The Futility of Censoring Online Chat

Online Virtual Worlds are semi-mainstream now, with World of Warcraft, Club Penguin, IMVU, Sony's Home, and Second Life all relatively well-known by a large chunk of the population.  But they all have their roots in MUDs (Multi-User Domain), MOOs (MUD, Object-Oriented) and BBS (Bulletin Board System) chat rooms that originated more than 20 years ago.  These text-based virtual worlds were run on university networks, accessible almost entirely by college students who happened to have computer access, a rarity at that time.  The basic features of today's Instant Message clients (ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, and Yahoo!), and every chat feature inside online games and website assistant windows are descendants of these proto-Chat systems.

Somewhere back in the mid-1990s, Chat met the World-Wide Web.  Companies like iChat (not the Apple webcam software) were selling chatting plugins for the fledgling web site industry.   Yahoo's own chat system used iChat's plugin originally before it developed Yahoo! Instant Messenger.  I recall going to iChat's booth at a Linux Conference where a representative from some large corporate site was asking a product specialist a question along these lines:

Corporate Representative: "How do we make certain that users don't curse and only talk about our products?"
Product Specialist: "Ummm... You can't."

Non-technical people in boardrooms have always come up with the same seemingly obvious solution: "Can't we just make a big list of bad words and filter them out?" The answer, it turns out, and always will be NO^*.

In the mid-1980's, a pair of programmers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer developed a 2-D graphical virtual world called Habitat, that ran on the Commodore 64 home computer. Since then they've been behind many online worlds.   Whenever there's a corporate backer for one of their projects (such as Disney, for their ToonTown virtual world for kids), they encounter (just like the one I encountered) the fundamental assumption that censorship is possible.

On their website, Habitat Chronicles, Randy Farmer blogged about how even their best laid censorship filter plans can be bested by a clever (and naughty) teenager:

"We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."
"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:

I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.

Alas, for better or for worse, communication finds a way.  It's built from finite materials combined in infinite ways.  So long as there are clever people, someone will find some way to say something you (or other players) don't like through your corporate playground.

You hear that, China?  (AT & T?)

^* That is, without having an impossibly expensive (and potentially corruptible) army of workers monitoring every conversation.

Zordinath Log

Zordinath is my Orc Hunter on World of Warcraft and he has been embarking on a lot of adventures since his birth a few weeks ago. Some highlights:

• Raided a castle, seizing the desired quest item from a chest on the top of a tower, then leaping off and running away to escape the guards
• Learned through a series of trials how to tame a pet, starting with a wildboar, a crab, and a giant scorpion. Now he's got a pet Velociraptor named "Rappy".
• Went hunting in the Golden Valley at night amidst the wolves and tigers and gigantic Kodo lizard herds.
• Discovered a hidden jungle oasis inhabited by centaurs and rather unfriendly snapping turtles
• Acquired the ability to use guns
• Took a blimp ride to the other island which is more Halloween Goth and less Tolkien. Rappy looks a bit out of context.
• Joined a guild run by my friend Michelle (aka Stirfry) who gave Zordy a bunch of handmade storage bags and money.
• Discovered an area where all creatures are a good 10 levels ahead and quickly fled the other way
• Met another lower level Orc Hunter with a pet crocodile. I took them hunting, which is much easier with a group, particularly when other beasts show up.
• Completed a timed quest where I had 45 minutes to deliver some fungal spores to a priest in a hidden cave up on a faraway city on a cliff. Made it with 22 seconds to spare.
• Developed skills in skinning (expert level) and leatherworking (journeyman) and can now make embossed pants, vests, boots, and bracers.

Curse Thee, World of Warcraft, for Thou Art Crack

One of the occupational hazards of being a fan of and deciding to do informal research on Virtual Worlds (or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games) is that once in a while, you land in one that is difficult to get out of. Sure, there are/were ones out there so unpleasant (Second Life) or dull* that the only thing keeping you in is the hope that maybe there's something interesting to be found. There are ones I think could have been great, but like an unhip nightclub or bar, nobody goes there (such as, ironicly, There.com)

I really don't consider myself a gamer. What hooks me usually is the social aspect, and in most worlds, I find myself having to break from the tools provided in order to enhance reality.** But then again, that's what reality is, no? Our collective perceptions of and responses to outside stimuli... Ok, I won't get all technical. But my point is -- if your virtual world is so dull that I have to use my creativity to make people have fun it, then maybe you didn't do your job. (Or you should have hired me, before it was too late!)

Really, I should have known better about World of Warcraft. The stories of people disappearing for months at a time. A friend of mine I met on There.com, originally a refugee from The Sims Online, found WoW after we both got tired of There.com and for a while I couldn't reach her at all (since I didn't really think I'd enjoy a "typical" fantasy role-playing game where you have to do errands for people). Two girlfriends of acquaintances of mine played so much WoW that they nearly lost their men. The Chinese young man who died because he played for days straight without drinking or eating. But pretty much everybody I work with (sans the ladies) plays it. A lady I met at a cartoon screening plays it (she's a Level 70 Guild Master!)

O Peer pressure, Curiosity, what have thou wrought?

Lucky for you, I will soon be descibing some of the adventures I've had as two different characters, Zordinath the Leatherworking Orc Hunter, and Latnenitnoc ("Continental" spelled backwards) the Herbalist Undead Warlock.

Stay tuned.

<sub>* ActiveWorlds circa 1996 anyone? Zzzzzzz. Though there are others, too many to mention here.

** For example, in Worlds Away (no longer available), you could only move around a pseudo-3D cardboard cut-out avatar through some nice planar spaces. The rest was just a standard chat screen. So I came up with a spontaneous convention with those I met for playing Tag that wasn't specified in the game itself.</sub>

Massively Multi-player Online Game ... of Math??

Blizzard made hacking virtual monsters with other people a lot of fun for millions in its massively multi-player online game, World of Warcraft.

Now a Canadian company wants to do similar with a fantasy world game called Hippasus where mathematics is magic.

Great. There's a game where I will be even MORE inept...