Day: May 19, 2018

Mike Nichols just wanted to make a talking banana. A self-described inventor of “useless” things, his original goal was to create an interactive robot for his Twitch viewers to play with. Whatever they typed into chat, the banana would say—while dancing! Then the trolls showed up.

Nichols learned the hard way what many Twitch streamers who employ text-to-speech technology already knew: assholes really like to try to manipulate programs into saying the n-word. Or even just things that sound like the n-word. As long as there’s a chance they’ll get the banhammer dropped on a streamer’s head, they’re not too picky. And given Twitch’s history of banning channels for saying the n-word, there’s a very good chance indeed.

The banana channel is pretty much what it sounds like: the banana is positioned in front of a camera, and while it moves back and forth to music, people can enter phrases into Twitch chat—which it will then read out loud. One night a couple months ago, Nichols’ channel’s concurrent viewer count suddenly shot up to 600, which is a lot for a relatively small channel. Nichols realized the channel had been raided by the community of a popular streamer, but he didn’t think much of it. “I decided to just leave the stream on and go to sleep,” he said in a video about the banana uploaded to YouTube this week.

That was a mistake.

The streamer in question was Greekgodx, whose “GGX gang” is one of the more notoriously troll-y communities on Twitch. Greekgodx himself pointed his viewers to the channel, but dipped out when things started getting racist. Members of his community stuck around, though, and made the banana sing and dance to a series of increasingly vile tunes. Among other things, they made it spell out the n-word. The next day, Nichols found that his banana had been banned from Twitch.

“It was pretty shocking to me when I woke up in the morning, came over to my computer, and saw the stream was down,” he said in his video about the banana. “I had been banned from Twitch for 24 hours, and I had a permanent strike on the channel.”

Nichols was not so naive as to put his banana on Twitch sans protection. There was a language filter in place, but the GGX gang figured out how to trick it. And while footage of the moment in question got deleted when Twitch banished the banana from the digital airwaves, Nichols had programmed it to log any text people tried to get it to say.

“It was kinda like when there’s a plane accident, and they recover the black box,” he said. “But this time, instead of the pilots saying ‘mayday’ as the plane crashed, they just kept repeating the n-word until the plane exploded.”

He found that Twitch trolls had used accented characters to get around the banana’s filter, using fake words like “knìgár” to defuse the banana’s defenses. While waiting for the ban to end, Nichols tweaked the banana’s code so that it would remove accented characters and added the words the GGX gang had come up with to his filter list. Problem solved?

Of course not. Once the banana was back up, the GGX gang were like Vegas magicians with their use of dehumanizing language: tricks up every sleeve and other crevices besides. Thus began an arms race that spanned days. Nichols says that the trolls switched to another tried-and-true Twitch tactic: spamming the word, except with the first letter at the end instead of the beginning so that—thanks to rapid repetition—it would still sound like the banana was saying it.

Nichols figured out a solution for this, too. “I added an extra step to my bad word checking service,” he said. “Now the banana takes the sentence, removes all the spaces, then searches the sentence for the bad word.”

It didn’t end there, either. Trolls proceeded to spam innocuous words like “Snickers,” which—when repeated ad nauseam—sounds like the n-word. So Nichols added words like that to the filter. But the trolls kept trying to turn the banana into their racist mannequin. Next, they went with combinations of innocuous words like “Disney Gurs” and “Bernie Curs.” Warning: do not trying saying those phrases out loud. The banana did, and Nichols told Kotaku that he was “lucky” that Twitch admins didn’t notice, or he’d have probably gotten banned again.

“Now, at this point I realized that I can’t account for every bad word combination everybody in the world can possibly come up with,” said Nichols. “I had to do something a bit more drastic.”

He wrote a phonetic filter for the banana that converts his list of bad words into their basic phonetic components. It would then do the same thing to every phrase people entered into the banana, scanning them for telltale sounds. Just to be safe, phrases also automatically go through the filter a second time with all spaces removed so as to snuff out sneaky tactics.

“So now not only does my banana not say bad words, but it also won’t say anything that sounds like a bad word,” said Nichols. “At this point I realized I had the best bad word filter I could possibly make. It might even be the best one on Twitch. I don’t know.”

As a last-ditch effort, trolls started coordinating, individually entering letters to spell out the n-word. So Nichols added code to block that, too.

Ever since the end of March, Nichols says the GGX gang hasn’t been able to bust through the new filter, no matter how much they’ve beaten their multifarious, hydra-like heads against it.

“As we speak, there are users adding racist GGX-related comments to my YouTube video about the banana,” he said to Kotaku in an email this week. “They still try to troll my Twitch stream from time to time, but they get bored after they realize they can’t get past the filter. Even with such a good filter I still have to listen to the banana just in case. I don’t want to risk getting another channel strike, as after three I will be removed from Twitch.”

Nichols says his next step will be to share his powerful filter with other Twitch broadcasters. “I have been receiving a lot of direct messages on Twitter asking for the filter code, I plan to release it after I do some final updates,” he told Kotaku. “I hope some streamers are able to get good use out of it!”

In the meantime, he feels like Twitch’s policy toward channels getting assailed by obvious trolls could use some tweaking. If nothing else, it’s clear that portions of Twitch’s community have a pretty serious problem. “The content I was banned for was never produced by me,” Nichols said. “It was taken directly from the Twitch chat. The banana was a sort of mirror that showed how toxic the Twitch community can be, and it turned out it was just too much for the [Twitch] admins to handle.”

This week, Microsoft revealed the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a new peripheral to help make gaming more accessible. It includes two large, programmable buttons and works in conjunction with a mix of joysticks and other devices like the Quadstick, a controller designed specifically for people living with different forms of paralysis. It’s just the latest in a number of unusual but really neat Xbox One-related projects that are helping the console evolve far beyond what originally launched in 2013.

It’s no secret Microsoft has been struggling in some important areas this generation. The company stopped releasing Xbox One sales data in October of last year, but estimates relayed during a recent EA earnings call put them far behind the PlayStation 4‘s. It’s also had a hard time bringing big exclusives to its platform. Long after the release of Halo 5: Guardians and Gears of War 4, Scalebound was canceled and Crackdown 3 remains MIA. But while Xbox One might not have Horizon: Zero Dawn or God of War, Microsoft has continued to roll out interesting new features for the console over the last year that have showed the company is still hungry for areas it can continue to innovate in—UI overhauls, backward compatibility, and more.

Take Mixer, for instance. The streaming video service was called Beam before Microsoft bought it in 2016 and rebranded it the following year. It’s nowhere near as widely used as Twitch or YouTube, but its smaller audience has also afforded it certain unique opportunities. Back when Twitch outlined a vague new dress code (something it has since backpedaled on), many streamers pointed to Mixer’s much more transparent guidelines as a refreshing alternative. Even if they didn’t always agree with them, people knew exactly where the boundaries were.. Microsoft’s platform also offers some unique features like co-streaming, where multiple people can combine their feeds on a single channel. Overall the smaller audience and investment by Microsoft has led to a more curated and less trolly atmosphere according to some streamers who use it.

Microsoft has also made a big show of its investment in backward compatibility. A far cry from the “digital-only” future it was talking about prior to the Xbox One’s launch, you can now play many Xbox 360 and original Xbox discs on the system. And as new games are continually added to the library, it’s helped unify the entire ecosystem unlike the fractured ones Nintendo and Sony have tried to mend with PlayStation 2 classics, streaming services like PS Now, and the Virtual Console. The technology runs so deep that lots of older gamers can even take advantage of the Xbox One X to run at better frame rates with sharper graphics.

Game Pass has been another big deal for the console. It’s the closest thing to a Netflix for games out of all the current subscription services available on console, and has been helped by supporting big games right when they launch, including Sea of Thieves in March and now State of Decay 2 when it releases next week. It was nice when it started in early 2017, but a year later it’s grown into one of the biggest reasons for turning my Xbox One on.

The Xbox One UI has also continued to evolve, mostly for the better. While I still wouldn’t call it pretty, it’s become way more functional and feature complete than what the console launched with. Almost everything from games to apps and friend lists are one click away from the home screen while the home button on the controller now first pulls up a shortcut menu that makes messaging, accessing the store, or digging through video game capture on the fly much faster. Microsoft also recently added the ability to gift games to other players, something Xbox One is currently the only console to allow.

Today, Discord was also half-integrated with Xbox One so that your friends list from the app can be shared across both platforms and show you who’s playing what even when you’re not on your PC. It’s a small move that makes a lot of sense given how Discord has become the central meeting place for people looking to play online together or just exchange info and news.

And then there’s Microsoft’s repeated push toward cross-play with other consoles. When Rocket League’s next big update arrives this summer, it’ll be possible to party up with people from across Xbox One, Switch, and PC, something that’s long overdue and hopefully a sign of things to come.

At this year’s DICE Summit, head of Xbox Phil Spencer gave a keynote address in which he stressed the importance of diversity and inclusivity in gaming, and the need for companies like Microsoft to take responsibility for the community around their games. It was a nice speech but didn’t come with many particulars. The Xbox Adaptive Controller, a grassroots project within the company, is one of the more visible signs that the sentiment was more than just words. None of these initiatives are likely to work as a substitute for a player-base anxiously awaiting word of the next Halo, but it shows that, off to the side, Xbox One has only been getting better with age.