hand what I’d be joining in a little under three quarters of a year.

As soon as the screen cleared to show what seemed to be identical to my distant memories of the Orientation Island, I let out a sigh of relief- at least some things stay the same, no matter what else changes. There were more people, sure, but this was just as the wave of new signups from unlimited registrations hit. (The lack of identification was what finally allowed me to convince my sister to play, in fact.)

I wasn’t too concerned as my sister travelled through the island, comandeering one of my spare mice to finish her appearance and some of the tests. (You all remember placing the beach ball on the table, I assume?) My first real indication that this was nothing like what I knew was when she came to the temple, and was faced by a choice- to go to the mainland of Second Life or to stay on Help Island. She turned to me, and asked where she should go. Puzzled that a choice was even there, I shrugged and said “May as well go the Help Island, you might learn some more there.” In fact, she had caught on extremely quickly, and probably didn’t need to go at all, but I was curious as to what this strange place was. As soon as she linked in, she was confronted by a greeter, and welcomed. The adult, so different from my experiences, took her on a short tour, introducing her to the Sandbox and giving her a basic Multigadget. At the sandbox, my sister was in for a bit of a surprise- midway in building a bracelet with my help, a large sign finished rezzing, displaying a half-naked avatar with ‘CENSORED’ signs over its private regions, and a large ‘NO!’ above it. My sister, shy by nature, blushed furiously and looked at me. “Hey, I’ve watched you play, I thought they didn’t allow that sort of stuff?” she asked in an accusing tone of voice- obviously, this was all my fault. I explained that this was the adult grid, and as such had ‘Mature’ regions. She roleld her eyes and continued on.

While she was discovering that Second Life had a darker side (albeit in a much lessened form than she might experience elsewhere) I was examining the people, the architecture, the communications. Some of it left me unsurprised- I realized that I’d seen a lot of this before in screenshots. Some of it- what people were saying, left me, in a way, speechless. I’d always assumed that when adults talked down about the teen grid, it was because they’d observed the way most teens act on the internet, and that it was different from the way adults acted. Wow, was I ever wrong. It looked like my theory about whether teens or adults were more mature was holding water, even as the Teen Grid sinks deeper in its standards of morality and communication. I saw everything I’ve come to hate about the internet, from people wearing genitalia to the worst forms of netspeak- and this was a PG region with Mentors and Lindens all around!

Soon enough my sister had explored the island, and headed back to one of the temples in order to link into the mainland. By happy chance her home point was set in a PG sim near Lordfly’s Art Museum, and I directed her over to it in excitement.

“Hey, see? Not everything is bad, this stuff is all pretty cool!”
She pointed at one of the objects on screen, a gray geometric plane that had been twisted, made of straight primitives set at slightly different angles. “Yeah, that one’s pretty cool,” she said “I wonder who made it?” I showed her how with a grin- she might be catching on fast, but there were still some things that I could teach her. We fired off an IM to the offline creator, and I asked her to run a search for ‘Hamlet’. One result, great, that meant I didn’t have to remember his last name. She IMed him, and, him being online, he responded in kind. She talked with him for a bit about the apparent ageism of the MG, and, with my urging, allowed me to type a few sentences to him. “Hey Aesop, look away before Philip catches you!” he ended with a laugh, directing my sister to the A.Life sim,

I left her there, so that she could explore on her own, while I logged in on my own computer and wandered around Teen SL, looking at the greats and the embarrassments, and spending a lot of time in the reserved sim of Behemoth, a great place for quiet introspection. Whenever I need to think deep thoughts, I always ask ‘Mana’, a imaginary person that shares my thoughtspace when I need him to.
Mana: “So, what did you see, Aesop?”
Aesop: “I saw beauty, and I saw the worst of it.”
Mana: “And what do you see here?”
Aesop: “I see emptiness, and I see potential, and I see beauty and sadness and darkness.”

Our conversation continued on for some time, as I looked over the public SL forums at sluniverse.com, and asked Refugees ‘What was different?’. I fired off a couple of emails to Lindens and Mentors from both grids, and I watched my sister, asking her what she thought. She’s watched me a number of times, so she was able to point some things out that I hadn’t noticed myself.

One thought, however, remained clear in my head the whole way through. “We’re not that different, on the whole.” We have 10,000 residents to the Main Grid’s 300,000. Our concurrent connectivity is less than 500 at peak hours, while the MG recently peaked at nearly 8,000. Our content creators, however, are just as skilled, from professional architects like Aesop Thatch, Amou Debs, Dolus Naumova and Paulie Cinquetti, to furniture guru Brooke Barmy and scripters Ryan Dayton and Alpha Zaius, to land baron Mercury Metropolitan. The clothing designers Spunky Pinkdot and Cursed Designs’ Wicked Loudon. Our core group might be smaller, but they certainly exist despite that. And they’re just as good as anything the MG has to offer.

In the next series of articles, I’ll be talking about the major players in Teen Second Life, starting with the Islanders and finishing up with the Architects. Stay tuned to secondage.blogsome.com for updates.