I tend to stay off of Xbox Live when I’m not joining a group of people I know; beyond the fact that many gamers are fickle and dramatically anti-competitive, the vile verbal diahrrea exhibited by users is a buzz-kill. The steady stream of fag jokes and racial slurs is more boring than offensive, but I’m sure parents and other folks don’t see it the same way.
In 2004 Microsoft filed a patent application for technology that would filter unwanted words from voice chat. As the application says: The automatic censoring filter employs a lattice comprising either
phonemes and/or words derived from phonemes for comparison against
corresponding phonemes or words included in undesired speech data. If
the probability that a phoneme or word in the input audio data stream
matches a corresponding phoneme or word in the undesired speech data is
greater than a probability threshold, the input audio data stream is
altered so that the undesired word or a phrase comprising a plurality
of such words is unintelligible or inaudible. The patent has now been approved, leaving us to speculate on how, if and when it will be put to use.
As a gamer who uses Live, naturally the first assumption is that the tech could clean up the wilds of online gaming. That’s questionable enough. Would I be able to filter anyone who isn’t in my friends list, but allow people I consider friends to be as vile as they’d like? In general, what controls would users have over the tech? Then there are the much wider-ranging questions. What other companies and agencies would license the tech? What if your phone company got hold of it? Is making Xbox Live safe for children a good enough reason to get a flexible censoring algorithm out into the wild? Not really.
10 comments
Good. Maybe it'll force these teenagers to come up with more intelligent dialogue during games. Or as intelligent as you can get while blowing up your faggot nigger friends in Halo.
LOL
MATT DAY-MUN!
I think comment #1 may be the funniest comment I have ever read on the internet. I seriously laughed out loud.
Bit of a slippery slope argument there, Russ. Microsoft is well within its rights to do whatever it deems neccesary to keep their service suitable for all ages, but there's no indication that the technology will be licensed in "the wild", or that it will mean our phone conversations are censored. There's a world of difference between a publicly available free-for-all like Xbox Live and a private telephone line, and any attempt to filter private communication would surely be unconstitutional. Not really worth a scare story like this.
I'm actually disappointed for this announcement, I've enjoyed vast amounts of entertainment from the rambling chatter of the chimps that regurgitate their hate in a truly American, no responsibility "cause you can't see me" sorta way, kinda like any internet forum…wait…
All I know is that on some message boards that censor posts or switch words, you get some pretty HILARIOUS results from the word replacement.
meh, it would probably just result in a resurgence of less in-vogue name calling, like mongoloid and wet-back. Sounds liek a plus to me.
The language of Halo underscores the CULTURE (or sub-culture) of Halo, and it's a discouragingly lousy one. I doubt that editing out a few words really affect the thinking of a community that seems to feel so comfortable slinging "Fuck you you Faggy Nigger" around. I'd prefer that they develop software with some kind of "asshole detection" that booted the many, MANY offenders.
Everytime I've been called a nigger fag etc on Live it's been by an American teenager who sounds like they're aged 11-16. Pehaps Microsoft would heve been better off ploughing the development money from this into educating these little shits through some game that promotes harmony and tollerance. But they didn't, did they? Fucking queers!
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