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How fear of penis towers held back progress on Lego Universe
Sometimes it seems like it is an unwritten rule in gaming that if you give players the ability to build things, someone will eventually make a penis. Or a forest of penises. Or a giant penis death tower that erupts lava onto the landscape.
Lego discovered this firsthand when they released Lego Universe, a family-friendly MMO and Lego building game that lasted for two short years before shutting down in January 2012. Aside from the usual questing and looting formula common to most MMOs, Lego Universe also allowed players to build their own structures on their personal properties, which could then be visited by other players.
And that’s where the penis structures come in.
According to former developer Megan Fox (no, not that one), the powers-that-be at The Lego Group mandated that lewd structures were forbidden, and the development team had to do something about it.
“The moderation costs of LEGO Universe were a big issue in general,” Fox said on Twitter. “They wanted a creative building MMO with a promise of zero penises seen.”
“Strangers could never see your builds until we’d had the team do a penis sweep on it”
According to Fox, the studio tried to create “dong detection” software that could automate the moderation process, but the team “found it to be utterly impossible at any scale. Players would hide the dongs where the filtering couldn’t see, or make them only visible from one angle / make multi-part penis sculptures.”
The logistics of policing an MMO that allowed almost unrestricted creativity led to frustrating challenges that pulled resources away from improving the game itself.
“They actually had a huge moderation team that got a bunch of screenshots of every model, every property,” Fox said. “Entirely whitelist-based building. 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.”
She added, “It was all automated, but the human moderators were IIRC the single biggest cost center for LEGO Universe’s operational costs. Or close to.”
The most popular building game without a doubt is Minecraft, but Minecraft avoids moderation issues by leaving it up to the players to police their own servers.
Fox explained, “What LEGO learned from Minecraft is – as many suggested, avoid official servers, make the moderation be not their problem.”
photo credit: LEGO WORLD TOWER KOREA 2012. via photopin (license)
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