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Guy Game Results in Lawsuits and Injunction

Posted by Zonk on from the stupidity-beyond-my-comprehension dept.

Several readers have written in to report on Tuesday's lawsuit regarding 'The Guy Game'. The PC/console offering, which strings a weak trivia game around footage of naked college age girls, has come under fire after the revelation that a woman featured prominently in the game was under the age of 18 at the time the footage was taken. The lawsuit names Sony (PS2), Microsoft (Xbox), Take-Two Interactive (Publisher), and Top Heavy Studios (Developer) as defendants. Commentary available on GamesIndustry.biz.

11 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by th1ckasabr1ck · · Score: 5, Insightful
    According to the Cox News Service, the lawsuit explains: "Plaintiff is still a teenager and wishes to attend college, develop her career and be active in her community and church."

    I wonder what the church thinks of the game. Maybe if she wants to be such a model citizen, she should start out by not running around topless during spring break.

    1. Re:Well... by thefirelane · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe if she wants to be such a model citizen, she should start out by not running around topless during spring break.

      Insightful? You realize that's why we have the concept of 'a minor' right? So that dumb youthful indiscretions do not tarnish one's life for ever?

    2. Re:Well... by ivan256 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You realize that's why we have the concept of 'a minor' right? So that dumb youthful indiscretions do not tarnish one's life for ever?

      That's also why you have parents. Why did they let her run around topless for spring break in the first place if it was going to be such an issue? As for "tarnishing one's life", well, you're born topless. I don't understand why being seen with your shirt off is such a big deal anyway. Hell, until you hit the teenage years, lots of parents think little girls running around on the beach with no shirt on is "cute". As soon as they have breasts, though, everybody's sexual insecurities make them all uncomfortable about it. People like that need to grow up.

      To top it off, it's not like somebody forced her to do this, or paid her to do it. It's something that happened in a public place, and as such it shouldn't be any less legal to photograph it than it is to witness it. If having a photograph of a naked person in public who happens to be a minor is a crime, it should be the guardian of that minor who allowed them to be naked in public who should be held responsible. That assumes that the real goal here is to protect minors though, and not to make people feel all warm and fuzzy inside because they don't have to be embarresed that they're aroused by sexually mature women.

      Since we're on slashdot I guess I should throw out a strawman here. What happens if a 17 year old streaks past the camera in a live newscast? Should the news outlet be prosecuted for child pornography, or be disallowed to keep that footage in their archive?

    3. Re:Well... by JuggleGeek · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Yeah right. And when a minor kills someone and the courts let them off easy 'cause their only 15, it's OK. They shouldn't be responsible for stealing the gun, shooting the victim, etc - they are just a minor.

      She was 17 years old running around topless on a beach because she wanted people to look at her cute little titties. And now she's bitching and whining and suing over it.

      You may believe that people should be able to do any damn fool thing they want with no repercussions, but that's an unreasonable belief. Real life doesn't work that way.

      The very idea that one would be "tarnished forever" for running around partially nude is nonsense in and of itself.

    4. Re:Well... by Romeozulu · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's something that happened in a public place, and as such it shouldn't be any less legal to photograph it than it is to witness it.

      It's perfectly legal to photograph someone in a public place, but it is not legal to use that image for commerical purposes. This is a issues that photographers deal wih everyday.

    5. Re:Well... by arkanes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have to agree with the stupid whiny thing, but on the other hand, it's not like it's well known what you have to do as far as release forms goes for crowd footage. And if the crowd footage happens to be of very young college girls with thier tops off, then anyone with half a brain should realize they need to go the extra mile to make 100% certain than they aren't shipping anything with underage girls in it. If she was an out of focus background character cause she streaked by while they were filming someone else, that'd be a different story.

  2. The cynical/conspiracy theorist... by the+Man+in+Black · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...yes, I'm certain this won't hurt sales at all. Kinda like Traci Lords "leaking" the fact that she was underage in order to get all her old movies pulled (and turned into hot collector's items) with the fringe benefit of making her last and only "adult age" porno flick sell like gangbusters.

    What? So I'm a pervert. At least I'm open about it.

    --
    El riesgo vive siempre!
  3. Lawers are so short-sighted... by acousticiris · · Score: 4, Funny

    So sue Sony because a playstation can play a game that features content that breaks the law.

    I'm surprised they were so short-sighted:
    They should sue the maker of the digital camera used to take the picture of the girl.
    If they used a scanner and a traditional camera, they should sue both the maker of the scanner and the camera. Double the dollars!
    How about suing the DVD Consortium because they produced the scandard by which the disc used to distribute the content contained the illegal picture.

    Too much? More realistic:
    Jail all of the end-users because they now possess child-pornography.
    Sue the ESRB ... which arguably operates as a clearing-house when they choose to slap a rating on a game.

    One can argue that because MS, Sony et. al. have put controls on their console allowing them to essentially declare what can and cannot run on it (without a mod-chip of course), that they "sanctioned" rather than just simply "allowed" this to take place...
    Of course, we can expect that Sony, MS et. al. will probably be far more conservative in deciding what is or isn't allowed to operate on their systems from here on out. I may not agree with the content of the game, but it'll shame when all of the software is dumbed down so as not to offend even the most conservative among us.

    But the cynic in me has to ask the question...if this succeeds: What happens when a slick lawyer is able to confuse a judge and a jury into drawing the conclusion that the OS/product not only "is" a clearing-house, but legally "must operate as" a clearing-house for the applications running on it. Do they sue all of the Linux programmers when Linux fails to block something illegal or offensive?

    --
    "God is dead!" - Nietzsche
    "Nietzsche is dead!" - God
    1. Re:Lawers are so short-sighted... by Khuffie · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Sony was sued because they published the game

      RTA. Neither Sony nor Microsoft published the game. Take-Two's The Gathering publishes the game. The role Sony and Microsoft have is basically to see if the game is essentially 'bug free', ie it won't cause their console to burst into flames. They usually don't care about the content or the quality of the game itself, just whether or not it'll destroy their hardware.

      Suing Sony and Microsoft here is like me suing a sports store where I bought those Adidas sneakers who got tangled up and caused me to fall, and scar my knees.

      From the article: Why? Because the woman in question was only 17 at the time, and therefore legally incapable of giving her consent to be in The Guy Game, let alone half naked.

      If she was a minor, what the frig' was she doing there, naked? I'm sure whoever was shooting checked their ages at the time (no one's going to be stupid enough NOT to). She must have had an illegal ID at hand (probably, its spring break, she was probably there drinking too). Being 17 doesn't make you stupid.

  4. Ah, the irony by chrisbtoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So she's old enough to be in college, she's happy to run around topless while at college, and she's smart enough to sue - but unable to give (or, indeed, not give) her consent to appear in the game.

    Hurrah! for the law.

    --
    Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
  5. I am suing by MyLongNickName · · Score: 4, Funny

    I was pictured topless in the game here:
    http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2004/reviews/ 919657_20040901_thumb008.jpg

    (Remove stupid spacing)

    --
    See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year