Been playing StarCraft 2 beta a bit lately, with the fine folks at Final Form Games.  I had originally been down on it since it didn’t sound like it was going to have a 2 player co-op single player game.  (Unlike Dawn of War, Red Alert 3 etc.)  Being a big fan of co-op, this made me sad.  Then we discovered 2v2 multiplayer, and life became beautiful and full of flowers.  And explosions.  Actually, mostly explosions.  Frequently in my base, but occasionally in other peoples’, which generally makes me happy.

One thing that I’ve noticed though, is that the game features an almost comical profanity filter.  To, you know, keep people’s delicate sensibilities intact in the in-game chat.  Happily it can be easily disabled or circumvented (standard tricks like putting spaces in the word work) but so far we’ve left it on, figuring that most people will leave it on by default, and we’d rather make sure we know when we’re being bleeped out.  Because you see, it is a bit… overzealous… in what it considers inappropriate.  Read on for our inappropriate findings!

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It looks like video games are on their way to court again.  In particular, a 2005 law in California prohibiting selling of violent video games to minors.  It has been struck down once already by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, (on grounds that it violated free speech rights) but is on its way to be heard by the Supreme Court.

All of that is interesting, fascinating and tremendously important for the future of the industry, etc.  As a programmer, the “is programming free/protected speech” issue is naturally somewhat important to me.  I would be saddened to see a law that made it illegal for budding programmers (who are minors) to make crappy remakes of Double Dragon and show them to their (also minor) friends.

But that’s not the part I want to talk about right now.  All of this got me curious enough to look at the law in question, and one part in particular seems really really odd to me.  I realize that reading through legal texts isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, but bear with me for a moment, and check out this part:

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