With the advent of online gaming on consoles hitting the mainstream, many people who had heretofore been excluded by the high-price of online gaming on the PC are now entering the fray. While there are a relatively small number of those people choosing to exemplify some of the less apealing aspects of mankind, far greater are the number of people negatively effected by their actions. While some of those actions tend to relatively minor infractions (screaming kids), several other acts are more severe, including the voicing of racial slurs and the nude self-exposure of owners of the XBox Live Camera.

The social culture of XBox Live is something that Microsoft needs to police, however distasteful that policy may be. In my personal opinion anyone using discriminatory verbiage in the community should be banned from XBox LIve. Now, I will admit that, as a minority, my opinion in that vein may be biased.

There are a host of problems with interrelations on XBL...little kids who come into rooms yelling and screaming, I also can not stand people who have off-game conversations with their microphones still open (put your mike on mute if your going to have a long conversation that is not about the game with people who are not on XBox live), and the largely discussed crap talkers, braggers, so-called gaming elite, etc.

I always had a fear about the camera, and I would have never gotten one, but I got one sent to me for free by MS due to the atrocity that was getting my third 360 repaired and returned. So now I have it, and I still fear it, buit fortunately have not been exposed to any mind-raping images.

I guess that I'm lucky that I've had my 360 since launch, so I've been on live for over 18 months, and have a strong circle of friends who all have agreed upon rules of conduct for our games and lobbies. I have also recently joined a clan of other Gamespotters who are now on XBL and have some reasonable beahavior. I have yet to use it, but I know that there is a XBL matchmaker service that is supposed to facilitate finding other gamers who have the same principles and values and conduct. So many of my rooms on particular games are friends only these days, and that is the best preventative means to staying away from the social idots on XBL.

I know that XBL should be free for people to communicate and behave how they see fit; I agree with that basic principle of freedom of speech. However, when it impacts my ability to enjoy a service that I am paying for, there seems to be justification for some more stringent rules of conduct to protect consumers from being offended to the point of not being able to enjoy the product they have paid for.

I have always wanted, and yes I'll put it bluntly, discriminatory lobby features in XBL games. I should be able to have a teens and over room (like 14 and up). I hate to say it, but to make it equal, if I want to have a room where Spanish is the main language, I guess I should be able to set it up. Outside the moral mainstream, if I want a homosexual room or even a white supremacist room, I guess it would have to be considered fair to have those available as well.

I do not know how you would police this, or an effective means of technically implementing it that would not get broken, but I think a means to segregate rooms might be a way to allow people to ensure (to a certain extent) that players get what want out of their XBL subscription, and little or none of the stuff they do not want to be exposed to.