I was playing Call of Duty 4 on the Xbox 360 tonight and there was this young person on my team who sounded to be in his early teens. As soon as the game started this (obviously white American) kid developed a severe case of racial tourettes. I could not believe the language spewing out of this kid's mouth...

And one of the best things to happen to video games over the past few years is broadband internet access. When I bought my first Xbox 360 I signed up for Microsoft's Xbox Live service - which basically gives me access to a global network for Xbox360's. Using my home broadband connection, I can log on to Xbox Live with my Xbox 360 and download things such as videos and game content. And one of the really cool things that Xbox Live offers me is that I can play games with (or against) other people online.

In a lot of the games, especially first person shooting games like Gears of War or Call of Duty, you can communicate with other people that you are playing with through a headset and microphone that you wear. Communicating with other players really helps out in team oriented games.

So this brings us to the fact that, at any given time, there can be hundreds of thousands of people on this network playing these games. Naturally, a lot these people are talking to each other through their headsets. And some of these people can be not so nice - In fact, they can be bad enough to ruin the experience. There are ways to report these people to Microsoft and they can be banned from Xbox Live. But reporting these bad apples obviously does not happen enough... which is why I normally do not use a headset to communicate verbally with others on Xbox Live. I will only use a headset/microphone when I know who I am playing with.

If you have kids and they are on Xbox Live or whatever network the Playstation 3 has, you might want to monitor what they are potentially being exposed to. There is some really bad stuff out there...