As long as I can remember, we’ve had some type of video game console, and I still enjoy them. It stands to reason my son will dabble as well, especially since he likes to hold an inactive Wiimote and play baseball with me.
But the “dad reflex” is kicking in, and when it comes to my kid and video games, it’s not the content of the games that worries me, its the players he’ll undoubtedly encounter. The apparently junior-high-age kids that are just as skilled at swearing and throwing racial slurs as they are dropping the the targets of their R-rated diatribes.
Well, things may get a bit easier. According to Ars Technica, Microsoft was awarded a patent for “real-time” voice chat censoring. Think broadcast television’s seven-second delay, only automated.
Microsoft applied for the patent in 2004.
Whether it’s game chat, internet forums, or anywhere else free Internet speech tends to pop up, profanity filters aren’t exactly 100 percent effective. But this is better than nothing.
Sure, the tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist in me worries about what Big Brother applications this will bring, and my journalism background causes me to get a little twitchy about censorship. But if this technology remains within this very targeted usage, it’s hard not to see the benefit.
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While Microsoft is a private company (in the sense of non-governmental), and thus is exempt from 1st Amendment regulation, this news gives me great concern over the future application of this technology. Will this make its way into radio? Who controls the banned list? If the Democrats get their wish in reinstating the Orwellianly named “Fairness Doctrine,” will the government seek to use the ability to elide words and bad ideas from the public airwaves?
Besides, how long before the F-bomb is simply replaced with Fark, or is replaced with FAQ? It can only be so effective. Voice Reco has come a long way, but it still has difficulties with accent and inflection. How long before every Live conversation sounds like driving through a tunnel on a cell phone?
I guess I blindly (time might prove it to be falsely) assumed it would work similar to games like WoW’s mature language filter, where you had the option to disable or enable the feature. If it doesn’t bother a person, they can just leave it disabled.
The technology was coming; it was only a matter of time and a question of which company would get to it first.
Obviously, I would be very concerned if was implemented on a widespread level and abused. Though given how attuned and trigger-happy the two political factions in this country get when it comes to something like real or perceived bias by any of the cable news channels, the government–even under an administration as Orwellian as this current one was at its height–would have a hard time getting away with it.
We’re probably getting ahead of ourselves. (Then again, maybe not, given that the government is traditionally bad at keeping technology laws timely and relevant.)
But, in terms of being able to press a button and have a filter that worked even half time (which is probably realistic), I’d feel a lot better about it.
I *hope* that when the baby is born, I’ll be able to supervise what they watch on TV, what video games, they play, etc. This way if there is any language that I don’t want my child to hear, I can control it by taking them away from it, etc. No offense, and I’m certain these words will be some of the first I eat when I’m a father, but it seems to me that too many people rely on TV as a babysitter for their children, and then complain when the kids learn something they didn’t want them to learn. Same goes with the Internet…
We monitor very closely the television shows they watch, the sites they visit on the internet and the games they play. My kids also understand (because we explained it to them) that there are some shows, games, sites that are for grown-ups. They also know that there are some words that are not for little kids to say (and we’ve done our best to prevent them from hearing them), specifically “Grandpa words” since their grandpa’s seem somewhat immune to our pleas to watch their language… It can be done, but it takes a fair amount of vigilance (and an early bedtime doesn’t hurt either). I’m not sure what age it is appropriate to hear F-bombs, the S-word and the many lesser curses, but I do know that it time yet.
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