Note: This article contains Adult themes.
In 2010 the prequel to Battlestar Galactica was aired in a few countries. It was named Caprica, consisted of one season, and was mostly forgotten.
How does this relate to Earth2?
To answer this question, we need only to look to the 2-hour season pilot where a company run by one of the main characters created a metaverse known as 'V-World'. The CEO of the company who created it placed restrictions on NSFW content to some users.
So what happens? A void is left for restricted users who wanted to experience those things. Users got tired of the whitewashed version of the virtual world. In turn, some users created "hacked" shards of the metaverse where nothing was off-limits. The company repeatedly cracked down on those rogue shards, but they kept coming back.
With this in mind, will the Earth2 developers allow NSFW content within their metaverse platform come phase 3? Additionally, if they prohibit such content, what will users do to experience that content?
I am not suggesting that someone will "hack" Earth2, nor am I suggesting that someone will make another version of it that will allow such content. Eventually somebody will, but the funny thing is, they won't need to. We'll get back to that in a second.
First I want to look into if NSFW content is even wanted by Earth2 users.
Judging by the amount of EPLs that have adult themes that were purchased, it would seem safe to say that users are looking forward to NSFW user-generated content. Funny enough, Dillon Seo noted in the E2 Official gen chat that he would love to see X-Rated content in the form of clubs, etc. Specifically, he would like the models in those clubs to be like the FFVII remake of Tifa or Aerith.
Secondly, we need to think about why they might want to restrict NSFW content in the first place.
Well, it's no secret that banking groups do not like to engage in adult-rated content. It's a common problem for those businesses when trying to get card processing services and such. Additionally, advertisers tend to shy away from adult-related content unless of course, they are advertising adult services.
Traditionally, when it came to websites, strip clubs, and similar venues, they would be dealing with human content. This is not the case when it comes to Earth2. This is a completely digital platform. Therefore the content would be nothing more than pixels on a screen. Let's look at Steam. Obviously Steam has no problems with processing cards. Yet on their service, they have at the time of this writing over 3000 titles including nudity, over 2900 titles flagged as containing sexual content, and over 750 titles flagged as mature audience only.
Next, let's think of advertising. We've looked at Google Adsense as the advertising delivery method. Turns out, they do allow adult advertising, and in fact, deliver ads to adult-themed websites. There are restrictions of course, and the advertisers have to select that they are okay with their ads running on adult-related sites. So while the range of the available advertisers may be smaller, the fact of the matter is that advertising on adult-themed locations is viable.
So now that we have determined that Steam does provide digital adult-related content with no problems with card processing, and possibly the largest advertising delivery system in the world allows not only adult-related advertisements, but also delivers ads to adult-related websites. It would seem that there would be no financial impacting reason to not allow such user-generated content on the platform.
If the developers still do not wish to allow adult content, users looking for this sort of content will not need to hack the system or build out a whole new metaverse to experience this.
See Earth2 wants to bring in functionality to the platform, and a stable of online communities has been, and as far as I can see into the future will be a hyperlink. Restricting this simple, yet elegant snippet of HTML would be like cutting off this platform from the rest of the online world. That is highly unlikely to happen.
All users interested in providing such content would need to do is create the worlds in a place like VRChat, SecondLife, or any other online world that is available. Then use a simple hyperlink on their property to direct those users looking for the content to a world outside of the developers' control. There are ways to monetize the content on the other platforms, but that's not for discussion in this article.
Last notes because I am sure someone out there will scream "What about the children!"
According to the terms and conditions, users need to be the almost universal age of majority (18) to use the platform in its current state. There is also user verification in place through Jumio. It would take a simple boolean (similar to the function that allows verified users to trade properties and use the resources tab) to restrict access to properties if the user was not verified.
It would be of course up to the landowners to set the flag if the content on the property was NSFW of course, and if the landowners fail to accurately flag NSFW content, then deal with them individually.
We trust the developers to make the best possible metaverse experience and the tools to build out what the users can imagine. What we don't need is a digital father figure making sweeping decisions as to what is good or bad for us as a whole. We're all different, we are all (supposed to be) adults, and we can make decisions on what we want to experience. The developers should not be yucking anybody's yums.