Linden Lab Says "Spicy Adult-Friendly Bedroom Secrets" Coming to Second Life in 2024. It's a Sign of Changing Times!

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A short paragraph in Linden Lab's "year in review" wrap-up of 2023 and sneak peek for Second Life in 2024 was so surprising, I had to read it a second time:

Second Life turns 21 in 2024… and, to celebrate, we are turning attention to the spicier side of Second Life with some bold and innovative new adult-friendly initiatives. Something wickedly wonderful is coming soon… We’ll be taking the sheets off this mystery initiative and sharing more bedroom secrets soon… so stay tuned!

Spicy! This brief aside probably rated scarce a shrug for most people, but it's quite a milestone.

For Second Life's first 20 years, Linden Lab has had a challenging relationship with Adult-rated content in the virtual world — struggling to enable the user community to create whatever sexual simulations consenting adults wanted to enjoy with each other, while also attempting to downplay that content, hoping to avoid Second Life from being further branded/pigeon-holed as a "weird sex world" unappealing to outside brands/organizations. (Not to mention the majority of consumers who just aren't into frisky pixels pinging them in the face unprompted.)

And now… Linden Lab is just up and offering spicy bedroom secrets as official content!

It's quite a sea change. Given the vast, graphic, often biologically impossible variety of user-made sexual content that already exists in Second Life, it is a bit like Netflix uploading an R-rated movie to Pornhub, but OK.

The fact that this is happening now probably has less to do with Linden Lab as a company, but rather, reflects the degree to which global popular culture has shifted over the last couple decades:

Back in 2006, a Linden Lab executive was straight up fired for saying at a conference that 30% of Second Life's user-generated content was "naughty".

That might seem like a dramatic overreaction (and it kinda was), but back then, many news outlets were publishing utterly scandalized stories of naked avatars with attachable genitals bumping and grinding into each other. It was a collision of simplistic and wrong assumptions, where Second Life was "just a game", and games are "just for kids", and therefore, outrage! But it was the world in which Linden Lab was trying to launch a mainstream product.

But in the year of our lord 2023 and our era of "WAP" and OnlyFans commoditized spicy-ness? Pixel sex seems pretty quaint. 

If anything, Linden Lab is actually playing catch up here. IMVU has had an adults-only Access Pass for years; even Roblox's CEO promised an adults-only dating app experience a few months ago. Given market competition and the current difficulty of enjoying UGC sexual content in Second Life — just installing digital genitals onto an avatar is bit like trying to edit a 3D Maya graphics file — it makes sense for the company to offer a, well, plug-and-play option.

All that to one side, it's still not the case that pixel sex grows the user base of a metaverse platform — it remains a fervent if niche activity — but as our social mores around online sexuality become more accepting, it's probably an option that needs to be offered on a thriving metaverse platform.

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