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GTA Sex Game Leads to ESRB Fracas
At first, it was nothing more than a rumour. A "sex mini-game" in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, left in the code for the PC version and unlocked by inquisitive players. Then, as more and more information became available it seemed as though the sex game might be real. This revelation has lead to California Speaker pro-tem Yee blasting the ESRB for their apparent slip-up in examining all the content in the game. The ESRB has responded by pledging a "thorough and objective investigation" of the claims to get to the bottom of the situation. Commentary is available from Joystiq, GamesAreFun, and Buttonmashing.
Did the ESRB rate the mini-games that came with MS office apps, namely the flight sim with Excel and the DOOM clone with Word?
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
How can the ESRB or even Rockstar be blamed for this? They removed the content from the game itself, its not their fault some gamers found a way to put it back in. Its funny how these people jump on anyone at anytime for no reason at all. The game is rated mature, and unless I live in some Bizzaro World im pretty sure just about every 17 year old has either had sex or seen porn.
So what's the problem again?
There's a lot of anti-computer-game sentiment in the world today, and the argument "we're adults, we can choose what to play" carries a lot more weight when games have ratings, so it's obvious to those who are choosing a game for a kid what's going to be in it.
So when game authors turn around and put stuff in a game, hidden, that go far beyond what the game rating indicates is in there, it does nothing to help our cause. It makes the game ratings unreliable, which means people who want to trust ratings (parents, say) suddenly have no indicator that they can trust, and their only fallback is "all games suck".
Honestly, I don't see how the ESRB could have known this stuff was there, without hacking every part of every game file. To get this stuff you have to manually change a couple game files. If it's something you have to consciously hack, and can't even get to in the course of (even wacky) gameplay, then it's not really part of the game.
Yes, the designers shouldn't have shipped the game with that stuff anyway, but that's not ESRB's fault, that's the coder's. Using this to scapegoat the ESRB is stupid.
While I think it was probably bad judgement for the creators of the game to put this in the game, it's not like this is really part of the game anyways, kids aren't going to come across the in normal play or anything. I mean, surely any person who would go through the trouble it takes to get to this easter egg would be able to find far more graphic things on the web.
The game is already rated M because of its violence, but sex in said game has the California legislature up in arms? Of all the "bad things" in the game it's the sex that's supposed to have pushed up to Ao?
http://files.gtanet.com.nyud.net:8090/gtasa/videos /hotcoffee.wmv
Next time use coral.
Nobody young enough to be traumatized by a "sex game" should be playing any of the GTA games at all to begin with. Once again, blame parents.
rooooar
Clearly this game was misrated! It's rated "M" implying that it's suitable for no one under 17 when obviously it should get the highest rating of "AO" to reflect that no one under 18 should play it.
THAT EXTRA YEAR MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE!
Clearly they wrote the code and then decided to play it safe and comment out the line that calls it before submitting the game for rating, replication, and distribution.
So someone comes along and adds the call to that disabled code back in and it's rockstar's fault.. how ?
How is this different from the nude models in Sims 2, or the console command to remove the pixelization when the sims are showering in that same game ? Surely EA Games aren't responsible for that ?
If you have to actually mod the game to "unlock" this then I don't see why this is the ESRB's business. The game Rockstar shipped deserved the rating it received. The game with the porn in it is a result of modification by the end user and therefore a different game from the ESRB's perspective. You could easily mod quake 3 so that, I don't know, all the textures are hardcore pornography, but that doesn't earn quake 3 an "adult" rating.
But, of course-- and this incident just goes to show this-- the ESRB isn't actually about allowing gamers to be informed about their purchases, or about allowing parents to responsibly monitor and regulate the video game usage of their children. Those things are just halfhearted side effects. The ESRB is about feeding and indulging hysteria and media hype concerning video games. With this goal in mind, of course, the ability to mod a game to unlock or insert porn becomes very much the ESRB's business.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Exactly. This is like getting all high and mighty because an NC-17 movie has unadvertised sex in it that was left on a master replication print that differed from a screener print. There are no stronger rating in games or movies, so what exactly is the ESRB expected to do? Apologize saying, "Oh, we're sorry. That should have been Stronger Sexual Content"?
... okay, I could understand why certain people were upset by that incident. But in this case it's nothing more than the Indecency Policeman getting on his moral high horse in order to make it seem as though he's oh-so-very-worried about the delicate values of the people that he so caringly represents. {/SARCASM}
... Yee's a D-California??? And he's worried about indecency? Wow! Who would have thought! (Yes, humorless mods, that's a joke.)
The game is not directed at kids and should not be purchased by kids. It says so right on the damned box!
Adding a topless woman in a frame of The Rescuers (Disney)
Wait a minute
Once again, a politician is out to make a huge fuss to prove to his constituency that he's worthy of re-election. "Molehill, I'd like you to meet your replacement, Mountain. Mountain is going to be my new Public Relations chief and head of my re-election campaign."
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
If indeed GTA is no longer appealing, then all of the fuss over stuff that the children could not possibly get to without a lot of help is just a lot of free advertising for Rockstar Games. Now there'll be a whole bunch of horny teens hacking the game for the sex games over the weekend!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
In the movie world, there's the theatrical release, rated by the MPAA, and then, often, there's the unrated "Director's cut", with extra sex, violence, or long boring scenes, depending on what was cut in the first pass. Games may go that way. Would probably increase sales, too.
"M" is no one under 17
"AO" is no under 18
So to clarify, running over people, shooting people, killing police officers, stealing cars, etc. are all okay if you're 17. Consensual sex, on the other hand, you have to be 18 for.
That's one of things Europeans just can't understand about America. It's acceptable in America to take kids of 12 or 13 to a Schwarzenneger movie where he blows the bad guy up with a rocket launcher while saying something witty. If the movie involves people talking out their problems while there is a breast visible, then it's adults-only fare.
-B
The US has strange attitudes about sex and violence. GTA:SA has (appropriately in my opinion) an M rating. The game allows you, if you choose, to:kill other gang members, cops and innocent bystanders in lots of gruesome ways (including setting them on fire or beating them to death with a big purple dildo); become a pimp; have sex with hookers; visit a strip club and get private dances; and lots of other mayhem. As part of the plot you need to kill or seduce a waitress at a casino who is into bondage.
But all of that is done without any nudity. Oh, but now it is revealed that if you hack the game you can see a blocky, pixellated bare boobie. Quick, somebody whip up some righteous indignation and start a fedral investigation! 17-year-olds need to be protected from boobies!
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
This is potentially the death knell for the ESRB. They are quite explicit in their direction to companies submiting games - all content, regardless of how it is accessed must be submitted for rating. Indeed, I'm not even sure if the ESRB gets playable versions of the games, they ask for footage of the most extreme sex and violence in the game. (They have guidelines to let you know what's significant.)
The only enforcement power that the ESRB has is the promise that if you try to trick them they will refuse to rate your games. If they won't rate your game you can't use their trademarked logos on your games. If you don't have a ESRB logo on your game the major retailers will refuse to carry your game.
So, here's the problem. GTA 4 is going to come out sometime. When it does there will be huge demand for it. If these claims hold true, the ESRB has a choice - either refuse to rate the game, and risk undermining their authority if stores carry the game anyway (and stores have to choose if they want to sell the game themselves, or risk introducing their customers to the competition if they are forced to buy the game on the Internet), or rate the game anyway and lose the only enforcement tool they have. Either way you have a neutered ESRB.
Why do we care? Because just like the movie ratings, the game ratings aren't in existence to be a form of thought police - they're there to prevent the goverment from creating thought police. Right now creating and selling an unrated game means you don't have access to Wal-Mart; if the government was in control your unrated game would be banned outright. Goodbye indie game scene.
The ESRB itself is agnostic about what kids are playing at what age - they just want to make sure that no one goes home and is surprised by what they've purchased. If this report is true, that's one hell of a surprise.
Walmart (and some others) refuse to stock AO titles. Means if your game gets an AO rating it's inaccessable to a large part of the market.
Same thing with NC-17 ratings on movies. The problem isn't that kids under 17 can't see it, there are plenty of older movie goers, the problem is most theatres will refuse to show it.
If you watch to the end of the video, you'll see the note saying "Remember, nice guys finish last".
Hey, that's good -- she should enjoy it too, fellas. I don't see the problem, they're teaching positive sexual relations here.
( Perhaps everybody's up at arms because here in America, we do it missionary only, and *only* when we need a baby. )
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
however sex does carry with it certain responsibilities
::biggest_rolls_eyes_ever::
Yes, and beating the shit out of someone or shooting them several times in the chest has no long term reprocussions at all.
The *real* reason why sex is abhorred and violence is glorified is because we're a bunch of puritans in comparison to the rest of the world.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Except that besides the parts you made up that aren't actually in the game ("no, run away, you stupid biatch!"), nothing that you mentioned seems that bad. The GTA scene from the grand parent, on the other hand, is pretty abhorent if you consider the actions in context of reality.
I think you can learn a lot about someone by what they do when the play GTA.. or whether they like or play the game at all.
Am I the only one mad at Rockstar? Everyone here seems to be blasting Yee (and yes, he is a douchebag), but Rockstar constantly pushes the limits (on what I think are crappy games, but I guess some people find a value in them). They really have to play by the rules, because they're playing so close to the edge it was stupid and rather negligent (not in the legal sense) to leave the game on there.
Rockstar does crap like this and it makes it harder to get a good game that uses violence to enhances the gameplay (Resident Evil 4, for example). Take their upcoming game on school bullies for example - it's going to make it harder to put out good-but-violent games.
Whether or not Rockstar targets young kids to buy this games is up for debate (I think they do) but the fact remains that they left the content on the game and anything like that is supposed to be submitted to the ESRB. As gamers we should be admonishing Rockstar too.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Boobs gets you at least a PG13 rating; enough of them, on screen sex, or "full frontal" female nudity tends to get an R. Show genitals (penis or labia), you're going to get an NC17 or X rating unless it's really short and nonsexual in context-- in which case you might get away with an R.
Yes, we Americans are, on average, completely whacko. And we invented nuclear weapons! Why the hell haven't the rest of you invented interstellar travel yet???
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
And speaking of insecure males, I suppose at this point I should say something mildly witty to point out the fact that I am, in fact, straight. Unfortunately, nothing is coming to mind except: "I'm not gay, really! I'm married! Yes, to a woman."
Which raises another interesting point - the whole US presumption that Nudity == Sex. There seems to be this idea that nudity must be entirely sexual, and hence if you're a man looking at naked men (regardless of context) you must be gay. If you ever look at nude woman, regardless of context, then its all about sex. In practice I would think it is the context, rather than the nudity, that ought to be of concern.
I think the tight binding of nudity and sex in the US stems, in a large part, from the fact that nudity is so taboo there. That means the only time you see much nudity is if you're secretively looking at porn or some such. That is, because nudity has been driven underground the only context in which it is generally encountered is a sexual one. It's rather sad really.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
If the only reason sexual content is censored is to prevent children from mimicing them and making poor sexual choices, then why can't women's breasts be seen on TV? Why do they automatically raise the rating of any game/movie? I'll tell you why: this culture obsessively sexually represses itself. Many other countries are much more open about sex, and many have less problems with STDs and teen pregnency than the US. This is not about role models, this is something much deeper.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Clearly then the mod should be rated AO and the game rated M.
As sold, the game is appropriately rated M.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Indeed. And as has been pointed out many times in these comments, the idea that violence is somehow less bad than sex is quite ridiculous.
GTA, which is packed to the brim with blasting heads off with sniper rifles and running over cops, leaving bloody smears gets an M rating. Fine. But as soon as you throw in some cheesy videogame softcore porn it's suddenly horribly offensive and in need of an investigation? Right.
"M is defined as "Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content, and/or strong language."
AO is defined as "Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity."
Well at least the ratings aren't vague and ambigous...
Sheesh can anyone tell me what differentiates intense violence/intense nudity and "Prolonged" intense violence/intense nudity?!?!
Is there a timer? If so how long is long enough to qualify for AO?!?
And finally.. what is less harmful about the duration of "intense violence/intense nudity"?
All of these ratings seem confused and unclear, but as long as the politicians feel better about what they spend their time on, i guess it doesn't matter if the ratings are accurate or effective...
"Maybe it's some of these weird USA cultural things?"
Yes. Yes it is.
In the U.S., if you can get laid in high school, you don't do anything else. The culture is so obsessed with popularity that the only people who have time to think about anything else are the rejects.
That's why the U.S. has so many varieties of geek. Computer geeks, sure, but math geek, science geek, band geek, drama geek...
There's no reason for a guy who plays saxophone in the school band to be considered undateable. Playing the sax is attractive. It's just that only unattractive people take the time to learn something like this.
The U.S. school system is so broken, foreigners can't even begin to grasp it. The only thing U.S. high schools can still do at this point seems to be keeping the horny and attractive teenagers mostly away from the adult population.
The game is a big sandbox. You can perform random violence if you like. However, if you persist in such sociopathic behaviour, eventually the authorities will take notice. Your character will, at best, be arrested. At worst your character will be shot and killed by a SWAT team.
This is no different from real-life.
You decided to inflict random violence on another character. You are the one to blame for your actions. Since you're posting on Slashdot, you're probably not currently in jail or on death row. This type of behaviour is obviously not acceptable to you in real-life - yet it apparently is in a virtual world where there are no real consequences. What does this say about you?
Will Wright (designer of The Sims) once said that his daughter loves GTA - she drives around the city on a scooter for hours at a time. No violence or death, she just wants to explore.
I would say that on some levels GTA is a mirror that exposes those who play it for who they really are. The game is not like a movie. It does not stomp on civilians without someone at the controls.
You win GTA by completing the missions - which, yes, are of a criminal nature, but they do not endorse random violence against innocent civilians in the manner that you depicted (it is often counterproductive since it is beneficial to attract less attention from the virtual authorities).
Sure, there are times when players just "go nuts", start messing around and go on random killing sprees, seeing how much carnage they can commit before being caught or killed - but if you persist, the consequences will always, always catch up with you.
With a few file-switching & some tweaking, you can turn off the blurring in the sims & then you have naked sims.
Ok, so theyre not anatomically correct, but there are also ways to fix that.
Not that ive tried it or anything.
In sims2, you can have the sims "try for baby" in which they disappear under the covers, fireworks shoot about & soon the female is pregnant.
Ive also seen "naked" skins for quake & im sure theyre available for other FPS's
Looks like ESRB has their work cut out for them.
This "anti sex" culture in Government will change... Here is why.
The current generation in the United States has access to the internet. Now, you can find whatever you want on the internet, this should be obvious. Indeed, you can often find sexually explicit material on the internet when you are not looking for it.
So, now we have both sexes viewing sexually explicit material when they choose to do so via the internet. (I can remeber being excited in the early 80s managing to locate a copy of penthouse, which myself and my friends would stare at in amazement...)
However, the current generation that is in government was not raised by these standards - they are far more conservative when it comes to sex. Therefore, they choose to ban it to 'protect the kids' or whatever.
However, as this generation ages, having had more exposure to sex and nudity, and being far more tolerante of it, so will the current policies surrounding it.
So, yes, the US government is very reactionary to sex, but this will change - it MUST change because the current younger generation just won't tolerate it when they age.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Thanks for the torrent link - it works. Please keep doing this for anything fairly large like this. It's great to actually be able to get the data instead of just clicking on it, waiting a while and giving up.
Cheers to j-beda! If I could serve you a beer thru the internet, you'd have a fresh cold one right now.
The part that makes me laugh is that 'M' rated things have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. 'AO' has content that should only be played by persons 18 and older.
I really don't think that the one year makes a hell of a lot of difference.
So wait a minute. Are you trying to say that a game which involves the wholesale murder of innocent pedestrians, gang members, policeman and even military personnel, the theft of any number of vehicles, lying, cheating and corruption, prostitution and drugs... you're telling me this game is of questionable moral character?
Never!
Thank goodness the ESRB is out to protect me.
The Internet is generally stupid
I have to disagree. I think ratings are important, should be accurate, and should reflect NOT your opinions, but the content of the film. For films, it might suprise you that some people don't want to see graphic gore, torture, pain and violence suprising them in a film that looked much less violent in the trailers.
In this instance, I have argued previously that many non-violent adult themes were palced into GTA for:
a) laughs
b) enjoyment
c) more laughs
d) to assert that this is definately a game for adults.
People who are anti-game-violence, and people who are 'anti-anti-gameviolence' and well as those pro-gaming violence (of which I would say i am one) get this all wrong.
Even with a mature rating, a purely violent game would be immediately pounced upon as marketting to children. If you can somehow put sex in there, you can really show that you are not trying to appeal to children, but an adult audience.
Hitting all the 'adult content' points is important therefore.
Now, Postal is a bloody marvelous game. And Hitman, but postal for a different reason. I completed the demo in about 1 minute. I walked to the shop, bought milk, went home. I won!! Hurrah!
Now, if that was what was shown to the ESRB, then it would have had a E and a smiley face. However, one time I accidentally pissed on a woman, and then hit her in the face with a shovel, and proceeded to douse her in petrol and light her on fire. Ooops! Now that kind of content is not suitable for children in any for, be in in a book, on a film, or in a video game.
The book is an important point, we are not just talking about graphical depictions, but the acts themselves.
I agree with the guy bringing this up, I suspected someone would, and I am glad they did. If this content had been in a game with a lower rating, and the content had been in stark contrast to the game (as it is, I do not really like that content, it makes me feel like I am playing a cheap 'playboy mansion' or 'Leisure Suit Larry' game (oh that vibrating black censor box when you had sex, I can't believe we wondered if you could actually turn that off!).
I do not agree (or know of) his agenda, but they deserve a slap on the wrist. You actually simulate sex, and although I thought it was cool, it really is offensive content (although they can both be clothed) It makes you tap in rhythm, and says your the man when she cums. Many parents bought this game KNOWING its violence, and let their kids use it, but if they knew of such adult content, then they would not have, ok it is not easily accessible, but kids on forums want to try everything.
While I agree with your points, the fact remains rockstar are in the wrong, if noone had found it, they would have got away with it, but it seems like they wanted someone to find it, and generate a second wave of buzz (for kicks, or, even more $$$).
MXBTBXW
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