The latest stupidity is this Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas controversy. For those that don’t play video games, the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series are games where you play a criminal. In GTA : San Andreas you play a south central L.A. African American gang member stereotype. In the game you can walk and drive around 3 cities that are based on LA, SF and Las Vegas. In the game you kill people. You can punch them until they fall down and then stomp on them until they are dead and bleed all over the road. You can walk into a fast food restaurant, shoot your gun and all the other customers will cower including little old ladies. You can then walk up to them and blow their heads off. You can solicit prostitutes while driving a car, the girl will get in the car and when you park it somewhere she will proceed to have sex you. You don’t get to see the sex but the car will bounce and you will hear sexual dialog between the main character and several different prostitutes including moans and sexual screams. You can have girlfriends in the game and you can buy vibrators and dildos for them. This is all in the shipping game which is rated “M” for Mature 17+ (ie, NOT FOR KIDS)
The supposed controversy is that if you have a special device connected to your PS2, a “cheat box” that lets you hack games and if using that cheat box you enter a simple code, a part of the game that was blocked will become unblocked. In that part of the game you can have sex with with your girlfriends. It’s called “Hot Coffee” because the segment starts by her asking you into her place by saying “Hey, how about some hot coffee?” If you answer yes it cuts to you two in her bedroom having sex. It’s not very explicit by movie standards. It’s short, nearly comedic, there are no genitals. You can see more explicit sex in American Pie the movie.
Supposedly this somehow makes the game controversial but dammit look at the box. Video games are rated in the USA and it says right on the box this:
Given the content of the game which is no more violent than any Tarentino movie, given that it’s already rated “M 17+”. Given that is says right on the box “Strong Sexual Content”, how can a nearly PG-13 sex scene matter at all? WTF is the controversy?
The most resent event is some “grandma” claims the game was misrepresented and that because it was misrepresented she mistakenly bought it for her 14yr old grandson. HELLO! Grandma! Did you even look at the package? It says right on it “Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs. If anything they should lock you up for giving your grandson such a present when it was CLEARLY LABELED!!!!
The GTA series is for adults! It says so right on the box. For those of you that don’t play games I can personally testify that the Grand Theft Auto series of games are some of the best games ever made. In the category of games this series is high art. It’s redefined games and started it’s own genre, not because of the theme of being a criminal but because it’s so well made, so fun, and gives you more freedom than any other game to date. Because it actually reproduces living cities including foot traffic, car traffic, train and subway systems, airports and plane traffic, boat and ship traffic, traffic lights, draw bridges, weather including rain, fog, clouds, sunsets and it does all of this far far better than any game to date. GTA deserves the same treatment as an R rated film. No more, no less. There is nothing controversial here.
I love how the ESRB completely pussied out and did nothing to defend their (correct) rating.
I thought I read a quote from an ESRB spokesperson in one of the earlier stories to the effect that a “Mature” rating theoretically indicated that the game was intended for a mature audience . . . stating the glaringly obvious usually isn’t a very good strategy when dealing with the press and The Unelectable One.
The Husband works for a game store chain, and his chief complaint is that he can explain in tremendous detail why a game is inappropriate for the intended child and the parent/s will whine that s/he “wants it” . . . and then will turn down the $15 magazine subscription that might help them make a slightly more informed, if equally uninterested selection.
All the major video game retailers have a corporate policy in place that states that they have to check ID for M rated games, and tell the purchaser why the game is M rated. And if that doesn’t happen, the games are clearly labeled as to the content. I honestly can’t see how that woman could possibly win her case against Rockstar, seeing as how it says right on the freaking box that there is “Strong sexual content” in the game.
The controversy should be:
Changing a ESRB rating based on digital modification of a game is probably not legal.
In this case, someone has to change this software from it’s original shipping state in order to see this new content. For GTA:SA it happens to be a matter of turning on something that was built in to the game but not enabled in the shipping software. But given enough time and energy I could hack in to any game and put a totally rude nude model in it. So once I do that, we’ll have to change the ratings of all games including Lego Star Wars to rated X.
All someone has to do is make a few mods like this and show to a court that any game can be turned to rated X with digital modification. I don’t think the ESRB has legal grounds to change a rating based on digital modification.
I mostly agree.
I think for the game industry the bigger issue is the ESRB backing down and re-rating GTA:SA with an AO rating. Lots of people inside the industry want to make “R” rated games meaning games for adults with adult issues. Games on par with movies like “Thelma and Loiuse” or “Pulp Fiction”. Those movies have both sex and violence and are rated “R”. GTA:SA is one such game that deals with those issues but now that the ESRB rated GTA:SA as with an AO rating, effectively banning the game, they’ve just made it impossible the have games with themes similar to “R” rated movies. They have basically set the industry back 10-15 years.
My main question is what Rockstar was thinking by not disclosing the “hidden content” to the ESRB. If nothing else, they just gave fodder to the political machine that was already looking for some “weak link” to sink their teeth into. By Rockstar not doing that from the get go, it’s not surprise that the ESRB caved into political pressure since they effectively now have to save their own skin.
I don’t think the industry’s been set back 10-15 years though … I mean (at least in Japan) there are certain kinds of games that would never see the light of day on store shelves in Walmart or the like.
Game Developers need to wake up and realize the fact that the medium is now considered “legitimate” by the mainstream and need to accept the consequences (good or bad) of what choices are made.
As usual Greg, you have a very rational take on a subject people are often irrational about. I’ve noticed this about many of your posts. Keep up the clear thinking and I’ll keep reading.
I disagree that Rockstar needed to disclose the hidden content. First off it’s a common practice in the industry to hide “easter eggs”. We had a whole extra world 6 levels and 2 bonus games as well as 20 minute hidden ending in Gex. Zombie Revenge for Naomi has digital pictures of the team in the rom. Demolition Man for 3DO has a level where you walk around the offices of Virgin Games and shoot the members of the team. The idea of not disclosing everything is pretty well established.
Second, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for Rockstar to think the content in question was within their “M” rating. M is supposed to be the equivilent of an “R” movie and the scene in question is most certainly not more than “R” rated. Given the content of the rest of the game I can’t see how anyone could see the “Hot Coffee” scene as special. I just got through playing a scene in the shipping game where you go to sex shop that sells all manner of sex toys, you follow a woman in who is buying a leather S&M suit, you buy a gimp suit yourself, kill her lover and pose as him and have sex with her. The sex itself is not visual but the dialog and sounds are there. She then becomes another of your girlfriends and you have to ecsalate the sex in order to get info from her about a casino you are planning to hit. How is this Hot Coffee scene deserving of a worse rating?
And lastly, Rockstar did remove it from the game. The only way to see the scene is to buy a special device you plug on to your console to hack games. It’s standard practice to remove things this way. Unlike a movie a game is a computer program and modifying the game in anyway can cause bugs as well as take time. I know games that take 3 days PER LEVEL to compute potential visible sets. It’s common practice, especially near the end of production to cut things but then rather than remove the data just change the code as little as possible so that the data is never used since that is less likely to introduce bugs then a signficant change and rebuilding all the data. Generally things are removed because they are buggy, there’s no time to fix the bugs so we just stop the feature from appearing. Rebuilding the data *could* introduce all kinds of bugs so it all has to be tested again which takes weeks so rather than rebuild all the data we just change the code to not use it.
During production there was hack in Zombie Revenge that makes the team’s faces appear in front of the zombies, but there is no secret way to make it appear. Of course if a game-shark existed for the Naomi arcade system you could hack it back in. Should the game have been rated different just because it’s a possibility someone *could* hack it to use those faces and therefore allow you to shoot pictures of real people instead of zombies? I don’t think so nor do I think we should have had to disclose the existance of the faces in the rom.
So, no, I don’t think Rockstar should have had to disclose it, in fact they removed the content in a very industry normal way.
The ESRB has set the industy back because they’ve just set the precedent that any visual sex in a game automatically means an AO rating. That means there will be no “R” rated relationship content in games for many many years, basically until someone sues the ESRB for receiving an AO rating (which effectively makes their game un-marketable) when it deserves an M rating.
Hey Gregg,
It’s obvious that the “Hot Coffee” scene wasn’t meant to be an Easter Egg seeing how you can’t access it in the “normal” way one discovers them (button sequences, triggering something at a specific time, & place, etc).
Perhaps they could have removed it, but (as you mentioned) it would cause bigger problems, or there wasn’t enough time, or even one or two people on the development team thought it would be cool to leave the content on their with no one else’s knowledge. The past titles I have worked on there was a clear delineation between code and data such that unused levels could be removed without the need to recompute the PVS data … only Rockstar knows the real reason why the data was left on the disk.
While it’s not the same thing (at least content-wise), there was the case where EA’s Tiger Woods ‘99 contained a South Park clip in the production run of the game. It was eventually removed (for what reasons, I don’t know) …
I thought this particular section of interview Rockstar had with IGN was interesting:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/635/635277p2.html
It was the second press statement that they made that caused me to question whether they were being truthful or not about the whole incident. I’ve no issue with why the content was there, but why they weren’t straight up about it from the begining.
But really the whole affair just seems to me that Rockstar got careless as it already had enemies (gathered from previous GTA titles) waiting for it to make a mistake. “God of War” on the PS2 has this sex mini-game, but no one’s making a big deal of it.
Hopefully things will calm down enough to where there won’t be any knee-jerk and unnecessary regulations placed on the industry as a result of this.
In my last message the point I was trying to make is that in this day and age developers need to show a bit more prudence in how they go about things especially when there are folks out there basically waiting to use such situations for their own agendas rather than actually trying to solve the problem. This obviously won’t be the last time the industry is placed in the limelight for a game’s content.
My PVS example was only an meant to be an example that it can take major time for data to be recomputed. GTA has continuous spooling of both music and levels, as far as we know there could be some tool the churns through all the data for hours or days to figure out the optimal layout of the data on the disk and removing a segment would have required that tool to be run again and all the segments to be checked to make sure there are no loadtime glitches. I don’t know that tool exists, I’m pointing out there are legit reasons not to change the data at the last minute.
As for the South Park example, it’s irrelavent. The issue there is that company was distrubuting unlicensed data which is fully illegal. Nothing on the GTA:SA disc is unlicensed content.
As for Rockstar’s statement, I agree with them, you can’t access the content without hacking the game. It’s not just a built in cheat code, it requires a 3rd party hardware and it requires hacking through the code to find out how to turn it back on. That it only requires a byte or two of changes to turn it back on is irrelavent, it most likely took hours or days of hacking to figure out what those 2 bytes changes are.
I guess we just don’t agree that Rockstar did or didn’t do something wrong. If they were shipping a Kirby game and there was a disabled sex scene then yes, I’d agree they probably needed to actually remove the content from the DVD regardless of the costs or delay in schedule but this is GTA, there is nothing about that scene that makes the game deserving of a higher rating than it already has.
I personally think this *fight* needs to be had. We need to get to a point where “R” rated games are as common as “R” rated movies and the public, parents in general, are aware that “R” rated games are not for kids just as “R” rated movies are not for kids. The problem we have now is lots of non-game players assuming all games are for kids. That needs to be fixed. I personally believe it would have been fixed better by the ESRB standing by their original rating than caving in.
I agree with your point about God of War not getting as much heat as GTA but I suspect that now that the ESRB has decided a sex scene as simple and silly as the one in GTA:SA requires an AO rating that there will not be allowed to be any adult situations in any “M” rated video games for several years. I would actually NOT be surprised if God of War got re-rated as well within the next few months.
It seemed to me that the different langauge in Rockstar’s 1st and 2nd statements showed that Rockstar didn’t quite think things through … though I do see the point you’re making. The unfortunate part is that it seems that some of politicians are using this as their platform for future ambitions … and that’s the trap/thing Rockstar should have been cautious about given how much attention they’ve attracted over the years.
I definately agree with you about people realizing that not all games out there are for children. There are still many folks out there in the mainstream who haven’t yet fully realized that gaming has changed over the years. I guess something like this was sure to happen because:
1.) It seems a lot of stores weren’t really enforcing the ratings (for many titles) consistently.
2.) Many parents out there were slacking off in doing their jobs as parents.
3.) There always seems to be some kind of “controversy” with every new medium of entertainment (at least starting in the 20th century).
I’m not sure about this myself, but does the game industry (at least in America) have a lobby of sorts? If not, it’s pretty foolish because Hollywood, the music industry, and others have this kind of political tool and it is essential to have a lobby to at least give the industry a means to inform the govt. about things which are unique to the game industry. ESRB != lobby.
I don’t think God of War will be re-rated … If anything, the developer might remove those sex scenes on their next run simply to avoid any hassle.
Hopefully the situation will improve things, rather than hurt it.
This is just bs in my opinon there are thousands of games out there that are as brutal or even more violent that gta. Sure Gta is kind of *real* but you have to remember this is just a game and noone makes you play it. Im not sure of thing though, has their actually been any controversy around fightinggames like tekken or dead or alive. I dont think it is rockstars fault at all, its just that there are people that got too little to do in their spare time and maybe have a misserable life. Its time for a wakeup, the world is changing faster then ever these days but some people dont seem to want changes to happen but its unavoidable. The game was rated properly, its the retailers responsebillity to inform their customers that it is inapropriate for younger individuals. Rockstar games should take a stand and fight for their right.
GTa Rulez, stupid aussies had ban them…
Nice blog.I like this.
Nick
http://www.yahoo.com
Get a life, all of you. You said right there, the game is for adults, as long as the game sticks to adults, it is fine. I am wasting my time posting on this gay-ass site.