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See you on sa@#!%day

by Chief Ug 

Censorship has always been a major thorn in the side of gamers. In order for something to be fit for everyone, some "mature" content must be toned down. It would simply not do for small children to be exposed to things like profanities or graphic violence. A majority of gamers has just had no other option but to tolerate toned-down content. Now, with the release of a title called Phantasy Star Online, censorship has reared its ugly head again, but this time in a different form.

For those of you not familiar with the game, Phantasy Star Online is an online RPG for the Dreamcast. The main focus of the game is adventuring with friends and strangers. Obviously players can and will also engage in lots of chatting with each other. Now, since people of all ages and backgrounds are able to go online with the game, Sega has chosen to implement realtime censorship of chats. Once a player has typed in a sentence, it is first processed through the Phantasy Star Online servers, which filter out any words that might be deemed offensive. Only then, the rest of the world sees the message.

The servers of Phantasy Star Online keep a list of words that are deemed "bad". Any occurrence of letters in sequence which are on the forbidden list are replaced by "@#!%" or something equivalent. The filter looks for letters, not words. Therefore, a completely legal word which happens to contain some said letters also gets the censorship treatment. "Pass" becomes "P@#%", "basement" becomes "ba@#!%t" and "See you on saturday" becomes "See you on sa@#!%ay". Someone who goes out to get a snack goes to get "@#!&%ers" and not crackers. Needless to say, this causes situations which may seem comical at first, but quickly become irritating. Sega has not been content with simply filtering out the most common 4-letter words, but many others that one would not even think about twice. Particulary strange is the censorship of some words that appear in the game itself. There are weapons whose names contain the word "hell", yet that word itself gets censored. Why would that word need to be censored from the player chats if the game itself uses it?

It gets worse. Phantasy Star Online is a very global game. People from all around the world play it. This means people with all sorts of different languages. The language filter, however, does not know the boundaries of language. A word or sequence of letters which might be perfectly innocent in every other language, but which is deemed offending in one language, is also censored. Greeting a japanese gamer gets an embarrassing end when a virtual character proudly exclaims "Hajimema@#!%e". A recent game with a team of people from Finland was another prime example. A simple greeting like "moro" was blocked out. (Yes, "moro" gets censored.) A phrase saying "odota sekunti" (wait a second) becomes "odota se@#!%i" (sic). Yet, the reaction to that censorship in the form of a colorful and powerful litany of prime Finnish obscenities happily went through, uncensored.

What is there to gain from censorship? Well, for one thing, don't forget that there ARE many gamers aged 12 or below whose parents would have a fit if they ever saw their children playing a game which has "bad" words, even if spoken by others. It might also cut down on some juvenile displays. On the other hand, it might just as well encourage them. A hobby of quite a few people seems to be trying to get around the censorship of Phantasy Star Online by fooling the language filters.

Could there not be a middle ground? Sega has forced censorship on everyone, but certainly a majority of people would not mind if the filter were optional. Web browsing softwares, for example, provide parental control for parents who fear their children will be subject to indecent content. If Sega were to make an option to turn off the language filter, it would serve to make many people happier. I imagine most gamers find the language filter of Phantasy Star Online to be more a hindrance than a help. Having to retype a sentence because it inadvertently contains a string of forbidden letters is not something anyone enjoys.

Would you agree? Maybe you should let Sega know how you feel. In a vast online virtual world, a petty cutting up of miscellaneous characters is hardly an important task. In the real world, we do not have (just yet) Big Brother listening to your every word, scanning for forbidden sounds. Despite this, let us try to enjoy Phantasy Star Online as a game, and try to make best of the situation. So let us see again on sat... let's make that sunday.

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