UGC Always Also Stands for "User-Generated [Expletive]"

Funny story - we were asked to make dong detection software for LEGO Universe too. We found it to be utterly impossible at any scale.

— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015

This is a pretty amusing Twitter thread by a former senior graphics coder for LEGO Universe, the MMO based on the beloved block system, detailing all the headaches the developers went through to prevent the often-underaged users from using the LEGOS to build LEGO-based dongs. Headaches, and a lot of money for extra staffing costs. It's just yet another case study which emphasizes three key, inter-connected takeaways for virtual world developers:

• If you give users 3D content building tools, they're going to use them to build dongs and so on. Always.
• So if your virtual world is open to minors, expect to devote enormous resources to censoring content, lest angry parents/lawsuits/bad PR/etc. come your way.
• Instead, think about allowing UGC only on third party servers, so you can honestly claim no oversight or control over offensive UGC, i.e., e.g. user-generated cocks.

As Andy Baio points out on his blog (where I found this LEGO thread), "Minecraft never hosted servers, so it wasn't an issue for them." It's too late for Second Life to take this option, but it looks like High Fidelity is going this way.

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Comments

[Metacam Oh]

and the Lab is going to make the same mistake with Sansa? The greed is transparent. They want another land pyramid scheme and to repeat history.