“Family friendly games made for horse fanatics” is how Horse Isle 3 introduces itself on its website and promises “Clean, nonviolent fun, with some education tossed in.”

In Horse Isle 3, players can create their own clubs and stores, and name the horses they breed. This means there is a plethora of player-generated content, which is always a certain risk and something that requires proper moderation. There is a reason popular kid-friendly MMO Star Stable only allows its players to combine names from a list of pre-approved words, by contrast.

That no inappropriate content appears and stays in Horse Isle 3 is therefore the responsibility of players who report problematic content, and the dev team who reviews these reports and warns or bans offending players accordingly.

What is or is not family friendly has apparently led to discourse and disagreements in the past. Concrete information about what has previously been discussed in the Horse Isle community is almost impossible to find however, apart from simply listening to what players say happened: The game’s forums announce that threads are removed regularly, “to keep [the forums] clean and recent”. This practice, in combination with the fact that the HI3 forums do not have a search function and don’t seem to be indexed by Google, makes it very hard to find reliable information.

Over the years – the first Horse Isle launched in 2007 – there have naturally been disagreements, both among players and among moderators. I’ve been able to contact a former member of the HI moderator team, and they tell me that players would disproportionately report mentions of partners and relationships if they were implied to be between people of the same gender. The moderators were instructed by the game’s administrators to heed these complaints and remove such mentions, even though this policy ended up only affecting LGBTQ+ people, since no one tended to take offense at mentions of hetero relationships. In one example, a player had the words “lgbt | married” in their profile, and was asked to remove it or face a ban.

When this unfairness was brought up in the moderator forum, the admin team decided to ban all mention of romantic relationships in profiles. Ironically, two members of the mod team itself were still called “FrogLips” and “MrFrogLips” – exactly the sort of innocuous allusion to a relationship that players were getting reprimanded for, if anyone suspected the people in question might be the same gender.

Another example – documented by the aforementioned former moderator – is an instance where players claim to have received rule violation warnings for mentioning having two moms or dads, while saying “my mom and dad” is allowed. Only the former example appears to be seen by the team as “dating related content”.

When confronted about such inequalities, the HI team claims that no one is being discriminated against and that mentioning partners or orientation is inappropriate for a children’s game in any context.