Red Light Center Exposed -- Part 1

Free basic account for clothed platonic friendship - VIP accounts for naked pixel-sex
The Herald explores worlds beyond Second Life

Red Light Center (RLC) is a virtual world that touts itself as a socialized meeting place where you can make friends and even have sex with them. Because some residents would like to see the lascivious go there, because they are not welcome here or There, I decided to check it out.

Accounts come in Basic or VIP. Basic accounts are free to play but you cannot have sex, and therefore, you don’t know what you look like naked. VIP accounts cost $20 US per month and allows for fuller access. I started with a basic account as Jessi_angel.

In opening an account, you have two things to create. One is your avatar. The customization is limited to either what RLC gives you or what you can download onto your PC. Downloaded textures can change your avatar's clothing or tattoos. No one else can see these textures unless they also download those textures into their PC.

One way to get those custom avatar textures is off a person’s web based profile. When you click on a RLC avatar for their profile, the program opens up your web browser and gives you a MySpace like web layout for that resident. This profile is customizable to the same extent as a MySpace page, except you can include pornographic pictures of yourself and others. The age verification comes by having certain pictures viewable only by VIPs or by your friends.

The use of the web browser is frequent as any tips or special rules are opened in an outside web browser and not in the game itself. FAQ’s, as limited as they are, open outside of the game. If more in depth help is needed, one either learns from others or goes onto the RLC forums which are linked to the profile system.