So just the other day we saw the grand release of Minecraft 1.0 and the big Minecon release party. A big part of Minecon was the Yogscast and they were invited to show clips of their adventures and their Youtube videos on stage. Some of you who have seen the Yogscast may remember that they’re not always mindful of swear words, which is fine – they shouldn’t have to censor themselves. If it’s not fit for a 10yo then a 10yo shouldn’t be watching it. The problem is that nobody at Minecon told them that they needed to filter the videos and pick clips that wouldn’t offend a young crowd at Minecon.
Apparently enough people (read: protective moms) left Notch harsh comments and feedback about the language contained in Yogscast’s presentation that Notch has un-followed the Yogscast on twitter and wrote “Celebrity or not, you don’t f-bomb kids.” There was a lot of speculation about who he could be referring to and he admitted later that he was talking about the Yogscast.
Yogscast has recently replied on their site that nobody at IGN or at Minecon gave them guidelines as to what they could say or what they couldn’t say. “I find the words ‘work with’ to be very interesting in this – you will see why when Lewis gets home and makes his v-log of Minecon. He used masturbation jokes in our videos, but then criticizes us for using old footage with swearing in, when we have limited resources to edit the footage in Vegas, and also neither Mojang nor IGN gave us any guidelines as to what we were and weren’t allowed to do – the people in the panel and on the livestream chose to come and see us – so you’d think they’d know swearing is likely. We did about six hours of signings and photos in general – no kid or parent complained to us about swearing. I won’t say more as Lewis’ v-log will expose everything in wonderfully high definitioned rage, so give us a few days to get our thoughts in order. ”
It’s all a bit silly considering the internet… it’s full of vulgar language and people should know better than to take young children to a conference in Las Vegas if they think swear words are inappropriate for their children. Hell, last time I played Call of Duty, I met at least a dozen 10yo boys who had slept with my mother and did unimaginable things with her.
Update: Notch has recently tweeted a bunch of new info about Yogscast at Minecon. Each one links to it’s respective tweet. “Yogscast repeatedly insulted people, talked behind their backs, refused to cooperate, and acted like total spoiled divas nonstop.” “They called us “a bunch of nerds who don’t know how to run a company”, demanded that we pay them to come here (nobody else got paid).” “And they claim they’re the reason minecraft is big and that we should thank them more than anyone else in the community. They’re total dicks” “A kid wanted them to sign something I had signed, and they said they’d cross it out and put “fuck you” there instead.” “Everyone else in the Minecraft community is all about respecting and caring. They’re not. They’re an isolated island of egos.” “All this said, I’m very tired at the moment, and this will probably pass. I do like the work they do, very much.” Wow, hopefully Yogscast will have some sort of rebuttal… In the meantime, grab yourself one of these and kick your feet up!
Update #2: The Yogscast replied with a Youtube video and Reddit/r/Minecraft post about the whole issue basically saying “wtf, none of that was true, we had a great time!” Read for yourself.
Yogcast doesn’t have to be told to censor themselves. They should know it already. Totally unprofessional of them. Notch could have handled it better, though..
meh, I don’t know what else they would expect from a group of people who swear in their videos with no issue at all about it. They should’ve told them before hand “this needs to be rated PG at worst” knowing that their videos contain profanity.
One thing someone pointed out is that outside of the intro video, they didn’t swear on stage. IGN has a video recording of their live panel here. At the intro, they drop the F-bomb multiple times. Starts at 2:43. They say it probably 15 times in the 5 minute or so intro.
At 12:43 Lewis says, “You guys are ffff… …very amazing.” And Simon replies, “You nearly swore then didn’t you?” Lewis responds, “I did, I nearly swore.”
The entire rest of the hour of their panel, there was extremely few vulgarities including 0 f-bombs. It seems to me that they compiled their intro video, nobody reviewed it, and they were told not to swear before they went out on stage. If they did act like Notch said they did in all of his tweets in my edit, then I have to say that that’s the most conceited bunch I’ve heard of.
I’m afraid in England, “fucking” slips into a lot of sentences easily. That’s not because everyone’s vulgar and hates single mothers who don’t know how to bring up their children or to intentionally fall out with people who desire quantity over quality with followers, but because it adds a bit of fucking flavour to speech.