Second Life Shuts Down Gambling 263
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."
1 down... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:1 down... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually a twofer for the senators, they get to throw a bone to their religious right and nanystate voters and they get to support the interests of their entrenched corporate gambling masters.
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Can't we give congress more vacations? Maybe if they were in session less they'd make fewer interferances into the lives of the common citizen. In the early years of the US, didn't congress only meet for a few weeks out of the year?
Congress makes laws. (Score:2)
Over time, all the easy laws are created. Which doesn't leave much for Congress to make laws about.
What we need to do is to have all laws expire after 12 or 16 years (or whatever) so Congress can spend their time voting to pass old laws again.
That way your Congress Critters could justify their salaries AND we'd have a chance of getting rid of stupid, bad laws.
On the downside, once you finally got a law passed despite all the corporate
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The problem is as enough of these laws build up, the representatives start repassing them as big clumps.
I would like to see laws that last forever require a 90% majority. Laws that last a lifetime (50 years) would require a 66% majority. A 51% majority could only pass laws that would last 8 years.
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Stuff like that actually happens right now when some of these temporary laws expi
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From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
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But anyway, isn't it still possible to gamble online in the US? I see ads for, I think, 888.com all the time, or used to. How can that be legal but not this?
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
Yes, such as tax law. As I've argued before [slashdot.org], there are serious consequencs to the convertibility of online game currencies. If it can qualify for gambling laws, it can qualify for ingame taxation.
I also
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having "sex" in SecondLife, or any other game, is already pointless. That you would even call it sex, and not at least "sex," is very sad. You do understand the point of sex is, well, the physical touch, and the bonding from the intimacy? Neither of which is remotely possible, err, remotely. Rather, neither of which is remotely possible in a game.
Wake me when it looks at all re
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Anyway, I used too many "air quotes" in that post already, without adding more. If someone is confused enough about the nature of SL to think that they can have actual sex, I don't feel any requirement to enlighten them.
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Internet sex is all about the fantasy. The point of it is doing things you would never do, whether that be new partners, positions, or species. It might be as timid as a housewife who would never cheat in RL experiencing a fake affair, or it might be as extreme as snuff/vore/rape play. Either way, it's about experiences one would never and should never pursue in real life. Making it more 'realistic' -- as in better graphics -- would be nice, but making it real would *ruin* the concept.
You don't pay hookers in real life to have sex with you, you pay them to go away afterwards. You don't pay hookers over the internet to have sex with you, you pay them to be imaginary and stay that way.
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Hey come on! Leave my sex life out of this! Geez, I'm not speculating about sex with rodents am I?
Re:do what you won't do (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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I would simply say that the only reason for sex is to procreate, nothing more. The whole bonding due to physical intimacy or "consummating of a marriage" / chastity cliche are all based on man-made social 'rules' which differ depending on ones society and have nothing to do with it's actual purpose. Though, I do agree follow some of those social rules, doesn't change the point of sex.
Cheers,
Fozzy
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Wiki: Teledildonics [wikipedia.org]
So you see, there is sex on the internet after all!
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It's like a storm in a jar. I agree it's not fair to Linden Labs. But.
Sex in Second Life - isn't that already pointless. I've always wondered what kind of people hang into this game. It's all about gambling and 3D porn, it's pretty sad.
Looks like they will have to move offshore (Score:2)
Like Slysoft, which distributes some programs that were originally developed by a German/Swiss company but are no longer legal to sell in the EU(CD/DVD copy programs including CSS decryption).
Re:1 down... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about online gambling, not nanny states (Score:2)
With the ability to freely buy Linden dollars with real money and sell it back, there's essentially no difference between SL gambling and Casino gambling - just that in Casinos they call them poker chips. It's got nothing to do with morality, nanny states, etc.
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Here is a link to a virtual worlds site that's been following Germany's ongoing hissy over virtual child porn. [virtualworldlets.net] It's funny how we're such a conservative country compared to pretty much every country in europe, but our conservative government is really trying to push us in the direction of their weird morality laws.
I still think all this stuff devolves on parents to monitor and supervise their kids; in the absence of a reliable way to make sure underage people aren't involved, that's the only workable solution.
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Still at least we can take comfort from the fact that nobody would ever be stupid enough to do that in the real world.
Protest today in SL (Score:2)
"Protest the end of SL Casinos!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Clementina/188/122 [slurl.com] Protest Encroachment of
Real-Life US law into Second Life... 1 PM today... pplease IM all your
friends about this demonstration at governor Linden's Mansion.."
Totally pointless. (Score:5, Insightful)
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<silly voice> I would tax (Score:2)
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Think/read carefully before posting (Score:3, Insightful)
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Sorry to post another US policing the world comment but as it is related to online gambling it seems relevant.
OK time to start Third Life (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OK time to start Third Life (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, the entire economy of SL revolved around gambling, prostitution, and the sale of devices intended to aid gambling and prostitution. I'm having a hard time picturing how this is going to fall out. A flight to an lawless 'third life' might actually happen.
At least (Score:5, Funny)
I bet... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I bet... (Score:5, Funny)
Here's an idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why couldn't they effectively tax it? If the company running the game simply started reporting conversions from in-game currency to US dollars to the IRS as income it would do two things:
The same standards could be applie
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Not according to your own logic. All they have to do is abide within the gambling laws and make sure no one scams their way out of the taxes on winnings. This would put them on equal footing.
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Games of Luck? (Score:2)
Blackjack
Poker
Don't those games have some skill to them?
I recall that efforts have been made to reclassify poker as a game of skill and not a game of chance, to get around gambling laws.
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Blackjack is a game of luck that involves skill.
Poker is a game of skill that involves luck.
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With enough skill at blackjack, you can beat the casino.
With enough skill at poker, you can pay the casino and beat your friends.
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I play *with* my friends in a casino... big difference, if we're at the same table. Not necessarily colluding, but staying out of each other's way taking the fish's money.
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I play *with* my friends in a casino... big difference, if we're at the same table. Not necessarily colluding, but staying out of each other's way taking the fish's money.
The thing is, you don't have to intentionally collude. If you've been playing home games with your frields for months, you should all know each other's tells, habits, betting strategy, risk tolerance, etc - as I'm sure you do. You can't just forget that at a casino. So it's a huge advantage when a group of friends play together at a t
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Luck vs shady code (Score:2)
In legal casinos such as those in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, the human dealers and digital gambling machines are subject to stringent licensing and auditing procedures. However, in SL anyone with rudimentary building and scripting skills can build a gambling machine, and anyone who buys a piece of virtual land could put a casino on it. Since nobody was watching them, they could fiddle
Casinos in MMOs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This is a good thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's worth noting that online gambling has been illegal in the US for a while now, [slashdot.org] and it's something of a surprise that Linden let things continue for so long.
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At any rate, the issue isn't gambling itself, at least for me. I'm no gambler beyond the occasional lotto scratchcard, but I don't mind at all that it exists. Let people have their fun, I just won't be joining in. However, the implementation of same in
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:5, Funny)
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Gee, just like in real life.
Friendster all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org].
Well then relocate your servers to Antigua [wikipedia.org].
Or make a poor policy choice, piss off your users, and wither and die.
Study the Friendster warning example carefully, dear Second Life executives.
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I'm not sure you understand the current status of the US internet gambling law. Antigua is fighting the US in the WTO over the fact that the US's restrictions on online gambling are against WTO treaty, since they favor US gambling houses. However, currently the law is in force, and Antiguan casinos cannot wire winnings to the US.
Note that under current US law, restrictions on foreign casinos operating online are tighter than restrictions on domestic casinos oper
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Interesting (Score:2)
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I played WoW for a good long time. Still have an account, but I haven't signed in in a month or so. It always takes me a while, depending on how cool the game is, but I get dead tired of the damn eternal item grind.
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So is sex for money in Second Life prostitution? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:So is sex for money in Second Life prostitution (Score:5, Insightful)
Player run Casino-style games (Score:2)
Win Win Lose Lose (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Somehow I don't think (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Haven't they released the source code? (Score:2)
Jurisdiction in Virtual Worlds (Score:2)
Where does Jurisdiction lie in a virtual world who's only physical manifestation lies in a bunch of web servers spread all over the world?
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Real Life (Score:2)
Linden = Dictatorship (Score:4, Insightful)
Premis is not accurate (Score:2, Insightful)
"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 p
That's Ok... (Score:2)
Ban Gambling! Fight terrorism. (Score:2, Funny)
Gambling (Score:2)
I know I am stretching it but I am dreaming of a time where I don't see a Second Life article on Slashdot for a whole week.
Not ALL gambling banned (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Anything for some PR? (Score:3, Insightful)
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"?
Verification and Reimbursement (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Thoughts from a Former SL Nightclub Operator (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Bottom line is that governments have no business regulating compulsive behavior except when it damages others who didn't accept the risk, and when the compulsives damage themselves so consistently that there's a medical solution that needs stron
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For another, we're not talking about laws for enforcing complaints when damage has occurred, l
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and my homies agree, I really look good in black, fool!
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It's more accurate to say that.... (Score:2)
If you saw some of the SL blog threads you'd laugh. Avatars try to explain they're in Second Life in the first place to get AWAY from advertising and mass media. Their voices are then drowned out by all