Video Game Perversity Potential spreads quite frequently. If your players have the right to customize something, and said something will be displayed online for everyone to see, Trolls will inevitably make it look like a penis or swastika and name it with whatever garden-variety swear or slur you can think of without fear of it coming back to bite them.
So as you can guess, countless game developers have developed ways to end this and keep their servers clean. Typically this trope comes in the form of a name censor, preventing the player from naming characters and objects naughty things. However, some players will still try to circumvent this, such as altering profanity.
Sub-Trope of Bowdlerize and Developer's Foresight. Compare Bleached Underpants, Video Game Cruelty Punishment, and Why the Fandom Can't Have Nice Things. For troubles text-based censorship causes, see Scunthorpe Problem.
Examples
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Action Adventure
- LEGO Adaptation Game: Several games limit the amount of colors for the crotches of the custom characters, effectively making it impossible to go bottomless (it's still possible with an Amazing Technicolor Population).
- In Psychonauts 2: Part of a puzzle solution in Ford Cruller's mind involves using an old timey typewriter to sign a letter with the missing name of the sender. If you try to make something vulgar, the final word is automatically censored with a hashtag and the mind's host will scold you for using foul language in a letter office.
Adventure Games
- The Mac OS Classic versions of Déjà Vu (1985) have a swear filter which scolds you for your "crude and vulgar language" lest you input something inappropriate. Notably, the filter even recognizes "golden bozos", a slang term for breasts popularized by a 1979 Saturday Night Live sketch.
Casual Games
- Gacha Life: Due to the ongoing controversy regarding how the game is used to make softcore porn, amongst other very sensitive topics, Lumine later issued an update
that removed any inappropriate colors (i.e. Nude-Colored Clothes).
Fighting Games
- A Super Smash Bros. Ultimate update darkened the area under female characters with dresses or skirts (such as Palutena or Peach), because the camera can be easily adjusted to get a Panty Shot.
- Dragon Ball Xenoverse: The game makes skin colors and clothing colors different shades, preventing the player from slapping on some Nude-Colored Clothes.
- The same thing applies to the Soul Series games with character creation modes. Any skintight clothing and/or underwear is available in every hue and shade, except for the ones approaching a human skin tone.
- WWE Video Games: Textures cannot be applied to the crotch (or chest for females). Newer titles no longer have this restriction, but character models and clothing options have also gotten lifelike enough that trying to draw naughty bits onto them would just look stupid, not titillating.
Massively Multiplayer Online Games
- In Animal Jam, if an animal attempts to perform the hopping animation on a sleeping animal, they'll return back to their standing animation, to prevent all the Moral Guardian concern over frequent cases of players attempting to simulate sex with such animations.
- Club Penguin had a "safe chat" function on some servers where the only communication option was a selection of pre-made phrases relating to the game. On the servers with a functioning chat function, players were auto-banned for a period of time if they typed inappropriate words.
- Webkinz also has a "safe chat" function like Club Penguin did.
- Wizard101
- The game has a safe chat function (called menu chat in this game) that all users under 13 are limited to. Text chat (for teenage players) and open chat (for adults with a valid credit card on file) are less restrictive, but will still disallow offensive/profane words.
- In the Summer 2023 update, more options for character names were added. However, a few options were later removed after inappropriate combinations were discovered.
Music Games
- In the Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA games starting with Project Diva F, trying to look up a female character's skirt in the Photo Studio or Augmented Reality modes will hide the character model and display a warning message. However, no such restriction applies to Edit Mode.
Puzzle Games
- It's possible to spell out a swear word or slur in Squaredle, but it won't be counted towards the word list for being offensive.
Racing Games
- In Daytona USA, if you enter something inappropriate ("ASS", "FUK", etc.) as your name on the high score screen, the game replaces it with a different one. There's a long list of "replacement" names, most of which are Shout Outs to other Sega games.
- Mario Kart: Custom Decals were removed after Mario Kart DS, almost certainly to prevent people from making any more penises and swastikas.
- In Uniracers, if you try to rename Unis with words such as "shit", "Satan", "jizz", "lesbian", etc., they will be rejected as "not cool enough". Amusingly, "Sega" and "Sonic" are also on the blacklist.
Role-Playing Games
- Pokémon games disallow the players from nicknaming their Pokémon vulgar things (such as words related to sexual acts), insults, or slurs (Gens I-IV had no name censorship whatsoever); they also forbid 'mons that already have such a name from being traded on the GTS, which occasionally causes problems when a species name sets off the radar. Players are known to circumvent it with foreign language accented letters or by replacing letters with numbers, though.
Simulation
- Similar to Pokémon, Animal Crossing games also have in-game word filters and a system where inappropriate custom designs can be reported. Players can end up with their towns/islands banned for anything inappropriate that’s submitted online or displayed on the town/island. Also, if anyone tries to use hacks to remove the player character’s clothing, they’ll find that Developer's Foresight added black bars across the character model’s private areas.
Stealth Games
- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has a sequence in which the player character Raiden gets captured and strips naked. After he escapes from his cell, he is naked for the subsequent gameplay sequence, and will cover his crotch with his hands. Even if the player makes him do a cartwheel, he will still keep his crotch covered.
Sandbox Games
- LittleBigPlanet 2: In The Factory of a Better Tomorrow, a door can only be unlocked by manipulating the fingers of a giant robotic hand to make the "rock on" sign. However, if the player attempts Flipping the Bird, a censor sign will drop over the hand as a buzzer sounds.
- In Roblox, in addition to a word filter censoring blacklisted words with hash symbols and moderation all user-uploaded assets have to go through before being available to the public, if all of the avatar's body parts are the same color, and the avatar is not wearing a pants item, the avatar is automatically given default clothing of a random color to prevent dirty-minded users from creating "naked" avatars and scarring children and Moral Guardians. However, this can be bypassed if a player changes one of the body parts to a different color or wears a transparent pants item (which will get deleted in a second).
- In the Saints Row series starting with the second game you can strip all of your clothes. However private parts are blurred. This is adverted in the the reboot in where you can uncensor nipples for your female character but you can't uncensor genitalia.
Survival Horror
- You get an in-universe scolding for trying to look up Ashley's skirt in Resident Evil 4. She crosses her legs and calls you (or, rather, Leon, but we all know it's really directed at the player) a pervert. This can happen even if the player wasn't doing it on purpose, such as getting knocked down from an enemy attack and Leon's face landing near Ashley's legs.
- This gets taken up a notch for the remake, where if you try this, Ashley instead bends over and gives a disapproving glare directly at the camera — as if armed with out-of-universe knowledge that Leon would never do something so perverted.
Visual Novels
- Minotaur Hotel: You can't have Asterion be naked, or have his penis showing, outside of the customization menu. The reasoning behind this is that the previous masters thought it was disgraceful for Asterion to have him serve the guests without any clothing.
Non-Video Game Examples
- Accel World: In the virtual world the students at Haruyuki's school can use, the tactile sensations of the avatars have been dulled to the point that they can only feel a flat box if they attempt to touch one another. This makes sense given the somewhat provocative avatars said students can sport, along with their burgeoning hormones. Haru points out that any attempt to change the settings alerts the administration and the culprit can get into serious trouble.
- Kahoot! changes your name if it recognizes that you've made it something inappropriate.
- Newer versions of the Leapfrog Alphabet Pal will refuse to pronounce a "C" or "K" immediately after an "F", instead giggling and saying "that tickles!"
- Dr. Sbaitso was a digitized voice software toy; when users started entering profanities, it would give the user a few warnings; if the user kept doing this, then it would have a "Parity Error", give off a loud screeching noise, and then rapidly spew out random characters until the screen was filled with them. The good doctor itself could easily be coaxed into saying all manner of offensive language, however, simply by typing "say" in front of whatever you wanted to hear from it.
- Burger King's interactive promotional advertising program "The Subservient Chicken" had a number of commands a user could enter and the chicken would act out; if the user entered a command considered inappropriate, the chicken would wag its finger at the screen.
