Hot Coffee In The Retail Space

Gamasutra has a piece talking to the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association's Hal Halpin about the impact of recent gaming news on the retail space. From the article: "As of this minute, [the game retail industry's] three major opponents are the State of California, the State of Illinois and the State of Michigan ... More specifically, they are those states' respective attorney generals and their governors, who each signed into law bills which their legislatures knew full-well would be in violation of the First Amendment."

Comments

Re:Riddle me this

[Pxtl]

Actually, it was beyond a cheat code - it was a hack. There was no way to expose the disabled content in the game without pushing bits around manually. Afaik, you had to hexedit a savegame or gamestate or something to expose it. People then uploaded the hacked savegame file that you could DL to try it.

The problem is that there is no real analogy for it in the real world. Most other forms of media can't include unviewable content in any expressible form. Imagine if a VHS tape had a porn movie outside of the margins of the screen - you'd have to practically break your VCR to view it. Or a book had 2 pages glued together with dirty pictures on them - but the only way to expose it was with chemical solvents that you'd have to go to a specialty store to buy.

Re:First Amendment is Federal, not State

[hunterx11]

There is a 14th amendment, you know. In fact, it's newer than the 1st.