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Bookworm Adventure and Political Correctness
Let me get one thing out of my system before I begin this little tirade: I loathe political correctness. Or, to be more in tone with that statement, political correctness can suck my hairy ass. I do realize that people find different things offensive, but I feel insulted in a vague way when people decide what I can and cannot express. I think Anthrax puts it best:
Now you might take offense
To a word like “fuck” or “shit”
But you fuckin’ don’t have the right
To discriminate me for saying it!
This is actually kind of curious, considering that I’m close to finishing an uber-cute game called Sheeplings that doesn’t feature a mean bone in its entire metaphorical body. It used to, though: previously I had the text “Dammit, you lost!” when you lost a level. Due to pressure (well, honest suggestions rather) I changed it to something less offensive; apparently mothers and kids might find “dammit” an unnecessarily strong word. Cue rolling of my eyes.
That little anecdote was put there to show that I’m not only an offensive person – I’m also a hypocrite.
Anyway, onto today’s experiment in political correctness: Bookworm Adventures by PopCap Games. It’s a lovely game in which you make up words from a set of available letters in order to defeat enemies, gain experience, and advance the story. I liked the original Bookworm, and I love this game: it has a progressing storyline and it’s not timed! The two facts combine into something I thoroughly enjoy on a lazy Saturday like this.
But oh, what’s this? I tried to compose an unorthodox word:
Neither CUNT nor CUNTS is a valid word. Meh! I got my first whiff of fear – was I playing a dumbed-down game with a censored word list?!
But hey! PENIS works just fine (and gave me a pretty good attack to boot). Time to investigate this further…
The silly WEE works just fine as well, as I suspected, but this doesn’t:
SHIT is banned! What the hell? That has to be one of the most common words in the English language, not counting prepositions and such. What about a more toned-down version…
Nope, SHITE isn’t allowed either. Meh! I’m really starting to dislike this. Time for a few other words:
DONG: not allowed. SHAG: allowed. The very common and practical word FISTER isn’t allowed. Anyway, I could go on and on with more tests, but I’ve reached my conclusion:
Why yes, Moxie! I would like to know why PopCap is censoring the word list. And I also would like to know how they’re deciding what words are okay and what aren’t. Why is PENIS, WEE and SHAG okay but SHIT isn’t? And is CUNT really such a horrible word that you have to remove it from your list?
I don’t see the point of the censoring. Kids can still spell the naughty words; what would happen if they got points for them as well? Would they be encouraged to use such words – is that what PopCap are afraid of? It’s not like they’re displaying bad words themselves – they’re just giving people the choice. I guess I’m most definitely a pro-choice person, eh.
My aversion toward political correctness isn’t a new thing. Back in 1998 I fell in love with a schoolmate’s game Chickens 2, in which you slaughter innocent little chickens trying to – ah-hah – cross the road. Well, a patch of grass actually. This game featured lots of gore and blood. I wanted to push this idea further, though: I thought about what people would find taboo, and eventually came up with a brilliant idea… A game where you killed cute and innocent babies. The babies would get mutilated in various ways, and cry and sob heart-wrenchingly.
I wonder how many people I would have offended with that game. Maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t have enough productivity to fulfil all my strange ideas.
February 24th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
[...] Original post by Karja and software by Elliott [...]
February 25th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
I DO know the point of this. I noticed it myself when I played the game, and was horrified and aghast, but then I looked at the high scores. The ONLINE high scores, which list your best words. Think they’re going to let naughty language on there?
February 26th, 2007 at 7:00 am
OooOOoh, right.. Online highscores. Ehm, I think I’m too focused on single-player gaming, so I didn’t even notice that they had such a list. O-kay. That would explain quite a bit; and I’m surprised that they even allow mild things like “penis” then.
November 18th, 2007 at 5:33 am
They could merely censor the online listings. That would reduce the number of people playing “let’s see what we can get past the censor filter” (we’ve found some British English colloquialisms that pass muster), and that would improve the online listings from their point of view.