Megan Fox

Players would hide the dongs where the filtering couldn't see, or make them only visible from one angle / make multi-part penis sculptures.

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.

They actually had a huge moderation team that got a bunch of screenshots of every model, every property. Entirely whitelist-based building.

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.

It was all automated, but the human moderators were IIRC the single biggest cost center for LEGO Universe's operational costs. Or close to.

And "that" is why Trove/etc were able to make better building MMOs. They didn't have to worry about little kids seeing dongs. We REALLY did.

We even had an employee very nearly fired for building a penis. It was on his own property, but a kid wandered into it during a kid test.

We're talking "test operator rushed forward, blocks the monitor, slams the game closed, four alarm fire to find who built the penis" here.

After which a memo went out indicating our new absolute zero tolerance policy on building penises of any kind, anywhere, in the game.

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.

This is a roundabout way of saying "never build an online game for kids / I have no idea how Minecraft hasn't been sued over this yet"

People saying "well just allow dicks" - LEGO's brand is utterly trusted by parents. We had to uphold that trust. Which meant zero tolerance.

I'm.... relatively positive I can talk about this stuff. The agreements signed when the studio shut down had more to do with defamatio, etc.

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.

And they basically can't compete with Minecraft, because Minecraft can just shrug that entire problem off. So they've focused elsewhere.

I expect stories of the sunk costs gone into LEGO Universe are told to young LEGO execs at bed time, as cautionary tales to never try again.

@glassbottommeg @DarkestKale Did you consider mechanical turking it?

@mikelovesrobots @DarkestKale We contracted with a moderation group that amounted to the same thing. The volume was just huge and costly.

@glassbottommeg Why is a lego dong such a big thing (no pun intended)? It's all the viewers interpretation and many kids would not see it?

@_allo Because of the brand LEGO represents to parents, mostly. Anything that says LEGO, parents assume to be absolutely safe for all kids.