User:Quizzical/----

There are certain words that are generally understood in polite company as usually carrying no meaning apart from expressing the speaker's desire to gratuitously offend his audience. There's no need to list such words here, but loosely, it's the sort of thing that would typically be filtered in any chat system with a filter.

Sometimes people who swear try to make those who are offended by it into the problem. If only you weren't so sensitive, they say, there wouldn't be a problem.

But this has things backwards. Words are chosen to be used as profanities precisely because they are offensive to people. Try using a fairly inert four letter word (e.g., "done") in the places where one might normally put expletives and see how it goes. That might draw some confused looks, but people wouldn't jump on you for cursing in public. It would be more comparable to people filling in "like" or "uhh" or "you know" in random places. Or in John McCain's case, "my friends". Perhaps it's a little annoying, but it's hardly obscene.

Rather, the way that swear words came to be is that a handful of words (often sexual references) were considered obscene for use in general public. Some obnoxious people picked words out of that small handful and used them a lot. That's going out of your way to try to be offensive. And if you go out of your way to try to be offensive, you have no right to complain about someone else being to sensitive if you succeed.

There's a time and a place for the use of such words. There is similarly a time and a place for urinating. But in public isn't it.

Now, I have no problem with people who want to have private venues where swearing is allowed. If people wish to set up an online forum where language isn't filtered, and everyone who looks to join knows ahead of time that language isn't filtered, that's fine. To bring this back to Guild Wars, if a guild wants to allow swearing in guild chat, and warn every prospective recruit that that's how it is, then that's fine. Someone who is offended by such language can easily avoid it.

The problem isn't what goes on in private. It's what goes on in public. Behavior that is acceptable in some private venues isn't automatically acceptable in public. People who don't wish to hear public profanity should have ways to get around it. Likewise, gamers who don't care to deal with it in-game should have ways around it, at least if ArenaNet wishes for it to be so.

The game servers really are the private property of ArenaNet. If they wish to allow people to say whatever they want, short of illegal things such as death threats, that would be their business. It would probably earn the game an M rating from the ESRB, but that would only reflect what players would actually see from chat in the game.

But if ArenaNet wishes for the game to be a place where those who wish to avoid cursing (at least not in the necromancer sense) can do so, then players ought to respect the public chat channels as a place where the language should be kept clean. For just as a guild can allow people to say whatever they please in guild chat, a guild likewise has the right to clamp down aggressively on swearing.