Family Friendly: Where’s the Line?

As we all know, Nintendo work very very hard to preserve their child-friendly status. Rather then being allowed to simply hop online and play other people, most of their games require you to swap “friend-codes” through a different medium. Of course, rather than making sure you only play with people who are safe, it’s just resulted in kids posting their friend codes on the Internet for everyone to see. Have a look at last year’s Animal Crossing post or our mostly-unused forums for some prime examples.

But rather than focus on that particular failure of child-protection attempts, I’m posting about another one.

My savegame for Mario and Sonic At The Olympics is not under my usual handle, Weefz. At first I thought that perhaps someone else had taken the name, despite the fact that we had the game within days of release. As it turns out, there’s no restriction on unique names. Still, I tried Weefz1, WeefzTyree and many others with no success. Finally, we clocked it. I had fallen foul of the naughty word filter. Apparently, “wee” is no longer the acceptable term for children to use when referring to urine. o_0

So, should you ever see a Wiifz in the Mario and Sonic online records table, that’s me.

Of course, once we figured this out, we had to push the boundaries. Here’s a small fraction of unacceptable phrases for a savegame file.

And there we have it… the difference between me and a person of upstanding moral fortitude lies somewhere between “wee” and “teabagging”

This sort of character string blacklist throws too many false positives. It also doesn’t work. If someone really wants to be a rude word on the Internet, they’ll find a way.