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Is there a crisis of Holocaust revisionism in video games? ADL certainly thinks so and publicly calls out Fortnite along with Call of Duty for being insufficiently tough on their gamers. While I generally speaking have a low opinion of mass-market video games, I'm surprised how politicised games are these days. When I was young, there was total freedom to name yourself whatever and say anything you wanted. I want kids' innocent hobbies to remain that way, without getting the ADL-sponsored Holocaust triggers and censorships baked into games. Is that too much to ask?
It reminds me of the brouhaha over transexuals in the latest Harry Potter game. JK Rowling's stance is well-known but the devs couldn't resist smacking gamers over the head with pro-trans content. If Holocaust denial is a concern, will we soon see Anne Frank adventure games for kids to play (whether they want it or not)?
But how far back are we talking, though? I remember when I was a fresh young teen gamer getting into multiplayer games and I found out that Team Fortress 2's neat feature of using your Steam name for your in-game name was far from universal--in older multiplayer games, including Valve's own Counter-Strike: Source, you had to manually set your name from a default. No Steam account synchronization, and if you just reinstalled, you better hope you remember how many Xes were in your sick l33t gamer name.
I hear Tribes 2(?) did have a weak sort of anti-piracy measure where, if your name matched a default name that was coded into a certain pirated version of it, it would auto-kick you, but I suspect filters were basically the most you had for multiplayer games in an age before Steam's utter dominance of the PC space.
It was before my time, but I'm pretty sure Ultima Online solely filtered profanity on the client side, with moderator decisions supposed to be focused on harassment in the traditional 'doing it after being asked to stop' rather than language directly.
In UO the client side profanity filter was so simplistic that enabling it display "Mass Dispel" as "M*** Dispel". It would actually display grawlix instead of stars.
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