Electronic Arts discriminates against people with the last name Caputo

[Sebastarious]

Caputo is a very common Italian name. My very best friend is Italian and his last name is Caputo. If you go to imdb.com (the movie database) and search for Caputo, then keep expanding the results, you will see that there are hundreds of people named Caputo working in the film and TV industry. I have even noticed some of them in some TV and movie credits from time to time. Even heard it once announced on a PA system at an airport in the US.

Those of you familiar with F1 24 (and I guess previous versions), know that you can start a career driving as one of the real Formula 1 drivers like Piastri or Verstappen, or with your own name and still be part of the team you want, Ferrari, Mercedes, etc. So I wanted to start a second career in my best friend's name just for fun, to send him some game captures and show him in the podium winning with Ferrari, just to have a good laugh.

So I enter his first name, press Enter, then enter Caputo:

https://imgur.com/d6GrJPq

Then I press A on the controller, and I get this:

https://imgur.com/CDJyEVy

Before you tell me that the last four letters of that last name is an offensive term for gay men in Spanish, I already know that. I couldn't care less, because I didn't enter those four letters. I entered a last name that is very Italian and rather common, not just in Italy but in the US and other places around the world. So EA is trying to be politically correct to an excess when they are blatantly discriminating against tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands? I don't know, but certainly a lot of people around the world with the last name Caputo, a name that in itself is not offensive to anyone at all, in any language. I'm very supportive of gay people and I would never do anything to offend them. This has nothing to do with gay people. Just because a name, middle name or last name has a combination of letters inside of it that is offensive in one language, doesn't mean that that name is offensive.

So if your last name is Caputo and you want to play any Electronic Arts games with your name, you won't be able to, because Electronic Arts is clearly discriminating against you. So please don't just take it. Voice your opinion and tell EA that you're upset you're being discriminated against.

 

[Pifanjr]

You could say EA's automatic profanity filter is a bit kaput...

Voice your opinion and tell EA that you're happy you're being discriminated against.

I think you forgot a negative here.

 

[Alm]

I remember someone with the surname nasser having it censored to n***er on an Internet forum

 

[Sebastarious]

I think you forgot a negative here.

Indeed, thanks for the tip!

 

[Sebastarious]

I remember someone with the surname nasser having it censored to n***er on an Internet forum

That seems like a script from a bad developer, same as in the Caputo case in F1 24. They are lazy programmers, they just set a list of words without any conditions, such as "ass" being banned as a simple A followed by S followed by S but without specifying if it's preceded or followed by a space, or if it has characters both before or after, or before and after.

And the funny thing is that this comes from people whose primary language has a word, "dick" that is hilariously used as a common way to describe the penis, as a name that many people have, and also as an insult, as a former girlfriend once told me "You're a dick!".

 

[Alm]

That's exactly what it is. You would think AI might work something out when it comes to name censorship. Maybe it will be used in future.

Edit: and if it wasn’t obvious, the censorship makes the guy in my example look racist, and far worse than if there was no censorship.

 

[Sebastarious]

Edit: and if it wasn’t obvious, the censorship makes the guy in my example look racist, and far worse than if there was no censorship.

I know, that's a great point. An excess of political correctness that ends up painting someone as a racist piece of trash because his last name includes the word "ass", which by the way, can't even be considered a foul word like the F word or similar.

And the funny thing is that the English language is full or words that include ass inside them.

Here's another funny coincidence. Since EA bans the last name Caputo because "puto" is a kind of offensive way in Spanish to refer to gay men (but there are far worse), I figured I would do a search inside the F1 24 installation folder to see if there was a file that contained that word. I used the free software Agent Ransack for that.

So I get tons of results, and it doesn't seem right, because they wouldn't put a blacklist of words in so many files. But Agent Ransack shows the part inside the file where it found the word. Turns out most of the files had the words Input and Output as part of the code, but together, so it's inputoutput mixed in between a lot of garbage characters. So what stands out there? inPUTOutput. So I guess a lot of the F1 24 code has an offensive word to gay men in Spanish. What was the roll eyes emoticon?

Now, the one that perhaps might contain the list of banned words is

"D:\Games\F1 24\2024_asset_groups\game_package\text_validation\words.erp"

But I can't find what software opens .erp, and Notepad++ opens a bunch of nonsense characters, but the first line contains this:

eaid://game_package/text_validation/bad_words.textvalidator TextValidator

However, the super duper nasty word is nowhere to be found inside that file, at least not when opened in a text editor.

 

[Zloth]

You play on the internet with all cultures and you'll get burned like that. Different cultures take offense at different things. I wouldn't even count on your interpretation being the real issue.

Just try other names like Capu+o , or otuqaD and then reverse the screenshot, or use charmap to replace characters, or whatever. Because EA isn't going to throw out their policy just so you can make a screenshot for your friend, and whatever culture is finding Caputo offensive isn't even going to hear your plea.