Terje Jansen was a vital part of the small but dedicated Sansar community, known for his welcoming friendliness, his story-telling, and his Norwegian accent. He loved Sansar so much that he became a member of the new Sansar team, and his presence will be sorely missed by many.
There will be a number of events taking place in Sansar this week, an open mic chat on Monday, March 13th for those who knew Terje, plus a couple of memorials taking place on Saturday, March 18th. Please check the Sansar events listing for details on the times and locations of these and many other events.
If you visit the Sansar homepage (and you’re not already signed in with your Sansar account), you will see a brand new, revamped homepage for the five-year-old social VR project:
One noticeable change is the “18+” logo prominently displayed, something which I do not remember seeing before. Wasn’t the age limit formerly 13+? I can’t recall, but I was pretty sure that teenagers were allowed onto Sansar, back in the days when naked base humanoid avatars were forbidden (you had to have baked-on underwear, or your avatar would be removed from the Sansar store).
So, it would appear that the new owners of Sansar are going to allow adult content. This would probably give them an advantage, in that few other social VR platforms currently allow adult content. Let me disgress by explaining how Second Life (Sansar’s predecessor in many ways) handles adult content.
BACKGROUNDER: In Second Life, they have a system where a sim (the basic parcel of virtual land) has one of three ratings:
General: “A region designated General is not allowed to advertise or make available content or activity that is sexually explicit, violent, or depicts nudity. Sexually-oriented objects such as “sex beds” or poseballs may not be located or sold in General regions.”
Moderate: “Second Life’s Moderate designation accommodates most of the non-adult activities common in Second Life. Dance clubs, bars, stores and malls, galleries, music venues, beaches, parks, and other spaces for socializing, creating, and learning all support a Moderate designation so long as they do not host publicly promoted adult activities or content and do not use adult search tags.”
Adult: “The Adult designation applies to Second Life regions that host, conduct, or display content that is sexually explicit, intensely violent, or depicts illicit drug use.”
While generally, Second Life is meant for people age 18 and up, in special cases, those age 13-17 can get in. Those 16 and 17 years old are restricted to sims rated General, while those age 13-15 “can access Second Life through an affiliated organization and will be restricted to the private estate of that organization.” Also, for those 13-15, older SL users won’t be able to access these private estates, except for pre-approved adults affiliated with the organization (e.g. teachers). This is intended to create a safe space for young teens, separate from adult areas.
So, it will be interesting to see whether Sansar will hold to a firm 18+ age rating, as I suspect, or if (like Second Life) they will set up some sort of system to gate-keep adult content, thereby allowing those users under the age of 18 some limited access.
Back in 2019, I wrote an entire editorial about adult content and social VR, which you can read here. Much of what I wrote then still applies today, particularly that adult content can be a double-edged sword! However, if managed properly, it can add life ( and longevity) to a metaverse platform. Whether you like it or not, sex sells!
What do you think? Please sound off in the comments, or join us in the RyanSchultz.com Discord, where over 700 people representing various social VR platforms (and flatscreen virtual worlds, too!) meet to discuss, debate, and argue about the ever-evolving metaverse and the companies building it. More information here.
UPDATE Oct. 5th, 2022: I have been informed by a Sansar staff member:
Just a small clarification, we are adult only but without NSFW content, so it’s still safe for [a] professional or academic setting.
So it would appear that I was wrong in assuming that Sansar will permit adult content. I stand corrected! The staff member, EvoAv, goes on to tell me:
A lot of other things fall under [the] 18+ category, and mixing adult users with teenagers/kids has potential issues of its own. Our users have been predominantly adults throughout Sansar’s history, so we do not see this as a limitation, but more of a safeguard that will allow us to introduce content geared towards adults, just not NSFW, or at least give us the option to change our minds later if we want to allow NSFW content with some moderation in the future.
I struggle with serious insomnia, which seems to be getting worse the longer the pandemic drags on (and no, the pandemic is NOT over). After another sleepless night, I gave up this morning, called in sick, and I am now sitting in from of The Beast, doing what I often do when I am chasing the Sandman in vain: hanging out in Second Life. (Hey, some people play solitaire. Others read or crochet. You do you, boo, and I’ll do me.)
I often like to visit popular clubs to listen to the music stream (sometimes I just park my avatar, turn up the sound, and use it as a radio while I work on something else). I often use a handy free HUD called What Is She Wearing? to inspect what an impeccably-dressed nearby avatar is wearing; in fact, many of my impulse purchases for both my male and female avatars were often something which I first spotted on somebody else on the other side of the virtual room!
Club 511, a very popular adult jazz club in Second Life
Some people are chatting (either in local chat or privately among themselves), others are dancing, still others are just doing a stand-and-model, showing off their avatar style. (Club 511 has a strict no-non-human avatars rule, so no furries, sadly! The Second Life furry community tends to hang out in their own clubs and bars.)
Which brings me in an meandering, roundabout way to the topic of this editorial: community. Clubs in Second Life come and go, and popular hotspots like Club 511 rise and fall in popularity with alarming regularity, but the thing that they all have in common is community. None of these places work without the avatars!
One of the reasons for VRChat’s success to date is that you can pretty much guarantee that, when you log in, you will find places where you can meet and talk with other avatars. Over time and through word of mouth, you hear about virtual clubs and regularly-scheduled events, you start to schedule them into your calendar, et voilà—you’ve become part of a community, and made new friends or acquaintances. (I vividly remember how much fun the Endgame talk shows were, while they lasted! Again, such popular events tend to come and go over time.)
I stood in the slanted rays of virtual sunlight leaving long shadows on the red floor of the central plaza, among the park benches, and chatted with friends I had made several years before, and even met a few new people. It was as if I never left! I have been admittedly rather absent from Sansar these past couple of years, as the platform changed corporate hands and struggled at times, but it is showing renewed life under the leadership of its new CEO, Chance Richie.
The point that I am trying to make is this: even in a social VR platform that might only still have a low number of concurrent users, like Sansar, there remains a hard-core, committed user base who have established friendships and working relationships. They might not be strong in numbers, but they are strong in a sense of community, and community is the reason that people keep coming back. I have seen this happen time and time again, in any variety of flatscreen virtual worlds and social VR platforms over the years. As long as the metaverse platform hangs around long enough (and Sansar just celebrated the 5th anniversary of its open public beta), a community will form—and if they’re lucky, in popular worlds like Second Life and VRChat, many varied and vibrant subcommunities, too!
And I have noticed that the relationships we make in virtual worlds and social virtual reality tend to carry over, not only in real life, but onto other metaverse platforms, too. For example, I have made a point of buying avatar fashion or virtual home and garden decor in Second Life from content creators whom I first got to know personally during the Sansar alpha test period. And many of the people who decided to leave less-successful or failed worlds have also tended to bring their friends and business partners to build and enrich many other metaverse platforms over the years! The seeds first planted in Active Worlds (now 27 years old!) and Second Life (which just turned 19) have borne fruit in many newer metaverse platforms!
So how about, instead of using the standard corporate yardstick of success, and focusing on the purely mercantile aspects of the metaverse, we talk about the communities that they foster, and the valuable relationships that we make because of these worlds?
Let me give you a recent example. The tech industry newsletter called The Information recently published an article titled The Metaverse Real Estate Boom Turns into a Bust. Now, you and I cannot read the full text of that article unless you shell out US$399 a year to subscribe to The Information†, but what they did freely share with us poors the first few sentences of their report, plus a couple of rather interesting graphs:
The metaverse is in the midst of a real estate meltdown. Sales volumes and average prices for virtual land have plunged this year, part of a broader slide in crypto and non-fungible token prices.
Soaring interest in virtual property spawned an industry that mirrors traditional commercial real estate—buyers develop land by adding virtual storefronts, and then sell or rent it to companies looking to set up shop as a marketing strategy or to sell things like clothing for online avatars. Investors who bought at the peak are now sitting on land that has tumbled in value. Meanwhile the real-world economic downturn could weigh on brands’ appetite for spending on building out their metaverse presence.
I notice that, in a note underneath the charts, it says, in fine print: “Includes data from The Sandbox, Decentraland, Voxels (formerly known as Cryptovoxels), NFT Worlds, Somnium Space, and Superworld“. I was actually quite bemused at the inclusion of Superworld, as it is among those buy-a-virtual-piece-of-Earth NFT schemes which provoked a rather cranky editorial from this metaverse blogger! (At least Decentraland, Voxels, and Somnium Space have already launched an actual product, while The Sandbox, the scene of some frantic bidding for NFT-based real estate during the bull market, has the bad timing to be stuck in alpha testing during this ongoing crypto winter. And NFT Worlds just had the rug pulled out from under them by Microsoft and Minecraft.)
Yes, obviously, these platforms need to have some level of economic success in order to stick around and for community to have a chance to take hold; that’s a given. But to ignore and/or mock a platform like Second Life or VRChat for not attracting or keeping big-name corporations or “brands” is missing the point. Metaverse success can also be measured by the strength and endurance of the communities and relationships they foster, things which you cannot assign a dollar value to.
So get out there, explore the various metaverse platforms out there, and see what appeals to you. Don’t let the current gloom and doom surrounding the blockchain-based metaverse platforms put you off the entire metaverse marketplace; there’s a lot more out there than the recent crop of NFT-based platforms. There’s so much going on out there!
So go and find your bliss, and find your community. You might just surprise yourself, and make a few friends along the way. Or just hear some good jazz 😉
OK, now that I have vented, this blogger is going to try and get some much-needed sleep…
†By the way, if you do happen to have a subscription to The Information, I’d dearly love to read that article! 😉
Definition: Handfasting is an ancient Celtic ritual in which the hands are tied together to symbolize the binding of two lives. While it is most often included in Wiccan or Pagan ceremonies, it has become more mainstream and pops up in both religious and secular vows and readings.
One certain thing that I have learned in writing the RyanSchultz.com blog over these past five years is this: no matter what the metaverse platform, and no matter how obscure or popular it might be, there is always a committed community of die-hard fans associated with it! And the small but active fanbase of the social VR platform Sansar (built by Linden Lab and since sold to Wookey) is the perfect example of that truth. Despite the almost total absence of marketing by Wookey, the userbase continues to create worlds, meet up, and hold various events. It’s heartwarming.
Did you know?I actually started the RyanSchultz.com blog on July 31st, 2017, as the Sansar Newsblog, devoted entirely to reporting on news and events in Linden Lab’s Sansar (I changed the name in 2018). It’s only after about a year and a half of blogging about Sansar that I began to expand my coverage to include all social VR, virtual worlds, and metaverse platforms. I still have a soft spot in my heart for Sansar and its community.
Did you also know? Even within the relatively small user community of Sansar, since its launch in 2017, there have been at least five couples who first met up in Sansar and then connected in real life (and in some cases, even got married!). Actually, it might be six by now…I have lost track! We learned this lesson back in the days of Second Life; the metaverse brings couples together. ❤️
Recently, Sansar ambassador Bluebell (whom I know well from my earliest days in Sansar, and who is a tireless promoter of the platform) and her beau Moggz held a handfasting ceremony on March 3rd, 2022, attended by all their friends who, in real life, were scattered all across the globe. When I asked about having a handfasting instead of a marriage ceremony, Bluebell told me, “Yes, we prefer the old rituals.”
Bluebell was kind enough to share some pictures with me which were taken at the event (unfortunately, I could not be there). Please click on each thumbnail picture in this gallery to see it in a larger size:
Photos provided by Bluebell, Wolfen Howeller, and Mijeka Munro; thank you!
