Recently there have been numerous heated discussions/debates/arguments/flamefests on the subject of adult-owned islands on the teen grid, such as Global Kids, PacRimX, Schome Park, the Eye4You Alliance, and the Suffern Middle School. The general opinion on this appears to be split into three main groups, with a significant majority in the first; the “Adults are evil, ban them all!” group, the “I like them here because…” group, and the majority of the grid that thinks “I don’t care at all.” There have also been a few in-between stances, and the occasional idea to help sort this out. Firstly, the arguments for getting rid of all educational sims are something like this:

• Teens aren’t allowed on the Main Grid, so why should adults be allowed on the teen grid?
• I don’t play SL to learn
• They’re invading
• They ignore the rules set when they are allowed to enter the grid.

Arguments against:

• My life is enriched by the people on these islands
• They don’t affect you at all.

That fairly accurately covers what people have been saying. My thoughts are that these sims are definitely not having any negative impact at all - they can’t access our mainland, for that matter they can’t even leave their sims to visit other sims owned by approved adults (a rule I feel is pushing the limits of what is needed in the name of “safety”). Since all adults have to have background checks, there is no chance of a known pedophile, etc. getting onto one of these sims. In essence, if you don’t like them, don’t visit them.

However, islands do have a positive impact (sometimes). Global Kids has raised, or at least tried to raise, awareness about problems such as the treatment of the population of Darfur, run a successful summer camp, joined with UNICEF to run the World Fit for Children building contest (which I sort of helped out with, a little), and run numerous programmes in SL with their students (wrong word?) in real life. Less usefully, they seem to now be getting into gaming as well. I can’t see this turning out as anything other than a laggy mess that achieves little. You may have noticed that I have only focused on the Global Kids islands there. That’s because, in all honesty, all the other educational sims don’t seem to actually do anything. I have been told that the Eye4You Alliance is gearing up to do something (eventually), but right now it’s a mess. Schome Park is a mess, and last I checked a mess that broke LL’s stringent rules (specifically, it was open access without notecard spammers) (Update 22/03/07: the sim is now abiding by the rules, and snapshots indicate it has been cleaned up).

The private sims I can’t say anything for, although their blogs do imply they’re doing something. I have no way at all of gauging their success though, so no comment there. As a summary, I say that educational islands and approved adults should be allowed on their own sims. I also feel they should be allowed on eachother’s sims, which as far as I can tell they currently aren’t. The reasoning behind this is not evident to me. I do feel that they should be more transparent as to what they do, but requiring them to submit a form that has to be approved by the entire Teen Grid is just stupid - nobody cares enough to approve anything, and those that do care are usually against the islands.

As a sidenote, blogs suck at two-way communication, since you have to actually check back to see if your question/comment was responded too - not a problem for me, but it is for everyone else. (Or you could subscribe to the comments RSS feed, or use the email notification) :P