Wizard101 Interview
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When a game allows -- and, in some cases, encourages -- grown-ups and young ones to play alongside one another, the biggest jewel of the kids' gaming crown comes under threat: safety. Ask the Wizard101 team which feature they're most proud of, and which they consider most key to their diverse and collaborative playerbase, and it's their safety mechanisms they name first.
"We took another look at the traditional MMO filtering system," vice president and creative director Fred Coleman tells Gamasutra. "Usually the way these games work... is they will allow you to say whatever you want to say and then they'll run it through a filter. We decided to assume every word was bad unless we knew it to be good."
This is a more complex effort than it sounds: It begins with an 8,000 word "safe" dictionary, or whitelist, of words that can't possibly be used to ill ends -- this doesn't just exclude "bad" language, as in the traditional "blacklist", but words like the names of U.S. cities and towns, as there's no good reason anyone would need to be disclosing their real-world location in a kids' game.
However, even the "safe" dictionary has its loopholes. Plenty of words, like "in", "my", and "pants" that seem innocuous when separated might mean something else when combined. "So on top of that whitelist system, we created... a 'bad phrase' system so it recognizes those situations," adds Coleman.
