MI6 2008: ESRB, Sony and Microsoft on policing user-created content

Moderating user-created content can be tricky business. That’s exactly why executives from Sony, Microsoft and the ESRB decided to discuss the matter at the recent 2008 MI6 Conference. Fortunately, they managed to come up with a couple of solutions to the problem. Find out what these are in the full article, right after the jump.

What would you do if someone were to create questionable user-generated content and start spreading it around? That was brought up during the 2008 MI6 Conference as various executives tackled the problem of policing such content. The ESRB‘s Patricia Vance, SCEA‘s Tony Justman, Microsoft‘s Boyd Multerer and Newseek’s N’Gai Croal all participated in the discussion.

It was Croal who asked the question: “How do you tackle something like people drawing penises in Echochrome and LittleBigPlanet?” The executives managed to narrow the solutions down to at least two possible ones: self and community-policing and the correcting power of legal action.

Multerer, for example, described the XNA Community Game Platform system whereby users rate their own games. These games, in turn, are rated by their peers in the community. If there is too much dissension between ratings, the game is sent back to the user to re-rate. Justman noted the self-policing systems of communities such as the ones in Linden Lab’s Second Life.

What about the issue of privacy? Boyd addressed this by saying that only users who publish the game for everyone will have to go through the rating system. Players who opt to share their game’s mature content only within their circle of friends may do so.

In the end, however, Justman confident stated that “We’ll learn as we go,” commenting on how legal action helps keep erring users in line. “All it’ll take is a few well-publicized lawsuits to get us on the right track,” he said.