Breakfast Topic: Would you join an "Anything Goes" realm?
Some of the commenters in yesterday's Breakfast Topic talked about how we were all adults and shouldn't be bothered by adult content. But we aren't all adults. Kids play this game -- and often it's teenagers who are the ones with the adult oriented chatter.
We've discussed the concept of age restricted servers before and many have expressed that they would join them in an effort to escape what is perceived as underage offensive behavior. But what I'm proposing here is not an adult only realm to avoid adult content, but one that is age restricted because of the adult content.
Restricting ages is a difficult thing to do. To paraphrase House, even 17 year olds know to press the "I'm over 18" button. So, let's say that Blizzard found a way to actually restrict this realm to 18 and over only, therefore eliminating any worries about the children. This realm would be completely uncensored. You could report offensive names or behavior, but nothing would be done about it. Profanity and sexual content would be allowed. Unfortunately, the language of hate would be allowed as well. In practice, there would probably still have to be some guidelines. Names of products and celebrities might have to be disallowed just for copyright issues. And threats of real life violence would also have to be taken seriously.
I play casual games at Club Pogo and some of their game rooms are labeled Anything Goes Uncensored Chat. Late one night, I was playing a competitive solitaire game (it's more interesting than it sounds) and was trying to find a room with enough players that wasn't full. The only one available at that time was an Anything Goes room. Since I don't mind profanity and sexual innuendo, I thought I would give it a try. I expected some profanity and adult chatter and perhaps some mature banter -- maybe even intellectual topics. Yeah, I'm hopelessly optimistic.
The good part about the room was that people actually spelled out their words rather than speaking in acronyms like in the other rooms: "wtg gga ns tyvm". But the chatter was mostly not game related and rarely related to what anyone else was saying. It seemed to be randomly generated sentences with sexual organs and sexual activities thrown in. I wasn't offended, but it was annoying. I suspect that an Anything Goes WoW server would be the same.
I don't see Blizzard creating a realm like this, but hypothetically speaking, what do you think this realm would be like? After the initial month of newness wore off, would the chat just be what Trade/Barrens Chat is now only a bit more explicit? Or would the age restriction actually reduce the potty humor and homophobic rants?
Would you join an "Anything Goes" realm?
