profanity-filter
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What makes a bad word bad?
Warning: This post may contain language that is offensive to some. Our own Fox Van Allen tackled the subject of the odd quirks of the mature language filter last week -- the fact that some objectionable words have been mysteriously left out of the filter, while others of a much less objectionable nature have oddly been left in it. None of this was noticed of course until the mature language filter was bugged so that it reset itself, resulting in a lot of people spewing a lot of random keyboard symbols until they remembered to turn it off again. Personally? I'm not sure if the mature language filter is at all an effective tool. Since the first days of WoW, Horde and Alliance players have not been allowed to speak to each other. Part of this was because of faction separation, but part of it was to discouraging griefing, which happened all the time in PvP situations. Players of the opposing faction could kill you repeatedly, but they couldn't swear at you -- until, that is, players realized they could communicate with keyboard symbols arranged into letters. This ability was soon squashed. And that's the problem, isn't it? It doesn't matter how much you block a word. If someone is determined to have their say, they will find a way to say it. If you can't talk to the opposing faction, you roll an alt and cuss them out that way, or over voice chat, or via email, or on Twitter, or wherever they can conveniently contact you. So why try blocking it at all? More importantly, what makes a bad word "bad," anyway?
Bulletstorm to feature a mother-hugging profanity filter
It's time once again to play Choose Your Own Analogy! Here's the situation: People Can Fly's Adrian Chmielarz recently addressed concerns about Bulletstorm's frequently obscene dialogue on Twitter, explaining that the game "features optional subtitles, and yes, you can tone the language down if you wish so." (In a followup tweet, Chmielarz suggested one might want to mute the voices and display the profanity in subtitles, say, if the kids could be listening from another room.) Chmielarz clarified to Joystiq that the game will apparently feature options to tone down "both" the voice-overs and subtitles, though it's as yet unclear if that will entail replacement words or a simple censoring device. If the latter, here's where we play the analogy game: Based on the promotional material we've seen so far, we can't help but feel like playing through Bulletstorm with a dirty word filter on will result in more beeps than a ... Car alarm factory Old-timey Morse code station Chiptunes concert Los Angeles traffic jam Beeper convention Chiptunes concert held at a car alarm factory on the same block as the beeper convention
The Road to Mordor: Forum diving
[Special note: Obviously, the news that LotRO is going free-to-play hit after this article was already written, so stay tuned as we dissect what it means for existing and potential new customers next week!] Lately, it feels like we're in a holding pattern for Lord of the Rings Online. The last major content patch, Volume III: Book 1, is fading into distant memory, and we're pushing into summer without definite news of the next update -- or better yet, the next expansion. Players are also nervous about any changes or new directions the game may take after the recent acquisition of Turbine by Warner Bros., and the silence certainly doesn't help any. However, there's always hope in the darkest places of Middle-earth, and the same can be said for the game itself. The Summer Festival should be around the corner, and as for new news, Sapience handed out a bit of vague encouragement on the forums: "You guys know we're preparing an announcement. I can't give you a specific date as to when we'll make it, but I can say I just ran into Adam Mersky coming out of an E3 planning meeting and he was pretty stoked!" While we continue the wait for the next step forward for LotRO, I thought it'd be a good idea to head over to the official forums and do a little diving for some of the more interesting topics and discussions bouncing around the LotRO community today.
Google's Nexus One censors your voice-to-text input, we #### you not
It'd be kinda funny if someone was live-bleeping your profanity, right? Sure, but five minutes later you'd sober up to regret and lingering annoyance. Turns out the Nexus One does it for real, courtesy of Google's speech-to-text engine -- it replaces notorious curses like the F and S words with a '####,' which is a more dramatic take on the Zune HD's now-obsolete Twitter censorship. As silly as this sounds, Google has come up with a good reason: We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent. Kudos for caring, but it wouldn't hurt to have an on / off option either -- after all, it's not like we're asking for pinch-to-zoom here, and we'll promise to use a swear jar.
WoW Rookie: Filter out the #$%!
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.Hey, isn't that the same screenshot we used for WoW Rookie just two weeks ago? Indeed it is, faithful readers – because frankly, "Who wants my man meat?" is the perfect illustration for today's topic.The World of Warcraft is your refuge at the end of a long, hard day – and the last thing you want to see rolling across your screen is the kind of lowbrow posturing that's given Barrens chat its notorious reputation. Or perhaps you'd like to let the kids try their hands at WoW, but you don't want them soaking up the rough language that seems to turn up more and more frequently in busy city Trade and General channels.It's time to take charge of your game chat.
