Why Second Life Cannot Be Taken Seriously

I read this on BoingBoing yesterday:
After France’s extreme right, anti-immigrant Front National opened an official HQ in Second Life, it was swarmed protests– which quickly devolved into open war conducted with surreal weapons…
machine guns, sirens, police cars, “rez cages” (which can trap an unsuspecting avatar), explosions, and flickering holograms of marijuana leaves and kids’ TV characters

Wow, that’s just great. Second Life is trying to be people’s, well, Second Life, and if we needed more proof that it will never work as a second world for regular people, this is it. There’s no accountability in these virtual worlds, worse than in chat rooms or message boards. Incidents like this and the “flying penis” incident, just prove to me that as long as people can interrupt public forums without fear of consequence, then the Second Life world can never offer significant real-world value beyond that of entertainment.
You can’t hold […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg