Online gamin has made leaps and bounds over the past decade. It has gone from the core group of stereo typical PC Gamer nerds to the cool and trendy XBox Live gamer groups. With the exponential expansion of the online gaming community demographics and participant quadrants changed. Instead of seeing the 15-40 something shut in hermit-like PC gamers playing online, we now had a wide range of ages from children to grandparents, men and women, boys and girls, and in some cases monkeys, all playing Xbox Live together. A mix of this degree could only lead to certain disaster.

Age, sex, relgion, race, and every other form of discrimination started rearing its ugly face in the plethora of games being played online. Why wouldn't it? There's no punishment for acting like a complete biggoted racist uneducated moron online. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all tried to curb the exposure of these elements to children by implementing some trully stellar forms of parental control services on their consoles. However, these controls only work the parents actually turn them on and enforce them. Saddly, many parents do not.

Microsoft, being ever vigilant in "protecting" their customers from what they deem to be obscene and offensive material has recently secured a patent on software that would censor streaming digital audio in real time. What this means, is that there would be a censorship program listening to everything you said over XBL and cutting out what it considered to be offensive, obscene, and vulgar.

This is all well and good for there are many many people out there who's vocabulary online is nothing but a slew of words that are so foul that the late great George Carlin wouldn't even of included them in his Incomplete List of 2,443 Impolite Words and Rude Sayings. However, as an adult subscriber to XBL I believe we should have the CHOICE of what we can and can't here. Similar to our privacy options where we can choose who can and can't see our Friend's list and recently played games list, we should be given the ability to filter who/what we want. Then again, if parents actually enforced the parental controls of the Xbox onto their kids then 1/2 of the obscenities and immaturities would be taken care of right there.

I believe that XBL should have a little responsibility for age vs content control on their network besides for just providing the tools. How many uninformed parents get their kids the consoles and games without even knowing fully what this technology is capable of? If an XBL account is registered as a CHILD account, then XBL should automatically reject the connection to play any M rated game online for that account. Why that hasn't been implemented yet I don't know. Microsoft is willing to censor any and all speech traffic on their network, but are unwilling to control accounts registered to children from connecting to games that are blatently stamped for the 17+ crowd. Why doesn't MS do that? BECAUSE THEY'D LOSE MONEY!

If the under 17 yr old crowd knew that because of the age listed on their XBL account that they couldn't get online and play games like Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War...the kids wouldn't even bother getting the games. Even though the average gamer age in America is 35 years old, age does not necessarily equal maturity. So while Microsoft should disable the ability for child accounts to connect to M rated materials (they can't download R rated movies from Marketplace), it is also up the the child's parent to turn on that nice little control switch that would prevent the child from even playin M rated games period. Still, I'm not one to tell people how to raise their kids. I am a firm believer in ESRB ratings and enforcement though. Movies, Games, and Music are labeled with ratings for a reason. Why is it that game ratings are so often ignored, then you get idiots like Jack Thompson trying to blame video games for all the problems in today's youth.

Back on topic. I'd love to see this streaming voice censorship software rolled out but ONLY if it is left up to ME, the primary account owner, to decide what is and is not censored.