Some disturbing bits of news about the most popular online virtual world, Second Life, came across my desk this week and, though the news was truly disturbing, it was also insightful regarding the success of virtual worlds in cyberspace. The news? Sex is a major selling point in Second Life.

Okay, call me stupid ("sheltered" or "naïve" if you're polite). I have enough trouble with my first life; I've never played Second Life, even though it's technically free. My favorite game is still chess; Wei Ch'i comes a close second. If (between teaching, writing, having a family, etc.) I were to spend much time in online gaming it would probably be a fantasy game like The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. The romantic in me is more attracted to slaying dragons and fighting evil...

The news about second life was actually a collection of two or three tidbits that changed my perception of the game somewhat. First was a report on how "age play" groups in Second Life were growing at a rate of about 1% per week. The largest group of these players (almost half) were playing out a lolita/sugar daddy sort of fantasy. Plenty of other variations exist.

There was also a piece by sarfunnisha about a lawsuit over copyright infringement in Second Life. The alleged infringement had to do with a Second Life player who managed to clone a software package that makes Second Life characters more physically realistic and adds a list of animated sexual activities to the character's online abilities. This for a mere $45.

As I surfed blogs and news about Second Life, the most disturbing insight came from Blogging Stocks, which ran a post back in May about how the people at Linden Labs (which runs Second Life) had purged the game of players who were engaging in cyber-pedophilia. While Linden Labs may have closed the accounts of those players and cashed them out (or just thrown them out), it has evidently been difficult to keep them from re-entering the realm of Second Life. Several blog sources say that Second Life still has plenty of players who created characters intended to seem like children or young teens and then use those "underage" characters to offer sexual services.

By my count there are at least six online gaming companies in China working to develop and market virtual worlds modeled after Second Life. Shanda and HiPiHi get mentioned most often. UOneNet and Frenzoo are smaller, but are both working to get a piece of China's virtual world market, as is Yilu. And the City of Beijing has partnered with Swedish firm Entropia to develop a virtual world.

My question is this: how will China cope with the kind of virtual world Second Life creates in the West? I don't see the Government of China tolerating players who pretend to be fourteen and work for a brothel or an escort service. Will the government police China's competing virtual worlds itself? Or will it require the operators of each virtual world to do its own policing? The first choice could make those Sino-CyberWorlds much less appealing in reality than they are on the current drawing board. The second option could create large manpower costs for the operating companies.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe virtual worlds will result in a loosening of China's moral restraints. Life may imitate art. Bourgeois decadence may get tolerated in cyberspace and eventually move from the virtual worlds to more official tolerance in real life China.

I'll leave you with this ironic slice of news. Police in Belgium's Federal Computer Crime Unit have said they plan to patrol Second Life in an effort to determine whether a crime was committed as part of an incident in which a Belgian player in Second Life was "raped" in the game. In a game where you pay real money to buy things and where money you make in the game can be converted back into real money to pay your electric bill or your car loan, separating reality from fiction (or whatever you want to call the stuff that happens in the game) gets a little harder every single day.

With all the money that is out there chasing the huge profit potential that exists in Chinese cyberspace, it will be interesting to see how virtual worlds eventually turn out in a place with the inhibitions of China...