Why can’t you use the words “train” or “help” to take territory from your friends?
Reports have come in from playing the new XBLA version of Denki’s Quarrel concerning some curious word choices. Some players said simple words like “train” or “help” are restricted from use, while others report weird words like “dof” are just fine. One of the developers from Denki tried to explain that the game uses the Scrabble dictionary for its word list, but that certain words are also blacklisted by Microsoft for use over XBLA.
“Quarrel uses the Collins official Scrabble dictionary comprising over 110,000 words up to eight letters in length, including a huge collection of words deemed ‘offensive’ by Collins, such as ‘arse’, ‘shit’, ‘wank’ and ‘fuck’,” said Gary Penn, but he said those are only restricted when playing multiplayer.
“You can make any offensive word you can find in singleplayer mode – unless you have the Xbox ‘Family Setting’ turned on.”
The other restrictions are where some of the strangeness comes in. “Microsoft has an additional filter in place for all Xbox Live games, which we have to support,” Penn went on. “But while we have to use that filter, we don’t know which words are permitted. From playing, we do know that it includes such oddities as ‘help’, ‘start’, ‘skid’, ‘poop’, ‘bung’, ‘hung’, ‘dice’ and ‘god’. Microsoft clearly has its reasons for censoring such words within Live games.”
When I first heard those words were restricted, I started wracking my brain for any sexual slang that contained either of those words. And despite my dirty mouth, I couldn’t think of one. To Urbandictionary.com! … Oh, dear lord. Really? Really?
Source: Edge
Published: Jan 27, 2012 03:17 pm