If you’re tired of those frickin’ fricks.
The Steam Labs program generally revolves around new features to help you find games to spend money on considering Steam’s release list quality generally looks like the cancelled b-side of a high school grunge band based out of a Wisconsin pizzeria basement and could benefit from at least user-side curation. This week however Valve is implementing a new experimental feature that will not only be useful to the community but partnering developers. It is a chat filter.
A customizable chat filter that allows players to choose what they want to see based on their own preferences.
“While we do ban profanity and slurs from being displayed in more public places like user reviews, comments, forums, and broadcasts on Steam, we do not want to block any user text in chat, but rather, empower users to choose what they see from others.
We know marginalized groups can reclaim language for themselves, and we don’t want to stand in the way of enabling groups of Steam users from doing so when chatting with one another on Steam. So players have an option to see profanity and slurs from their Steam Friends, if they wish.”
It allows Steam users to block profanity and words they don’t want to see. Players are able to curate their own blocklist of words, meaning even if you just really don’t want spoilers for the next Paul Blart Mall Cop movie you have all the tools needed to block mention of Kevin James.
If you want to modify your list of words you can do so by going to the community content preferences section of your account page and joining the experiment. The base options include complete filtering, filtering only slurs, or not filtering. You can also build your list of words to always filter or never filter.
For more information, check out the official website. Developers interested in integrating this into their games should read the API documentation.
MMO Fallout 