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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?
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!
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.
"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.
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.
My understanding is that the video game developers are required to submit footage from the game that is representative of the maximum level of offensive content the player is going to experience, and the ESRB rates the game based on submitted footage. If the developer doesn't disclose some content that is more offensive than what they submitted to the ESRB, it's their own fault.
From what I read, it seems the code in question was blocked off, and it takes a mod to unlock it. So the material submitted for examination would be what the normal player is going to see. It really depends on whether the game developer intended for the "mod" to be discovered and made public. There are a number of people out there disassembling game code for cheats and finding things game developers would prefer they didn't.
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.
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.
I think it was more like this:
Boss: "Hey, did you get the gore level turned up like I asked?"
Developer: "No, I've been working on this bonus level."
Game: *squeak squeak squeak*
Boss: "Take that the fuck out. This is going to ship to the US, and those wankers can't stand sex."
Developer: "Comment out this line, and this line, and this value can never be true, so it's out. Perfect."
Or maybe - just maybe - the fact that it's a black pixel fucking a white pixel from behind is what's really giving the Puritans a wedgie. As someone else said, in America it's only married couples of the same race but different sexes that have sex, missionary only, and only to conceive.
Of course, if you think that sex is only useful for conception, there have been serious omissions in your education.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
"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.
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!