End of a (tiny) era

Well, the first Big Brother in Second Life just finished. Congratulations to the winner Madlen Flint

But will Endemol be back next year? The crashes, griefing, etc must have taken their toll on the patience of the organisers. Even at the final, chat lag caused all kinds of difficulties for the crewmember who was making all the announcements.

At least there wasn't a crash during the final celebration, but if Linden Labs want Second Life to be a viable venue for this kind of thing in the future there still remains a lot of work to do on grid stability and griefers. The first step, I hope, will be a method to more effectively deal with Griefers. The difficulty for Linden Labs is enforcing their age policy, because the downside of free accounts is that people who have been banned before or people who are under the age of consent can easily gain access to Second Life. There remains at this stage no viable method to verify someone's age and yet still allow free accounts. Now, I'm not saying that griefing is solely the realm of the young; far from it. There are older (supposedly) residents who should know better but don't. However, free accounts used by teenagers who want to be "hip" and "cool" and on the adult grid are a problem.

We shall see if Endemol are interested in running Big Brother another year. Big Brother this year has certainly been interesting, when it wasn't offline through technical difficulties. It would be a shame if Endemol didn't come back another year.