Call me crazy, but are there any studies that show exposure to genitalia during childhood leads to psychological damage of any kind? I suspect there isn't, and that this social taboo is, to some degree, absurd. Seems like this social taboo leads to a lot of damage and cost, while likely being unwarranted.
I mean, I suspect people in general don't want to see dongs in Lego Universe or really any non-sexual game, so efforts should be taken to prevent it. But it shouldn't need to go beyond normal moderation. The only reason Lego feels the need to go beyond that is because of the social taboo. In what I imagine a "normal" society to be, dongs in LU would just be laughed off as a joke, and the builder banned for breaking the rules. Nothing more.
The first thing about social taboos is that they are culture specific. Sweden for example in the late 90s had a strong censorship regarding violence, while nudity was mostly ignored and quite common in movies made for kids and on family prime time on TV.
As two examples of this, Darkwing Duck was banned since people believed it would cause children to kill other children in the play ground. However during similar prime time hours on TV, a other show called "Bullen" (euphemism for female genitalia) was on, and was about teenage relationships with a large focus on sex education. They address topics like masturbation, homosexuality, and relationship advice in the form of viewer mails being illustrated by actors.
Now days, the Swedish taboo culture has changed to mimic the American one, but one notice remnants always pop up when people suddenly feels that Astrid Lindgren movie adaptations should suddenly be censored since they got naked scenes in them.
In the Netherlands something similar, who remembers the cartoon "Purno de Purno"? :-) It was glorious, made on a pixelated Amiga, many boobs and sexual innuendo (that went straight past me as a kid), and pretty absurd plotlines (which is why I loved it).
I don't understand why the US is so puritan. They even blur out footage of babies' bottoms on broadcast TV here. I was watching a documentary about some artist on PBS one evening with an interview scene that took place on a beach. I didn't notice there was a baby in the background until my eye was drawn to the floating blur oval concealing his or her precious little butt cheeks.
In fact now that I think about it, when that Picasso painting was in the news a week or two back for setting a record price at auction, some channels blurred out part of it in case their viewers got offended by cubist depictions of the female breasts: http://metro.co.uk/2015/05/14/fox-news-blurred-out-the-breas...
No word yet on how this horror will affect the fine children of Roanoake, VA - no doubt the monies collected for the fine will be channeled to treating their post-traumatic stress disorders.
My favorite is when they showed a gender reassignment surgery on TV and, at the precise point the editors determined she had transitioned from a man to a woman, they blurred out her nipples.
I once saw a segment on a US chat show about a man who get breast implants, as a bet. (Not gay, not trans.) When he took his shirt off on camera they commented on the fact that he had to have two little round stickers over his nipples for censorship reasons.
I may well get burned for this, but I'm going to quote a friend's quip from years back. I think he made a good, if caustic, point. (Your choice of term "puritan" is the operative word here.)
"It's cultural baggage. The country was colonised by Puritans. You know, the segment of British population whom even then Victorians considered uncomfortably prude."
I do believe there is a kernel of truth in that. As to why it has remained such a dominant feature in the collective US psychology, now that'd be an interesting study.
Well, the nation was founded by a bunch of Puritans. I believe that much of their fundamentalist worldview has persisted, largely unchanged, through the centuries since.
You answered the question. This country's first moral code came from puritans who were trying to get away from England because the other religions there had too much frivolity.
Fox News displayed the entire video of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive by ISIS, yet censored the buttocks of a man featured in a segment on nude beaches.
I find the Japanese porn censorship particularly strange.
As far as I can tell, it's generally extremely rape-y for cultural reasons -- from a Western POV I'd describe it as very misogynistic. Yet the genitalia are censored, implying the genitalia are somehow more obscene than the acts that involve them.
And breast feeding, nudity. But then I guess other countries have their own weird little taboo's.
More and more I see America having a lot of Puritan values, which is spreading. Even countries who wouldn't have freaked about penis or saying fuck on tv, suddenly find themselves adding pixelation and muted audio to their native language
We are getting far more socially liberal in general. I've noticed a shift even in the last decade. Those of us in America who would identify as socially liberal know where the puritanical values are, and those places are becoming less and less able to generate a national uproar over family values as time goes on and liberal youth get older.
Compare American television from even the late 90s to now. It's absolutely night and day. We have a long way to go on chilling out about sex (it's a weird line to draw given our fetish for violence), but the trend is definitely in that direction. The problem with America is that we are really eight or nine different nations stitched together, and it shows not only in our divisions on family values in different parts of the country but also our growing inability to agree.
Just in the last few years the word "shit" started to be acceptable on television. A single usage on TV in the 1990s or 2000s would have been a local news segment. Now, no one cares. It's changing, but slowly.
> Facebook is allowing videos showing people being decapitated to be posted and shared on its site once again.
> The social network had introduced a temporary ban in May following complaints that the clips could cause long-term psychological damage.
[...]
> Its terms and conditions now state that it will remove photos or videos that "glorify violence" in addition to other banned material, including a woman's "fully exposed breast".
So,(in 2013) they allow beheading videos so long as you're not glorifying violence.
I have a feeling that the sort of "psychological damage" they're worrying about is precisely the fact that "exposure to genitalia" makes kids more likely to violate the social taboo and show their own genitalia, and that makes the anti-pedophile groups (and others of prudish nature) horrified.
The reason that kids are building dongs is because they know it's a taboo. If the reaction of others upon seeing it was not shock but a mere "Oh, a penis. So what?", I doubt they would be doing it.
She/He never said it was. It is being suggested that, er, enthusiastic anti pedophile groups think that. I think that its implied that its a dubious argument at best. None of us can answer for the flawed logic of campaigners with tunnel vision.
Funny thing us that I bet the kids probably wouldn't really comprehend what they were seeing in most Lego-dong cases. I remember walking past some fairly prominent "8===D" style graffitti each day in my school when I was a kid (I was <10yrs) and thinking it was someone's hasty attempt at a "flipping the bird" gesture :D
>The reason that kids are building dongs is because they know it's a taboo. If the reaction of others upon seeing it was not shock but a mere "Oh, a penis. So what?", I doubt they would be doing it. //
To posit an alternate hypothesis children find squirting water innately amusing; hence the whole activity of urinating, particularly with the apparent extra control a boy has over direction, is a point of fascination and so too the organ of this action. Beyond that children realise the differences between themselves and others. A primary difference that is noticeable between boys and girls is genitalia and so they become more fascinating still.
One thing that tends away from your perspective is the apparent Roman fascination with dicks [eg the Greek's Priapus / Roman Mutinus; the fascinus (from which our word fascinate comes)] in a comparatively sexually liberal society.
I guess data from anthropological studies would help to flesh this out; are children brought up in societies where genitals are often displayed less fascinated with them?
A further thought:
>'But the penis grants man "immortality." [...] It is the perpetuator of human existence.' (A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, by David M. Friedman, p.70)
are there any studies that show exposure to genitalia
during childhood leads to psychological damage of any kind
No, none at all. If that were so, many generations before us, and most European generations, would be quite damaged. The epidemiological evidence speaks for itself.
and that this social taboo is, to some degree, absurd
Completely absurd, period. It's confusing genitalia with sexual activity, completely disregarding context.
There are some studies done in Denmark in the seventies, where small children were shown danish soft-porn movies, and a control group were shown 'Bambi'
If I remember correctly, the kids where not reacting in any special way to the porn, and thought it was nonsensical or plain boring, except the humorous segments (think Benny Hill but naked, typical of danish pornography of that era) which they laughed at.
However, a large percentage of the kids in the control group reported nightmares from Bambi, and many children reacted badly to the death of Bambi's mother and other dramatic events, and it occupied their mind for a long time after they watched the movie.
Edit: On the other hand, 95% of the internet porn of today is probably not good for anyone to watch, and especially young people seems to have a rather bent view of sexuality and especially women's sexuality. But seeing naked people, can't possibly be damaging for anyone.
this is really not my area of expertise but you pose a great question that I'm trying to justify for myself: perhaps Lego has legal responsibilities? you know, the same way I have legal responsibilities not to expose kids to genetalia.
for instance, if user of age shows a pornographic picture to a minor in minecraft, what are the legal implications?
edit: another comment suggests minecraft handles exactly this by not running their own servers. let's say for the sake of argument they didn't.
If you are over 18 and if you show an image of sexual activity to a child (someone under 16 that you don't believe is over 16; or someone under 13) then you've committed an offence.
Running a server in which other people show children images of sexual activity doesn't count.
It's unlikely that Minecraft dong-towers would count.
I'm also a bit wary of removing parental responsibility. Depending on the age and maturity of the child you should probably be monitoring their first interactions and giving calm safety advice. Suggesting that the providing company takes all that responsibility is odd.
I am trying to think of an age where kids would not be exposed to genitalia. When they are little, we let them run around naked anyway. When they are older, they might take up some sports and be exposed in the changing room. What I mean is: I doubt there is a legal responsibility to prevent kids from seeing genitalia.
I suspect how society reacts to it plays a big part. Kids exposed to genitalia might be sent to therapy sessions and only considered "cured" when they accept that they have been traumatized...
>The only reason Lego feels the need to go beyond that is because of the social taboo
The OP mentions COPPA and brand trust with parents, so I think there's more to it. Less "protect the kids", more "don't get sued" and "don't lose customers".
I found it kind of silly how the poster alludes to this being an issue with the success of the game (operational costs, don't let execs try again), but really, the game was simply boring to begin with. You have something as amazing as lego, and you don't design your game around the concept of building whatever you want...
>Call me crazy, but are there any studies that show exposure to genitalia during childhood leads to psychological damage of any kind?
That is a brilliant question, we could actually find out: substantially every danish school kid has showed in communal showers after gym class. This, I think, is not nearly as common in the US.
If exposure to genitalia caused psychological damage then we should see a greater incident of this in Danes than Americans. My hunch is that such a difference, if found at all, would not pass statistical significance.
Hey, maybe we'd find that not seeing enough genitalia during childhood leads to psychological damage and that people damaged by it tend to reproduce the same abuse on their own progeny.
I feel like the opposite is happening: By making penises something vulgar and taboo and to be constantly protected against, we're telling boys that a very important part of their body is ugly, dirty, gross and wrong. And that they should feel gross for having one.
If anything, we put too much value on a woman's vagina--to the point that it's taken to be her greatest asset. Too often a woman is valued for her body parts rather than her ideas or her abilities. Virginity is overvalued and "slut shaming" is applied to women who have sex because girls are encouraged to conserve and maintain the value of their resource, while men are lauded for being able to obtain access to vaginas. Rather than being vulgar, wrong, taboo, dirty, gross, vaginas are seen as beautiful, valuable commodities. Which comes with its own set of problems, but different problems from those young boys have.
I don't see any value in this sort of one-upsmanship, where every time a boy's problem is brought up, people say, "But it's even worse for girls." That both downplays the problems of boys and misunderstands the problems of girls. I'm not saying you do this all the time, I'm just saying I see this all too frequently.
Exactly. Even now that they offer official paid servers hosted by Mojang, you're still paying for your own server, and you control who's invited to it.
Parent can rest easy knowing that all the penises on their server were definitely created by their own kid and his friends.
Put in a more general way: decentralised systems sometimes avoid hidden costs that more centralised systems can suffer from. Minecraft is decentralised and Lego Universe is not.
This point in the article is really strange though. Isn't Roblox, for example, operating massive building online universe for kids and somehow solves this problem without godzillion of moderators?
If Lego can't do it themselves - just, you know, acquire Roblox.
This is the answer to the oft-asked question, "Why didn't Lego build Minecraft?" Because big companies necessarily focus on risks to what they already have, while small companies focus on untapped opportunities.
This is a great point. I used to work for a large biotech firm and we agonized over decisions that small companies wouldn't even bat an eye at. When you already have several billion in sales, you worry about jeopardizing them. When you have nothing, what is there to risk?
Here the concern was that Lego would jeopardize it's brand, but they also wanted to leverage their brand to increase appeal. Were the issues you were dealing with similar, or of a different nature? Can you give any examples? I know little of the biotech buisiness, and I'm sure it'd be interesting.
"It really comes down to the brick, the core brick," is what Lego concluded. How though could the company's teams put this on a screen? Obviously, Gram says, they were inspired by Minecraft and knew that they could learn from it. "Minecraft is digital Lego," he says. "We only wish we had invented it."
And meanwhile, in an alternate universe, the people developing Game Neverending accidentally invented "Dongr", the perfect dong detection algorithm, which they sold to Yahoo for millions of dollars.
"It really comes down to the dong, the core dong," is what Yahoo concluded. How though could the company's teams keep this off the screen?"
Which is strange because there did exist a multiplayer game made by a hobbyist where you could build using Lego shaped bricks. And if I remember correctly Lego is the reason that game stopped existing.
Blockland. It's still around. I remember playing that around 2004/2005. It was really fun back then but suffered from bad performance for sizable builds.
The developer looks like he has checked out on improving the game but he is still making games and if the forums are to believe had a booth at PAX East.
Why didn't Lego just buy Minecraft, or create a similar game under a different brand? It doesn't tarnish their core product's reputation, yet they still profit off of the niche. Seems like they'd have the capital, and domain expertise to accomplish this.
Because Mojang has told them that they don't know how to build games. (Source: I know people that work at Lego and met him in person)
In general, many people prefer simple games with simple rules which they can use to build more complex systems. The reward is the appreciation of ingenuity in the application of one's imagination with the limited resources provided in the 'physical' environment (in the virtual world).
When the users are not allowed to express their ideas without mental restrictions or simply being forced to think about abiding by the rules of censorship, the imagination is being confined within artificial limits and this removes the joy of the free and innocent exploration of possibilities.
Lego enforces many rules about the play experience that hinder the creativity compared to the freedom you have in Minecraft. This is exactly what the OP has pointed out as well.
There's also something about the size of the company that tends to bring an unnecessary overhead and sluggishness into an otherwise lightweight gaming experience. The phrase "the slower it is, the more enterprise it is" is very often true in the corporate environment.
As the OP writes the moderation costs were one of the biggest expenses for the Lego Universe project. This was essentially the 'Lego Minecraft'. People loved it, but the company pulled the plug because they couldn't make enough money out of it which is their primary goal. They also wouldn't allow the fans to run their own servers or to create mods for the game (AFAIK).
There is now already a Lego theme featuring Minecraft which was released after the company realized that they've missed out big time on not buying the rights for it while it was getting popular.
Nobody is required to use a given medium in a way that others find "proper" just because they annoy some people. I personally enjoy the stream-of-consciousness feel of this style of self-referential twitter threads for certain types of storytelling or reporting.
That would be a good point, if the writer's intention was to create a disjointed slipstream narrative for the readers enjoyment. But it's more likely the writer wanted to tell a straight forward story about lego dongs. Would have been better off writing a blog post.
While we're at it. How about company's stop linking fucking screen shots of their press releases on twitter which are impossible to reflow or read properly on a mobile device.
In this thread: folks who get snippy about other folks criticizing presentation choices without offering an alternative means to voice such criticism.
Like it or not, folks, presentation is just as important as the content being presented in most cases. If the presentation style is so distracting as to cause threads (like this one) focusing on presentation rather than content, then one should probably strive to fix that problem instead of sitting on one's haunches complaining about the flood of criticism.
In my book, therefore, presentation criticism is fair game, and I'm with the parent commenter on this. If you don't want to be criticized for using inappropriate presentation methods, then don't use inappropriate presentation methods. A more conventional blog post would have been far more appropriate for this sort of thing.
When websites suck (for example, those horrible, horrible websites that break right click, scroll wheel or the back button), nobody hesitates to point it out.
Twitter is a pretty awful format to .. essentially write a whole article. Gotta agree with GP...
> A reader emailed to complain about how this and other HN discussions often become derailed by off-topic carping about blog design. I agree completely. Could there be a more classic form of bikeshedding? It would seem parodic if it weren't sadly real. This has become more of a thing on HN lately. It needs to become less of a thing.
> I don't mean to pick on you personally, or just on this one comment. (Your second sentence alone, by the way, would have been a helpful contribution.) The problem is the tedious stampedes such comments spawn.
Honestly, what is the problem with ranting and railing about poor design, poor execution, and poor UX? This website seems obsessed with good versions of these three things so why can't we bitch about these things when they appear?
If the design is what's being shown, and you can make a constructive criticism then probably go ahead.
But it's boring and tedious when the first comments to a detailed technical post are about the blog platform or the font. It's off-putting for people writing those articles and as dang says above it's off-putting for some readers.
Sorry DanBC, I agree that my comment was probably unnecessary.
But I do feel that the medium is an important part of the message, and that the whole point of these threads are to share one's personal opinions and give feedback.
I spoke up because I do unfollow people who use twitter like this and it makes me sad because I would otherwise be interested in what they have to say.
That is exactly as annoying and sucks every time. It’s so, so, so, so very irrelevant and uninteresting and so boring. If I could nuke only one thing on HN it would be … well, it would be the horrific sexism … but after that it’s pointless complaints like these.
This is someone who doesn’t owe you anything or want anything at all from you tell an interesting story. If they were using morse code it wouldn’t matter – so no, you shouldn’t say that. (It’s always the same, boring, irrelevant talk about the presentation format. Who cares about such irrelevant things in cases such as these that are not the least little bit about presentation?! It’s so, so boring and so, so cliché. Wildly off-topic, too.)
It just goes to show you that no matter the capabilities of the medium of the day, people will do anything to expose their genitalia.
From Pompeii[1] to LEGO Universe. Gosh.
Although I have to admit that I've been puzzling about this kind of problem in my spare time because it is a very difficult problem to solve with plain algorithms.
Which makes me ask, why don't they just separate the kids who draw dongs into a separate pile and only let them interact with each other? Or something like that. Something like GTA V's "cheater pool" [2] or HN's hellbanning.
Some of the Pompeii erotic art may have had a practical purpose. I saw a documentary about Pompeii that mentioned erotic murals at a public bath. These were not the "normal" kind of erotic scenes you would find in Pompeii or other Roman cities. They were things that would be considered shocking and perverted by even Roman standards.
These murals were in an area that was the Roman equivalent of a locker room, where bath attendees would leave their clothes. Archaeologists speculate that the shocking murals were memory aids--a customer could remember where they left their clothes by remembering the shocking perverted scene on the mural above that section.
This is plausible. Shocking or unusual things are easier to remember, so this would have been more effective than just numbering or lettering the sections of the storage room.
This is also why people around my age (mid 50s) probably have an easier time remembering the resistor color code. The mnemonic I learned 40 years ago is shockingly racist, violent, and sexist--and so impossible to forget. The mnemonics taught to kids nowadays are boring and easy to forget.
> This is also why people around my age (mid 50s) probably have an easier time remembering the resistor color code. The mnemonic I learned 40 years ago is shockingly racist, violent, and sexist--and so impossible to forget. The mnemonics taught to kids nowadays are boring and easy to forget.
I'm in my early 30's and I still remember the exact mnemonic you speak of. Sorta shamefully, at that.
Just turned 30 and by the time I heard it s/Black/Bad/ happened so it was only violent and sexist. I heard it from a older professor in my early 20's and was quite shocked that it was a thing, but I remembered it.
The "Black" version is interesting, because not only is it more offensive (and so probably slightly easier to remember), it doesn't require a separate way to distinguish the colors black and brown so there is less to remember.
> his is also why people around my age (mid 50s) probably have an easier time remembering the resistor color code. The mnemonic I learned 40 years ago is shockingly racist, violent, and sexist--and so impossible to forget. The mnemonics taught to kids nowadays are boring and easy to forget.
Ha ha ha
I just memorized the sequence as a 'word'. Like the beginning of each word, so would be like BlaBroReOraYelGreBluViGraBla
(but not in English, so it's shorter, since I take only the first letter of some of the colors, so maybe BlBROYGBlVGBk)
I didn't use a phrase because I made this mnemonic myself.
Another electronics mnemonic I came up with, which is the Cathode and which is the Anode of a diode. So if you see it's something like this: --->|--- the left side is the Anode (since it looks like an A) and the right is the Cathode so it looks like a K (mirrored in this case)
I know some contemporary fancy places that have naughty art in the gents. I think it's mostly to be amusing. It's usually in contrast to the formality of the rest of the place.
I've always struggled with resistor colour codes, but after I looked up what you were talking about I think I have it instantly memorized. Better not let anyone know, though.
Never heard about that the resistor color code has another meaning beside being a color code. Though I would have preferred a simple Ohm value on 4 sides instead of the code.
Reliable printing on curved surfaces wasn't possible at the time when "miniture" resistors were being produced, and a paper wrapper would be an undesirable extra element.
Yeah, in a kids game you'll probably get an awful lot of complaints from parents when they find out that their child is suddenly only capable of entering games with dongs as the primary focus.
Because it would group all the kids who obviously don't have parental supervision into one place where people are already talking about and/or showing fake dongs.
And then some sicko comes in and wants to talk about and/or show their own.
What are they doing to stop kids from making Lego dongs in real life?
But on a serious note:
I've always wanted a "minecraft" legitimate Lego game. It's just something I would play even if it were only Single Player, but had several modes like a story mode, and then obviously a creative mode. I enjoyed Lego City Undercover, still haven't beaten it, it's quite fun to run around exploring the depths of the game.
What if someone else's kid builds a dong out of Legos and shows it to his/her friends? We'd then be ina situation more similar to the one prompting Lego's anti-dong work.
That's totally meaningless without a control that shows how it did on a set of images without nipples and how it did on a mixed set of images both with and without (after all, these could simply be selected to show 'good' cases).
Detecting nipples when you know they are present is relatively easy.
COPPA is the real deal. A friend ran a ticketing company that was fined in the 7 figures over an issue regarding email collection and a tween pop star's ticket sales.
COPPA is definitely the real deal (and the equivalent is currently being rolled out in the EU). However the reference to COPPA by @glassbottommeg actually isn't correct. COPPA is about data collection on kids without parental permission (e.g ad tracking etc.), not about content restrictions.
Otherwise it would be called COPPPA (Children's Online Privacy, Protection and Penis Act).
That said, COPPA concerns will almost certainly come into consideration here. It's not just data storage, but ways that Personally Identifying Information (PII) might be shared through a product, and whether that sharing is approved by a responsible adult, etc.
User generated content is almost always a candidate for PII leakage; for example in a block building game, you might reasonably expect a player to proudly build their full name in huge letters for all the world to see. If other players in game can see it, and a legal guardian hasn't approved that kind of behaviour (and been unambiguously informed that their child can do that) then you've got a COPPA violation. And COPPA violations are routinely prosecuted, so you need to pay attention when making a product explicitly targeted at under 13s. It makes it remarkably hard to design games for kids that are both creative and social.
It feels very bureaucratic, but despite that I still very much believe it's worth having legal safeguards like COPPA; we're still in an era where society is changing drastically in response to the internet and I wouldn't want to see the more vulnerable members of it open to exploitation.
> It feels very bureaucratic, but despite that I still very much believe it's worth having legal safeguards like COPPA; we're still in an era where society is changing drastically in response to the internet
Surely that's an argument for not having COPPA? Social standards are changing but laws, once enacted, almost never do - they tend to freeze an arbitrary set of moral judgements in place and prevent people exploring any alternatives. As you note, would Minecraft exist in Notch had lived in the USA and a friend had helpfully informed him about COPPA early on? Perhaps the risk of letting people build anything with no age verification would have seemed too risky, yet the cost and overhead of age verification + subsequent retarded user based growth would have seemed to make the project not worthwhile.
I've yet to see any real evidence based studies that show COPPA solves any real problem. It appears to be a classic case of "something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done".
I don't think so - it certainly doesn't feel like security theatre to me. Minecraft never had to worry about COPPA; Notch never set out to create a game targeted explicitly at children (it's just since found a huge market there) and player tend to host Minecraft servers themselves, which neatly side-steps a lot of the issues.
I work in an area of the industry that does regularly make multiplayer games and apps for kids. A number of clients have commissioned MMO style games through us, but their visions are usually optimistic and centred around letting kids play and explore freely. Without extensive guidance from us, they'd often want to allow things like free chat within a game world without getting explicit parental consent first - which is great for building a community of players and allowing them to interact, but a nightmare to police adequately. It requires a lot of moderation overhead, which comes with technology and staffing costs that might not be otherwise expected.
This isn't just another "think of the children!" style blanket statement with no real thought behind it. There is a real threat here. Most users in an young online community are kids who interact constructively. There might be occasional bits of swearing or abuse, but that's not really a problem. Kids enjoy breaking social taboos because it's naughty and funny. I really don't think that poses a danger in any way, although it can do damage to a brand if it becomes prevalent and public enough.
There are though a small number of adult sexual offenders that attempt to target and exploit children using these services. They do exist, and they are persistent and very difficult to defend against. I've worked closely with a number of companies that provide third party moderation tools that attempt to profile and flag such offenders through fairly sophisticated language profiling. It's difficult; there are certain otherwise innocuous words that offenders use to avoid writing anything directly incriminating. I don't worry too much about children shouting out "Penis!" in a chat room. I do worry about them divulging their home address, or agreeing to a meet somewhere, or (more commonly) being coerced into a webcam chat.
We don't need studies to attempt to see where lack of thought in this area can lead; we have actual events. There's a famous example in Habbo Hotel, where lack of adequate moderation led to a scandal the ended up with the owners turning off chat entirely (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18424400). Had there been protection laws enforced in that example, Habbo might not have ended up in that situation and its young players might not have been sexually exploited (http://www.brentwoodgazette.co.uk/Billericay-sports-coach-Ma...).
I'm sure the law will be (as usual) slow to react to change. But I'd rather it there than have no protection at all. It doesn't take malice to expose children to danger - just careless product design. There needs to be some legal liability to provide pressure to stop that happening.
> Minecraft never had to worry about COPPA; Notch never set out to create a game targeted explicitly at children
Does not matter. COPPA affects all websites or services even if you don't target them at children. All it requires is that children use the service and that you have knowledge of that fact somehow. Obviously, Notch cannot claim ignorance that children play Minecraft. Indeed, COPPA is extra-territorial so Notch theoretically has to worry about it anyway - though whether the third party server thing changes stuff is unclear (I'd hope it would but I don't have a whole lot of confidence in US law enforcement in this regard).
Re: sex offenders. COPPA isn't about that, is it? I don't see how providing chat is careless product design. I remember when I was a young teenager everyone used MSN Messenger, but the notion that Microsoft was responsible for every case of child grooming that happened through it hadn't taken hold back then. This stuff comes about because governments want to outsource the cost of enforcing the law onto random third parties instead of doing it themselves. A neat way to create invisible taxes but ultimately harmful. If there are people doing bad things on public chat services, then the police should go onto there and try to catch them (and they do). I see no reason why services themselves should have to try and do this or even shut down.
> COPPA affects all websites or services even if you don't target them at children.
I don't believe this to be true. I am not in anyway a lawyer (so please consult one before taking my advice), but I've got a fair degree of experience making COPPA compliant products. For a site or service to fall under COPPA rules, it must explicitly be "directed to children" (https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/com...). There's a little ambiguity about this term (which is ultimately resolved in court, I suppose), but you can read a little more on that FTC FAQ. It seems to be quite reasonably applied. I also believe if kids self-host their own servers in a Minecraft game, Mojang/Microsoft can't reasonably be accused of storing or sharing PII. It doesn't get near any company owned servers.
I also used IM services and chat rooms as a child, and came to no particular harm. Many, many children use those services everyday and also don't come to harm. Some do. I don't think that has much to do with COPPA. COPPA shouldn't apply to MSN and generic IM services. MSN and the like aren't directed at children; at least I can't see any evidence that would lead someone to believe that children under the 13 are the "primary target audience" for MSN, which triggers the COPPA requirements.
> Re: sex offenders. COPPA isn't about that, is it?
I think it is, yes, amongst other things. One of those P's is 'protection' - whether that's protection from exploitative marketing or groomers, it's about keeping children safe online. Making something explicitly for use by children is very different from making something for use by the general population, and you have a different kind of responsibility as part of that.
Given the number of kids walking around all the naked people at burning man, and not paying the slightest attention (well, after the first day), I doubt a replica of a penis in Lego would have any impact, negative or otherwise. Total waste of money policing that sort of stuff.
So, I can vividly remember being young. 13, probably back to 10 or so.
I did all this stuff. Looked for porn, played online games, chatted on IRC with 'old people'. Etc.
There never was an issue. The weird fears people seem to have like video chat with pedophiles didn't happen because, well, it was just as odd to me then as it would be now.
This was with little guidance from parents... in the early days of the Internet I think they just didn't know how to use it as well as I did.
I have the vague sense that barring some sort of learning disability, the idea of 'protecting' kids from most stuff is silly.
Sure, I look at a 13 year old now, and see their immaturity, but part of me feels as if that's mostly just that they don't have the pressures adults do to be respectable, to act in predictable ways, to not burn money and so on. I acted out on purpose then because society was broken for me; it still is, but as an adult we must conform to not starve and die.
Am I just weird and special or do other people feel this way too? I have the same attitude about e.g. violent video games... it doesn't really matter how much I played them when I was younger. I am not violent because a) it's not ethical and b) it has negative EV.
Are you a parent? Not trying to dismiss your opinion, just want to make a counterpoint. Sure, pedophile interactions mostly never happen. But as a parent, I agonize over the awful (although rare) events that my kids could go through. So I'm going to setup age appropriate restrictions, but I also realize I can't protect my kids from everything so ultimately need to keep talking with my kids about issues and have good lines of communication.
I'm not, but I'm not talking about parenting here, really.
I am asking whether it is unusual for me to remember my youth. If it is, then my story is just an anecdote. If not, then I would be interested in knowing whether others had reasonable thought processes.
The basic idea that a 10+ year old needs to be protected from themselves or they'll just develop neuroses/be abducted/whatever seems weird to me based on my own experience of being that age. I was just as rational as I am now - with different data points to draw from, but not self damaging.
I guess I would compare it to funerals. They are not for the benefit of the deceased.
Whether or not individuals continue to do these things is kind of a different debate.
I used IRC, chat rooms, did open source coding etc all the time when I was between I think 12 and 16. I used adult tools and resources and that's one reason I was able to get a great job right out of university. There were no issues. I even used the ICQ "chat to a totally random person" feature and made some friends in real life that way. My parents were mostly clueless, though obviously once I started getting on a train to go visit my internet friends they had to be told.
I do worry that American attempts to make a totally safe internet for every single child simply result in the thermonuking of vast amounts of greatness that children can massively benefit from. The Minecraft vs Lego Universe story is very apt.
While an interesting story, my takeaway from this (and I guess, exquisitetweets?) is that coercing long-form stories into Twitter is just really obnoxious.
On the one hand, parents who are worried about their kids seeing a Lego penis are crazy. A kid isn't going to recognize a Lego penis and if they ask about it, it's a learning opportunity.
On the other hand, Legos were a huge part of my childhood. I recently went into a Lego store and bought a big Lego kit, the $160 kind my parents couldn't afford when I was young. The security guard at the entrance laughed because I had such a giant grin on my face walking out. I'd really hate to see Lego become inaccessible to the next generation because their parents are too puritanical.
Well, ok, but you would have to be powerfully insane to conclude "Someone made a penis out of these generic construction blocks online, clearly these generic construction blocks are unsavory."
SL is still a thing. I was once paid to write a robot that wandered around SL classifying the goings-on into perversions/other. If you've ever seen SL you know that ratio.
Given that my legitimate, above board enterprises never went anywhere because 98% of the population was on adult islands getting frisky, I don't know about crying shame.
That game was a depressing look at people. I don't mean this to sound like I am not a fan of sex, but Christ, there are other pleasures in life and that game seemed like a single track mind.
A few months ago I got a haircut from a middle-aged lady with a subtle Mid-Northern U.S. (Minnessotan? Dakotan? Yooper?) accent who - in response to my responding to her "So what do you do for a living?" question with "computer programming and repair" - spent the entirety of our time together talking about how much she loved to go on Second Life and hang out with people, interspersed with various remarks about SL clients infecting her computer with viruses and being unsure how she could better protect her computer from said malware.
I'm surprised that there isn't a parental agreement requirement possible to absolve lawsuits against player created content. This is similar to the Call of Duty dong and offensive content problem in user created emblems.
Wouldn't fix the problem, which is damage to the brand. If word got around to parents that their new lego game isn't kid friendly cuz of dongs, that's far worse than any number of lawsuits. Lots of them would never buy another lego game again.
The big concern is COPPA compliance; COPPA violations don't give the parents grounds to sue, they give the FTC grounds to initiate an enforcement action. Parents aren't parties, so they have no rights to waive in an parental agreement.
> I have no idea how Minecraft hasn't been sued over this yet
Is Minecraft explicitly aimed at kids though? I mean, what exactly do you have to do to get sued if you have dongers in your game? A childish graphical profile?
A real life example of this type of trick happened with a large public sculpture in New Zealand recently. It looks innocent except from the right angle.
I didn't surprise if it was a deliberate move to making people talk about your product. Animated films for children are plenty of sexual innuendos destined to parents and nobody raise a brow. Children love the idea to break rules and boast with friends about how they discover and understand the sex innuendos, even if they don't really understand the joke at all. It takes a lot of effort by the marketing department to show everybody those 'hidden codes' that nobody will noticed otherwise.
> For instance, our observation on a typical
weekend (summer 2011) from a representative online video chat website (Omegle) indicates that 35% of the videos broadcast by this website have nudity in them. ... In this paper, we present a new approach to misbehavior detection in online video chat systems that significantly improves upon the state of the art in terms of its increased scalability while also achieving higher accuracy.
> This work is supported in part by the unrestricted gift funds from Chatroulette and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) through grant number CiC 1048298.
Lego Universe will never be as successful as Minecraft. Look at Little Big Planet and how they crushed people building trademark-infringing levels. How can you be that restrictive and hope people will flock to your platform?
I know what you mean but I often find those black band censorship in adult manga.
If you've seen Dragonball Z comic books, there are scenes where Goku's penis is uncensored and emerges in his early days or Bulma showing her boobs (vagina is erased) or flipping the bird before a major fight, and other adult themes can be found (dirty magazines, sexual innuendos).
No kid complained. I mean it made the comic book so much more worthwhile to read. Like little cherry topping on top of a great storyline and characters. This sort of 'teasing' is so prevalent in kids and teens comic books. I mean there were even more crazy ones like Ranma we watched as kids.
When I read the same comic book in English, all those 'no no not in America' type of scenes were removed or have gone thorough de-perversion.
I mean, I suspect people in general don't want to see dongs in Lego Universe or really any non-sexual game, so efforts should be taken to prevent it. But it shouldn't need to go beyond normal moderation. The only reason Lego feels the need to go beyond that is because of the social taboo. In what I imagine a "normal" society to be, dongs in LU would just be laughed off as a joke, and the builder banned for breaking the rules. Nothing more.