I recently purchased a copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World for the Nintendo DS. I love it, greatly. The WiFi especially is awesome, excluding one little feature.

For those of you who may not know, with Wild World and WiFi, you can connect to friends throughout the world just as you would with other DS games. You then may go and run rampant throughout each other's towns, chatting the whole while through use of a touch screen keyboard and speech bubbles; the issue herein lying that you have only a short line in which to input what you'd like to say.

This wouldn't be too terrible, really, if you didn't have to pause everything else you were doing in order to say even a simple "Yes.", "No.", or "Thank you.". It slows you down and actually hurts your wrists to have to stop and drop everything to poke out each and every letter and bit of punctuation, in turn submitting it slowly and steadily, so that you can get your entire thought out in kind, while still allowing your friend(s) enough time to read.

My friend from Michigan and I have been running amok in each other's towns for a couple of weeks now, and every night we would catch ourselves TXT TLKing to one another...And every night, as we were disembarking back to our own town, we would scream something along the lines of "ARG! TEXTING!". Amazing how THAT fits on those little bitty lines, no?

Other visitors, however...Are none-so horrified by TXTing. There have been a few instances where I've actually been forced to kick the people from my town, as they refuse to even attempt to make their messages legible, and flood the screen with masses of jumbled letters and symbols. They sometimes even grow vulgar when I politely request that they either post legibly, give me a moment to interpret, or in some instances ask them to leave. The censors may cover things like "********" and "s**t", but neglect to blotch out "whore", "slut", and other such disgusting words.

In the world of a game where children are sometimes directly involved and sometimes are even subjected to leet and TXTing violence and vulgarity, I think it's a bit much that we can do nothing but play the bad guy and shove people away instead of being somehow able to teach them that the English language is a treasure and a privilege, not a commodity.

As for my friend in MI and myself, we've turned to using AIM while we're playing. It saves our souls and minds from burning and bleeding that way...