Give another human being a creative tool with the instruction to make anything, and odds are that first creation is going to be some variety of dong. It’s just human nature. This is funny when it’s a bunch of adults but a pretty huge issue when you’re making a game meant for children. The developers of LEGO Universe have recently spoken up about the challenges of making a building game in which every creation had to be very closely scrutinized for… well, you get the idea.
In a world where games like Minecraft and Landmark have both taken off, it’s relatively obvious that creative building games are welcomed. The problem was that preventing the display of wee-wees was an absolute ironclad portion of the game’s development; it couldn’t be automated, the branding required constant hypervigilance. As a result, there was a huge cost associated with just moderating the game, extending even to the developers playing around with the toolset. By extension, it turns out that there’s really no way to build software to automatically detect dangly bits.
