PlayStation Home (also marketed and referred to simply as Home) is a community-based service for the PlayStation Network which entered into open beta on 11 December 2008. Looks like in an effort to curb as much "bad" language as possible from Home, recently SFgate.com reported that Sony has blocked words such as "gay", "lesbian" and "bisexual". This was discovered by a guy who wanted to make a straight/gay alliance group and tagging it with the same terms and having them filtered out.
The details are as bleow:
Michael Marsh, an 18-year-old gamer from Norwalk, Conn., wanted to set up a gay/straight alliance club in PlayStation Home, Sony's new free 3-D virtual world component for the PlayStation 3.
The problem was that the words he was using - "gay," "lesbian" and "bisexual" - were being filtered from text chats and were not being allowed in the naming of clubs or in postings in club forums. Marsh, who is straight but supports gay rights, said he raised the issue with Home community managers during the private beta test, but the problems persisted after the public beta introduction of Home on Dec. 11.
"I can understand if they're filtering out profanity, but if feel like it's discrimination," Marsh said. "By blocking a word like 'gay,' which is a preferred term by the gay community, you're encouraging it as a bad word."
The censorship issue is just one of a number of glitches and problems that have dogged Home, which was designed as a virtual social community for gamers. Users had trouble getting into the world on the first day and continued to have trouble connecting, prompting Sony to issue a patch aimed to fixing those problems. The fix, however, temporarily suspended voice chat.
Sony Computer Entertainment America spokesman Patrick Seybold said the company is working to improve Home on a daily basis and is incorporating user concerns and suggestions. He emphasized that while the virtual world is open to the public, it is still being tested and is a work in progress.
In the case of the censored words, Seybold said, Home employed filters to prevent defamation in Home's closed test version. But when the service went public, he said, it should have started allowing those words. Some other users, however, noticed that the filtering continued, and blocked words like "Christ," "Jew" and even "Hello," which apparently was flagged because it starts with the word "hell." Seybold said the company is looking into the censoring of words in Home's clubs.
The long-delayed Home has been a major undertaking for Sony as it tries to build a more robust online community around its PlayStation 3 video game console. The world is not only aimed at fostering more connections between gamers but also represents money-making opportunities for Sony and other brands that want to sell virtual goods.
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