I remember reading a mulitplayer Lego game dev talk about how her team spent most of their time creating algorithms to detect penis shaped block sets for censorship reasons.
Sounds difficult to achieve. I attended University of Texas at Austin, and the campus has a central tower that my psychology professor used as an example of something phallic. The dividing line would have to be rather precise not to exclude too much.
If I remember the original article correctly, it WAS too hard. It proved impossible to prevent offensive shapes from sneaking in. It actually killed the game.
When Minecraft came along a few years later, they avoided the problem by making users host the servers. This shifted liability away from the central developer and put the onus on the player community to sort themselves out.
If I user makes a suggestive shape out of lego blocks inside a 3D game, what liability is there? Much less surely than any of the text chat you get on virtually any online game??
Does/had Minecraft ever had a major problem with what one might term "phallo-philes"?
