Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

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lindsay40k
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Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by lindsay40k »

During a game just now, an Elf archer was spawned with the name 'Mong'.

In the UK, 'mong' is a disablist term for people with Down's Syndrome; IMO it's not appropriate.
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Iris
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by Iris »

That kind of names are randomly generated using an automated algorithm on recruitment (or when spawning units with the generate_name attribute set to yes). We don’t have any fine-grained control over the outcome of the algorithm—unless the whole name is found in the generator’s input, which is not in this case—and blacklisting every potentially offensive word from all languages (or transliterations thereof) using the Latin alphabet doesn’t sound very feasible.
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doofus-01
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by doofus-01 »

Randomly assigned names can be changed by the player, usually. If it really offends you, you have the power.

If the player is just itching for offense and reasons for outrage, there is nothing anyone can do, as Shadowmaster said, short of removing the naming system. Why let such jerks ruin things for everyone else?
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by ancestral »

Context is ever so important. Dick is a formerly common name in the U.S. which is still used quite a bit in parlance today, as a nickname for people who are named Richard. Nevertheless, the word also has a secondary, often derogatory, use… but that doesn’t mean it’s a banned name by any means. How it’s used dictates whether it’s appropriate or not.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by lindsay40k »

I can understand that it would be a significant bolt-on to add a filter to the random name generator. But if the name generator were producing three certain words, one that rhymes with 'bigger', one that rhymes with 'maggot' and one that rhymes with 'hacker', I'm not sure how 'change the name yourself if it offends you' would be accepted as a response by players who are black, gay or have cerebral palsy.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by RedAdder »

It isn't a technical question, it is a question of being manageable.

One would have to maintain a huge list of words which are considered offensive by someone, it would never be complete, and surely someone would appear who would find the very existence of such a list to be inappropriate.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by Bob_The_Mighty »

lindsay40k wrote:In the UK, 'mong' is a disablist term for people with Down's Syndrome; IMO it's not appropriate.
Just for the record, I live in the UK and was unaware the term had this meaning.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by lindsay40k »

If a forum user were to address other forum users with racist, homophobic or disablist terms, they'd be warned and eventually kicked; not being aware that the language is offensive would not be an excuse.

If a player were to address other players in the game lobby or public games with racist, homophobic or disablist terms, they're be warned and eventually kicked; not being aware that the language is offensive would not be an excuse.

If an add-on were to be made that featured racist, homophobic or disablist terms, I would assume that the author would be told to remove the offensive terms, and the add-on possibly taken off the server until they complied; not being aware that the language is offensive would not be an excuse.

To be frank, I don't understand why the argument even needs to be made that racist, homophobic or disablist terms should not be acceptable when they come from the game itself; the random name generator not being aware that the language is offensive is not an excuse.

Neither do I accept the 'it would be difficult to make the list complete' argument. It would be simple to set up a thread in which players can report names that are inappropriate, and use that as a guide to updating the list as versions are updated. If a term sounds obscure or unlikely, thirty seconds on Google would confirm that 'whoa, ______ cropping up as a name would be incredibly insensitive to German people with learning difficulties, let's add that to the list'.

Nor do I accept the 'some would find the existence of the list offensive' argument. Does anyone find it offensive that forum users, players and add-on authors aren't allowed to use the n-word?

Does the iOS port of Wesnoth use the same name generator? Apple are notoriously strict about apps sold or distributed through the App Store being family-friendly.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by zookeeper »

lindsay40k wrote:Neither do I accept the 'it would be difficult to make the list complete' argument. It would be simple to set up a thread in which players can report names that are inappropriate, and use that as a guide to updating the list as versions are updated.
Pardon me for being blunt, but what you are suggesting is a thread in which people are invited to post offensive words... that sounds very unlikely to end well, and the moderators would be in a very unenviable position trying to police that.
lindsay40k wrote:Nor do I accept the 'some would find the existence of the list offensive' argument.
I don't think it would be reasonable at all to find the existence of the list offensive, but nevertheless I don't think it's a particularly good idea to include a list of offensive words with the game. I mean, it'd end up being a plaintext file or list with every offensive word we've wanted to avoid written in it for every giggling juvenile to peruse. That doesn't sound much better than the name generator extremely rarely coming up with a potentially offensive word.
lindsay40k wrote:If a forum user were to address other forum users with racist, homophobic or disablist terms, they'd be warned and eventually kicked; not being aware that the language is offensive would not be an excuse.

If a player were to address other players in the game lobby or public games with racist, homophobic or disablist terms, they're be warned and eventually kicked; not being aware that the language is offensive would not be an excuse.

If an add-on were to be made that featured racist, homophobic or disablist terms, I would assume that the author would be told to remove the offensive terms, and the add-on possibly taken off the server until they complied; not being aware that the language is offensive would not be an excuse.

To be frank, I don't understand why the argument even needs to be made that racist, homophobic or disablist terms should not be acceptable when they come from the game itself; the random name generator not being aware that the language is offensive is not an excuse.
I think it's as good an excuse as anything can ever have. It's a simple name generator algorithm generating a name, not a person insulting another. I can understand someone getting offended if they think that the game picks from a pool of static pre-defined names instead of stitching syllables together, because then someone would have needed to intentionally include the offensive words, but if one knows that that's not the case, how could they possibly be offended by whatever the generator comes up with? I really don't see any excuse to be offended at the sight of a word no one composed.

That said, if an offensive word can be prevented by making a trivial little edit to the name list based on which the names are generated, I'm sure no one objects to that. Finding out what edits would be required would likely be quite a bit of work, though.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by JaMiT »

This discussion about names transplanted from one language (Wesnothian?) to another (English) with unfortunate consequences reminded me of the last panel in this comic. What significance that may have (if any) is a subject I will leave to others to determine.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by Pentarctagon »

It also brings up other problems. What if a word has multiple meanings and one is "offensive" but the other meanings are not? What if the meaning in one language is something good, but in another it is something bad? What about actual names, like say, "adolf" and "hitler"? And how would we determine what words are "sufficiently offensive" to merit banning from the names generator? The whole thing is a giant grey area and imo the time and effort that it would take to make it would be better off spent elsewhere.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by AnnieSpambot »

I live in the UK, and the original usage which you seem to be objecting to went of of use many years ago, and now refers simply to a lack of common sense. I work with disabled people, both physically and mentally, every day and they do not recognise this term any more in the way you mean it.
Trying to compile a complete list of words offensive to anyone throughout the globe (while amusing in concept) is obviously ridiculous in practice. As seen with the word mong, usage and meaning of words change, sometimes very quickly. For example, after certain popular culture personalities appeared over here, for a while both 'Joey' and 'Benny' were considered insulting. For two of my uncles this proved a tad difficult for a while, but at no point did they stop using their names in case of offending others.
Plus in this case as Zookeeper says, it's a random name generator. To find such disablist is maybe trying too hard to be offended.
Going that route we may soon need to be evaluating the whole knalgan faction as it wasn't too long ago that the term dwarf was considered offensive in the UK.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by lindsay40k »

Checking back in to say that I didn’t only stop interacting with this thread, my interactions with Wesnoth in general massively fell off. I thought I’d come back and rake it over, having been recently offered a game of Wesnoth by the friend who got me into it, whereupon I mentioned this thread as a thing that put me off. Maybe the culture here has changed from ‘there’s nothing wrong with making a random word generator and leaving it to periodically produce slurs, and there is no way to stop it from doing so, the problem is people looking for something to be offended by’.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by Ravana »

You could create [modification] which removes all names when unit is created.
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Re: Sort-of bug report - inadvertent offensive content

Post by Helmet »

Rather than sharing my opinion, if I even have one, here's a scene from the show "30 Rock" where someone uses a bag of scrabble tiles to randomly generate a name for a new product...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5onC93dc0cE
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