At this years E3 Nintendo *cough* came out all guns blazing in an attempt to sell the Wii U to the masses. One of these guns was the Miiverse social network. A hub were gamers can meet and talk about all kinds of gaming related stuff. But as anyone who has been gaming on-line, it wont take long before he idiots invade and start with the offensive and rude comments and slagging matches.
Nintendo doesn’t like this of course, they are a family friendly company and such behaviour will not be tolerated. According to a report in the LA Times, Nintendo has a three-pronged strategy to help keep the Miiverse clean. The first is your typical word tracking software, highlighting all those pesky swear words. Nothing new there and nothing that people can’t get around if they really want to. The second measure is user submitted complaints. Again, this is nothing new, and in some respects pointless as the offensive material has already been sent and offended little Johnny.
But the big and rather annoying third approach is the dreaded Human Resources. This means Nintendo will be spending some of their hard-earned Wii money on hiring employees to monitor the Miiverse. This basically translates to people reading your Messages, pictures etc etc and then determining if they are appropriate or not. This in turn means there could be a delay between you sending something and your gaming buddy receiving it. Depending on how many people Nintendo employ this could mean quite a substantial delay.
Head honcho at Nintendo Satoru Iwata said he considered 30 minutes to be an “acceptable” lag.
What do you all think? is this acceptable if it keeps the Miiverse clean and tidy or do you think it’s a Big Brother type step too far?
