The banter on Xbox Live has gotten so out of control and counterproductive, that Shadowrun designer Bill Fulton has declared “Rochambeau” on the world’s largest multiplayer service. He was a leader on matchmaking at Microsoft, so he knows what he is talking about. My argument is that, well, no shit. Did they actually expect to drop people in a world on anonymous competition and expect them all to play nice? I do not wear my headset unless I am in a game with people I know and/or have played with and demonstrated some adult like qualities.
Talking trash after a game is fine. You don’t have to stay in the lobby. Yet when a gamer thinks its funny to shout racial obscenities that would make Eddie Murphy blush just for the hell of it renders the service basically unusable. Here is Fulton’s main point:
Non-gamers simply don’t love games enough to put up with the crap they get online. The reason they would consider playing online is to have fun with other people - and right now, playing games online with strangers rarely delivers that for anyone outside the hardcore demographic.”
Herein lies the problem. How do you plan on fixing this? If you outlaw cursing, people will claim censorship. Start taking away memberships and you will have a mass revolt on your hands. Leave it alone and nothing happens. I sure hope he has a plan because I see no reasonable solution to this ongoing problem.
[via Gamasutra]
13 Comments
Write a Comment»It’s a problem that has been around for as long as in-game chatting has been around. Sega curbed that on Phantasy Star Online with their censor, which went as far as to censor Saturday, because “turd” is int he middle.
How do you curb cursing when people talk? Voice recognition. And if a person who has XBL is under 13 (as in PG13 for example) the voice recognition program could censor out the curse words of the child and any adults in a room with him/her.
That or find a way to set an age filter for games so you don’t have to deal with kids, then you can curse to your heart’s content.
Dealing with kids is one thing, but I’ve found some pretty asshole annoying people over 18 online.
True, but didn’t some games have the ability to mute assholes?
I usually find 5 years olds to be the worst. I’ve had about 4 of them in a gaylo match, and sounding like toddlers they say, “Shut up you niggor (when they say it it sounds like there’s an o) misterneedles you black niggor hahahahaha” and besides the racial obsenities are the incoherent screamings for no logical reasoning.
I’ve been called all kinds of racial slurs, mostly to races that I don’t even pertain to.
same here
yea its gay..and most of the little kids who have an xbox play halo 3..and i like the muting future..
Maybe they should add the muting feature to more titles.
you can mute anyone on XBL not sure about the PS3, but for 360 go into recent players find the person click there name and click mute..
Thanks, I didn’t know that.
are you being sarcastic or are you being serious..? lol, its a great tool, and in COD4(360) if your in a game you can press back and then use the D-pad to highlight a name and click A and it will mute them..
Nah, seriously, I thought it worked only game per game (like some games would have it and others wouldn’t). I don’t play a lot of online games, and I generally ignore the dumb comments, so I never put it to use.
You can easily make it so you can only hear Friends online. But that makes things shady when you need to play a team game and you can’t communicate with other team members. The biggest problem is figuring out who needs to be muted in the first place.