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Remember Lego Universe? A brick-building MMO for kids launching a full year before Minecraft was a thing, yet closing in 2012, how on Earth could that not succeed? Well, says one of its developers, you have no idea how much it costs to keep that kind of a space safe for kids.
E-specially if that space has a name on it that families trust, like Lego. Megan Fox, a senior graphics coder at NetDevil (which developed Lego Universe for Lego and Warner Bros.) took to Twitter on Friday to share her experiences of building the game, after wondering how a game like Splatoon moderates, if at all, a message system where people may draw anything they want.
Fox, who founded Glass Bottom Games (their latest work is Hot Tin Roof) unloaded an absolutely riotous tale about Lego Universe with equal doses of humor, caution and bewilderment. Lego Universe required an enormous moderation process, Fox said, to make sure that, well, the game wasn't overrun by Lego penises.
The moderation costs of LEGO Universe were a big issue in general. They wanted a creative building MMO with a promise of zero penises seen.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
Yeah, good luck with that. Fox said Lego Universe was "entirely whitelist-based building," with the moderation team maintaining a catalog of every model and property in the game.
YOU could build whatever you wanted, but strangers could never see your builds until we'd had the team do a penis sweep on it.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
It was all automated, but the human moderators were IIRC the single biggest cost center for LEGO Universe's operational costs. Or close to.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
It wasn't necessarily that children were playing the game and might see a penis; it's that children were playing a Lego game and might see Lego penis.
People saying "well just allow dicks" - LEGO's brand is utterly trusted by parents. We had to uphold that trust. Which meant zero tolerance.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
Minecraft, which isn't attached to another brand (though it is by now an enormous enterprise owned by Microsoft) didn't face the same limitations or need to make the same guarantees when it was being built.
Fox related a story of a developer internally building Lego dong, and very nearly being fired for it. The dev was dicking around in his own property, Fox said, but a kid "wandered into it during a kid test." It was a "four alarm fire to find who built the penis," she said. After this, someone went off half-cocked and sent a memo laying down a "new absolute zero tolerance policy on building penises of any kind, anywhere, in the game."
Anyways, "all of that" is why every single successor to LEGO Universe has been small and missing build play. LEGO knows how expensive it is.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
Fox was swamped on Twitter after telling this story, and we don't mean to blow up her feed all over again, but the story is too good not to share. You can read the whole thing in sequence more easily here. She did ask earlier today that if anyone writes about this, that they use the picture above, by Lego Universe superfan PANGOLIN_2. We're happy to oblige there, too.
This is all obvious, simple stuff, and is why dealing w/ COPPA (which protects kids) is so damn hard in online games. Even DEVS build dongs.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
