Multiplayer games offer players the opportunity to play with strangers online. While some interactions evolve into lasting friendships, others can lead down a dangerous path and quickly. A friendly game between two players can lead to an inbox full of trolling, insults, or threats.
Xbox is continuing to work on its messaging filters to ensure a positive and fun experience for gamers and reduce the amount of unwanted trolling and bullying. They’ve taken the first step into improving communication by introducing private message filters on the Xbox One.
Gamers will soon have more ways to combat offensive messages, along with parents having more peace of mind when their kids are playing online. Xbox has announced four Inbox content filters so far, which include: Friendly, Medium, Mature, and Unfiltered.
“Friendly” is the highest level of filtering meant for kids, which is set by default for child and teen-level accounts. Parents can change this filter at any time.
“Medium” is the second-highest level that allows some profanity in messages, but removes the most vulgar words and phrases.
“Mature” filtering only hides the most explicit words, while “Unfiltered” is exactly what it implies – nothing is filtered, and users see the full message as intended.
These filters can be further customized for messages received from existing contacts to unknown senders.
For those worried about how much, or how little, Xbox is filtering in their Inbox, there’s an easy solution. Gamers can head to their “Message Safety” settings and view any message marked with [Potentially offensive message hidden]. From there, users can adjust their level of filtering.
“We’re rolling out customizable text filters for the Xbox platform, giving gamers more control over the type of content they see on Xbox. With this update, you will set your own specific levels of automated filtration so you can decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t in the text-based messages you receive across Xbox Live,” stated Xbox on their official YouTube channel.
The content filters will work with multiple Xbox devices, including the Xbox One, Game Bar, Xbox Mobile App, and the Xbox Mobile App on Windows 10.
Messaging content filters officially rolled on on October 14, 2019, but only for those signed up with the Xbox Insider program. Xbox plans to implement the feature for all users later this Fall.
