%TOPIC_TITLE%quot;Inappropriate%TOPIC_TITLE%quot; content on ContentDB

[ShadMOrdre]

@wuzzy,

I do not ignore those arguments. Railing against societal norms is not the same as simply asking other mod authors and developers to not get banned from the tablets and computers of the biggest segment of the market, the children that constitute that vast majority of our user base.

I like modding. I like modding MT. I like to share the stuff I create. I keep it within perspective. I want my mods to get used. I keep them clean, so that if kids download them, they won't upset their parents by using it.

When I write software for medical research organizations, I do not fill the software with inappropriate content because, well, it's my right. If I want to keep that contract, I provide the software that fits the task, and leave my personal opinions, ideas and other agendas at the door. My ethics and morals follow wherever I go, and while I will stand and fight for the freedom of others to do as they wish, (having put my words where my a$$ have been), I do so within reason. We all have to live here. We should really all just follow some norms. It's what has gotten humanity through the last few million years. I don't think, in all our human arrogance, that we are gonna change much that quickly. Just watch the news, and see the wars over this stuff. You ain't makin it up. This is all detrimental to all of our well being. Fortunately, my kid doesn't watch the news.

Rules exist for a reason. Compromises exist to accomodate when the rules cannot apply. When a rule shouldn't apply, the rule should be reevaluated. But, in the context of the user base of this very child friendly game engine / game, there does need to be accountability, self-censorship, and other things that, as a part, may seem very disagreeable, but taken as a whole, make sense.

Let's keep the ability of kids everywhere to download, install, and play MT intact.

@Astrobe

I agree, MT potentially stands liable in the same ways for which we are rooting for Google and Facebook to be held accountable for the privacy issues. The server list should maybe be moderated and the in game links pointed to a moderated list instead of a wide open, wiki style list. By moderation, this could also simply mean a "rated" list. However, for adult content, some sort of login system needs to be inplace.

Midgyn,

I used SL as an example. You are totally correct to point out the much of the SL ads themselves are full of "adult" themes. It has, for the most part, become driven more by that industry than any other. In fact, when the online gambling was shut down by the US Govt, sex based content became essentially the only other revenue stream on that platform. Those two industries essentially comprised the entirety of the SL landscape and was a major reason that drove me away from SL to Opensimulator, the open source alternative, which found backing from several major organizations, who had also migrated for many of the same reasons.

[Kilarin]

I do not ignore those arguments. Railing against societal norms is not the same as simply asking other mod authors and developers to not get banned from the tablets and computers of the biggest segment of the market, the children that constitute that vast majority of our user base.

Exactly. The point isn't that our culture's attitude about sex and sexual content make sense. For the most part, they DON'T. The point is that we don't want chase away a significant segment of our user base by violating cultural norms, when, as is obvious from the current content of minetest, adult content is a minuscule percentage of demand.

[sorcerykid]

How did this topic devolve into a debate about children and sex? Some people really need to get their head out of the gutter. Rubenwardy clearly stated such content will not be hosted.

If the goal is to protect children, then once again I refer back to LinuxDirk's very apt remark:

So making sweet love is illegal, but slaughtering people is fine? I call bullsh–… double standards.

IMHO, mods that specifically promote destruction or violence or murder are not suitable for children, particularly preteens. This includes any games or mods with warfare, artillery, etc. Sure, it may be popular and common in American entertainment to nuke your enemy. But that doesn't make it appropriate for little kids. I certainly hope responsible parents (including those in this discussion) aren't turning to mainstream media for making parental decisions.

[twoelk]

we allready have icons for pvp and damage in the server list, would be nice if they where explained before needing to click them,
but all we need now is an "easy-for-non-tech-parents-option" to filter out such servers and we're done........
well maybe add a no-monsters icon and a no dark nights or caves and ...
and hope the kids don't get bored.

I remember the first times I played with my niece I had to exclude all frightening mobs but after a while she wanted them. First she stood petrified and got globbered then she learned to run and hide and build safe places. Soon she crafted weapons and stood to fight and now, even hunting mobs becomes quickly boring. The interesting thing though is she is not really interested in mightier mobs, she just fights when needed and else lets them be.

Of course a world where one never needs to fight sounds great but I don't know wether that helps kids that much. Learning to fight an abstract monster not related too much to the real world at the right time with some help, be it adult or more expierienced child, can help to learn to focus on dangers, plan a path to survival and maybe be better prepared for dangers to come in a far more cute cubic and ungoric way than any zombie-slasher-dino-sword-and-sorcerer film that is sadly rather unavoidable growing up in our current world.

[parasite]

Please, do not bring this discussion back to moralizing and describing your social and religious attitudes. Some parents do not allow 8-year-old children to leave the house alone, others do not allow them to watch TV, while others allow them to play in Second Life or the Witcher. This is an interesting topic, but it is neither a topic nor a forum for these matters. Also, discussing other games that have nothing to do with the minetest is a waste of time. This is a minetest, not parents forum.

How to rate minetest with PEGI? This is pretty hard problem. Sims 4 are rated PEGI 12 if I am correct. Note that this level, 12 not 3, allow user to use a sword " towards human-like characters".

Minetest can be played as singleplayer, and then you can have mods that will make this game even PEGI prenatal level, but when you are considering multiplayer game, all the troubles with rating starts. Note, that a situation when you unexpectedly find in the mine dungeon master, oerkkie or whatever bad mob, can be pretty scary to young kids. Also 3-6 year old player may have a lot of problems with understanding how technic or mesecon work, why to use it, and why a player with few HV quarries have a lot of resources, the way much more than the kid have. Also, such kid often feel bad, scary and cry when some other player killed him or her and do not understand that was happened as a consequences of entering somebody "private" area, taken something seemingly accessible, but what belongs to another player, or wandering after a other player step by step and demanding his attention, admiration for a primitive house or begging for some resources. Young kids do not understand hard survivals challenges, and I guess only fully creative servers with supportive admins can be rated as PEGI 3. Note, that PEGI rating should apply to the whole game, not just single mod or minetest engine!

My experience as a player indicates that it is easy to recognize the youngest children on the server, and in the survival and PvP games, they always need the assistance of an adult. They are lost if they play alone, or there is a risk, that they will learn bad things playing with teenagers. Of course, I do not generalize, it does not always have to be that way. But if the teens play aggressively, the little children do not understand it, and they have the impression that they are worse, less smart, and play the role of an easy target to be beaten and bullied somehow. They do not have sufficiently developed cognitive abilities to effectively plan a longer game strategy to gradually reach the goal. They even rarely return to their bones after death, even when they lost in that bones valuable things. And they just do not understand what is going around, they do not learn "how to play" by their own mistakes and errors, as they do not have intelectual skills which could make them understand things by thinking! Rather you need to show them directly how to do some basic things, they should see your character movements and actions doing some thing which kids can imitate later.

If there are complicated tools in the game, the youngest children will hardly be able to produce them. Adults are most often asked to build a factory or other complex thing, or a nicer house than a cobble block for a child, so that they can also use these cool things, just like other players. So what if there is no PvP in the game, and no mobs, so that there will be no violence nor something that can scare younges kids (PEGI 3). The game may be inappropriate for a young child, because the child will not understand all the rules and will not be able to achieve many goals of the game.

That are all those "will you be my friend?", "tp to me" and so on. Youngest kids are more interested to finding other kids in their young age and to talk to them on chat, than in building, gathering resources. The youngest children do not build these nasty cobble houses for being lazy, they are just too young to be able to do all the things that need to be done to make great and beautiful house with not cobble materials! And they do not understand why older players are laughting, they are just proud of their own house lol Those are also "dating" isues. Young kids often want to play a role of boyfriend, girlfriend, mommy, daddy, with own kids, brothers and sisters, uncles and so on - depending how many there are kids on given server who can freely talk and play with each other. They just build a house, schools, and act as if they were real in someone's home over and played with dolls. Whatever, kids generally play the roles in theirs gameplay no matter if it is with or without network and computers. Youngest kids and teenagers have different minds, different targets, different needs, they play minetest in different ways.

And what is more, we also got adults as players, who are interesting in something more intellectual in minetest gameplay. I am sure that these questions about possible hypothetical mods with sexual context concern not children, but adults. Who said that the minetest must be a game only for the youngest children? This game can be configured so that it can be equally fun for adults. But adults will be able to set up this game for their needs by themselves, so we should not deal with the needs of this group of players here. The misunderstanding arises from the fact that someone wanted content.minetest to be a place for all possible mods. Meanwhile, if we want minetest to be kids-friendly in its default form, just after installing on the phone, contendDB can`t contain any something which can be somehow inappropriate for young children. That's what everyone understands I hope. Another misunderstanding may arise in the fact that someone tries to understand this discussion as an attempt to limit the freedom in creating new mods. And again, that's not what this is all about. This is obvious that if devs want to use something like PEGI rating for minetest, all main games, especially those which can be run directly with few first clicks after installing minetest on a phone, should follow this rating rules. And it seems, that contentDB should do the same. I hope his is clear for evrybody.

I am disgusted and surprised at how someone here is threatening others with police or possible false allegations of some connections with pedophilia, if only the further development of our community and mods would not meet his attitudes and preferences for what he wants or does not want to show to his or her kids. We never can be sure what such user will find as a threat to his child and what can trigger his social media campaign against the minetest. I propose to ban such a person from this forum if he repeats attempts of this type of blackmail, because it is beyond the standards of any discussion. We are here to talk, not to hysterize. It is obvious that nobody here has any bad intention, and nobody here is tyring to do something wrong to that user`s child.

After this long introduction I just want to pay attention to what Wuzzy wrote before: the need of strict guidelines, rules or any kind of policy about what mods can and what cannot be officialy tagged as PEGI 3, 7, 12 or what number devs want to label the minetest. Please, let's not talk about how we care (or not) for our children, because although interesting, it is completely off topic. Do minetest really need to be tagged with PEGI level? If yes, if it need to be PEGI 3? If yes, do you know, that even if a game will meet those rules of PEGI 3, a lot of interaction between players on a server can be a way beyond of possibility to understand by a young kid? How to define violence level? How to measure violence that is made by players, not mods? What PEGI in minetest it means for mods makers? Do all mods posted on this forum meet a given PEGI level? Which not? How to point a mod that can be freely available in the minetest client to all players, and which mod should be "hidden" or available only on this forum? We have a lot of content in mods/wip mods section: technology, magic potions, mobs, npi, tools, furniture, weapons, teleports, elevators... do really all of them meet PEGI 3? What mod could not meet PEGI 3 then? This must be clear for the future modding. And form me: what about games/servers? Does will not be rated, and if yes, how? Maybe PEGI rating should have only minetest_game, not minetest as a whole engine + any kind of game or modded minetest_game?

And sorry for my english level.

[Astrobe]

I already explained in a previous post why PEGI3 (=BABY level) is unrealistic. I will not repeat that again here. Please browse trough the 96 previous posts to find the answer. :P

MTG is PEGI3. If really the swords are not PEGI3 (since there is nothing to kill, they cannot be used as weapons), they can be gone without issues. If the axes are not PEGI3, they can also be gone without issues.

PEGI3 is totally viable for single-player MTG or any creative-only single player game. Which are probably more than enough fun for very young children. A few games in ContentDB (BlockColor? SkyFactory?) also seem to be compliant.

For you and I, this is not the type of games we play or make, granted. Yes, PEGI-3 compliance "cripples" the game from our point of view. But don't forget that a significant part of the playerbase enjoy "baby-level" creative games (for instance those annoying Startrek nerds that make Enterprise ships everywhere ;-) and have no interest in killing mobs or other players.

Hence my proposed solution which aims at having a PEGI-3 compliant MT out-of-the-box (more-or-less RubenWardy's wish), while letting older users unlock the full game (our wish).

A side note: I suggest to change the "death message" to "You have been defeated" instead of "You Have DIED" (exaggeration mine). Two reasons: soften a bit the language, and better match with the usual gameplay; characters rarely really die in MT games as in Roguelikes, they just respawn.

[migdyn]

A side note: I suggest to change the "death message" to "You have been defeated" instead of "You Have DIED" (exaggeration mine). Two reasons: soften a bit the language, and better match with the usual gameplay; characters rarely really die in MT games as in Roguelikes, they just respawn.

What?
You have been defeated?

There's no opponents in MTG and some other games so this would appear when you fell of a cliff, or died from drowning? It doesn't make sense.
Also, I'm wondering why they chose these weird ages. 3, 7, 12, 16, 18?
The only one that makes sense is 18 - that's when you become adult. The other ones are just random number they made up. 3 as the minimal rating? Does that mean a 2 year olds can't play that game? 7? Where did they take that from? 12? What does the age of 12 mean? It doesn't make anyone more eligleble for playing games! 16 - what? It's only 2 years behind 18! These rating make no sense. These rating should also be based on gender and race. Example MALE-PG-16 should be equal to FEMALE-PG-7. White females are more sensitive to certain topics, while black males are brave, fearless, and unsensitive.

[v-rob]

Rubenwardy has stated what he is going to do, and he's in charge of it. This discussion is at an end. I have my own opinions, but I won't say them.

This topic should probably be locked.