Please note: I have no personal interest in using anything beyond PG-13 language on the public areas of the site. That would not be kind nor respectful to the team that poured their heart out to give us such a wonderful game. BUT, my curiosity burns. What, if anything, kept people from running around and using NSFW language and concepts on the site? I can think of some really amusing and non PG things to name pigs and chickens, for instance. I will confess that the jack o'lanterns inside my house had some obscenely funny and X rated things to say, but I live with the only other person who had access to see them. I would never drop an X rated thing outside, because, that just wouldn't have been a very Glitchy thing to do. However, it surprised me that no one else did either.
TO CLARIFY, I am not talking about mildly risque stuff that is just funny, or cursing about stuff to let off steam, or even being cheerfully vulgar. I mean people saying really ugly and foul things to each other just to be ugly and foul. Think the kind of nasty trash talk you see on PvP servers, and how that spills over into some non PvP games. You know. Racism, sexism, yelling obscenities just to annoy people, being hurtful to others, defiling or trashing things and people. That's what I didn't see (and certainly didn't miss!) in Glitch. I regularly see it on other gaming platforms, even ones that limit or prohibit PvP.
I'm sure there were mods to discourage egregious behavior, but I don't think there were ever enough of them to keep so close an eye on things that I literally never saw anything like this, not once, in the months I played.
Which leads me to a very interesting conclusion about the uniqueness of the social dynamic of the Glitch community. It is a real loss that the social experiment can not continue, because if I'm right on this, I think it could have mattered in more ways than just a game.
Am I right? Did thousands of people spontaneously decide to *just be nice*, because the fundamental principles of the game gently led them in this direction without the need for draconian rules or stern enforcement?
If this is true, maybe Glitch was something bigger and more important to us as a species than just a failed browser game.
Food for thought.
Edited to clarify, since folks were thinking I was talking about SFW in an actual workplace context, or about jack o'lanters not being Glitchy. That's not what I was trying to communicate at all. To be clear, the jack o'lanterns inside my house issued explicit and comedic sexual invitations, and I wouldn't put them in a public place. They were pretty funny, though, and I wish I'd taken snaps of them.