There used to be a blog where a developer who worked for Disney and their Toon Town MMO discussed the absurd difficulty of trying to keep young kids "safe" in an MMO.
The bottom line is this: If you give kids literally any way to communicate, they will use it to bully each other and destroy the "kid friendly" nature of the game. If you let kids place objects in the world, they will spell out their home address for a pedophile by dropping objects to create words and then build a giant penis next to it. If you give kids the ability to emit only a few specific pre-approved sentences as a "chat" feature, they will find a way to sext with it, and then tell a pedophile their specific location through an ad-hoc code involving character facing direction and specific sentences.
Kids are smart, and imaginative, and don't understand or respect the concept of "You aren't supposed to do that" and don't recognize the danger of telling strangers your home address (in as much as there is actual danger there, as "stranger danger" is massively overstated) and will utilize ANY possible signal channel to explore taboo topics in an environment that seems safe.
Like, people in the Wii days shared friend codes in multiplayer shooters that had zero chat by using gunshot decals to spell out friend codes one digit at a time!
Either don't make a game where strangers can interact in any way, or pay shitloads for aggressive moderation like disney did. Those are your two options.
Or just do what roblox does and let kids be found by literal pedophiles who then go on to sexually message them and just somehow not have parents freak the fuck out? Also you get to literally profit from the work of children. I guess the moral of the story is to sell your soul to the devil because he has great PR
The bottom line is this: If you give kids literally any way to communicate, they will use it to bully each other and destroy the "kid friendly" nature of the game. If you let kids place objects in the world, they will spell out their home address for a pedophile by dropping objects to create words and then build a giant penis next to it. If you give kids the ability to emit only a few specific pre-approved sentences as a "chat" feature, they will find a way to sext with it, and then tell a pedophile their specific location through an ad-hoc code involving character facing direction and specific sentences.
Kids are smart, and imaginative, and don't understand or respect the concept of "You aren't supposed to do that" and don't recognize the danger of telling strangers your home address (in as much as there is actual danger there, as "stranger danger" is massively overstated) and will utilize ANY possible signal channel to explore taboo topics in an environment that seems safe.
Like, people in the Wii days shared friend codes in multiplayer shooters that had zero chat by using gunshot decals to spell out friend codes one digit at a time!
Either don't make a game where strangers can interact in any way, or pay shitloads for aggressive moderation like disney did. Those are your two options.
Or just do what roblox does and let kids be found by literal pedophiles who then go on to sexually message them and just somehow not have parents freak the fuck out? Also you get to literally profit from the work of children. I guess the moral of the story is to sell your soul to the devil because he has great PR