E3 2012

Nintendo’s Wii U is implementing a huge number of social networking features into the Mii Universe that ties all of its games together. But censoring that content is going to take a while, according to Nintendo chief executive Satoru Iwata.

If you’re a discerning parent and are worried that your child will be seeing bad language or something even worse, rest assured that Nintendo will have a whole crew working on filtering that content. But in turn, anything that you post may be subject to the same “Level 5 Clearance” type of scrutiny.

Nintendo’s filtering system will be three-prong, as the LA Times discussed with Iwata during E3. First, there will be automatic content scanning for words like a**, s***, b****, n*****, d***, and most likely, even less obvious ones like “poppycock”.

But the other two methods Nintendo will rely heavily on are community flagging and “human resources”—which could take a while based on demand. As Iwata explains:

“The attraction of a social network is the immediacy of the feedback,” Iwata said. On the other hand, it’s absolutely essential that parents need to feel comfortable with Miiverse as a safe place for their children, he added.

That raises the question: What is an acceptable time lag that satisfies both requirements? Is it 30 minutes? Or three hours?

Iwata said that the company will monitor feedback from its users when the service launches to answer that question. “But personally, I think 30 minutes should be acceptable,” he said.

A whole 30 minutes to censor anything that you’ll see online? That kind of defeats the purpose of the Internet’s instantaneous method of community interaction, but we’ll have to see how it works.

Source: LA Times