Minecraft competitor? Don’t get cocky
Someone think about the children! Like my own personal brand, LEGO is a family-friendly, name-stealing company. And so the open-ended, Minecraft-like builder LEGO Worlds has some problem what with immature idiots’ propensity to build cock. Idiots like this one.
And so let’s strap in for a story from Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore a Fedora developer Megan Fox who remembers one of the things that killed the last LEGO MMO, LEGO Universe, after hardly a year.
Hint: Don’t sleep on cocks.
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
Players would hide the dongs where the filtering couldn’t see, or make them only visible from one angle / make multi-part penis sculptures.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
The moderation costs of LEGO Universe were a big issue in general. They wanted a creative building MMO with a promise of zero penises seen.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
They actually had a huge moderation team that got a bunch of screenshots of every model, every property. Entirely whitelist-based building.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
YOU could build whatever you wanted, but strangers could never see your builds until we’d had the team do a penis sweep on it.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
It was all automated, but the human moderators were IIRC the single biggest cost center for LEGO Universe’s operational costs. Or close to.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
And “that” is why Trove/etc were able to make better building MMOs. They didn’t have to worry about little kids seeing dongs. We REALLY did.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
We even had an employee very nearly fired for building a penis. It was on his own property, but a kid wandered into it during a kid test.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
This is a roundabout way of saying “never build an online game for kids / I have no idea how Minecraft hasn’t been sued over this yet”
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
