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LA Attorney Sues Rockstar Over Hot Coffee
Next Generation reports that the L.A. city attorney has filed suit against Rockstar, for a misleading ad campaign and 'unfair competition'. The suit was prompted because of the much publicized 'Hot Cofee' mod discovered last year. From the article: "'Businesses have an obligation to truthfully disclose the content of their products - whether in the food we eat or the entertainment we consume,' Delgadillo said. The lawsuit is actually part of a wider effort to investigate the marketing of videogames."
isn't this game rated mature? if so, the issue here isn't that mature content was on the disc. IT was about disclosure.
I've made a point of this before. Coders are a select subclass. They communicate in a language that most cannot comprehend. Further, they can communicate with machines and make them do things. It's an awesome power - really the penultimate modern day power.
The issue here is that the non-technical non-coding governmental and institutional bodies are impotent in the face of this power. Not only is this code completely opaque to them, they've no inclination to learn of it or to gain knowledge of it. So they want full disclosure. Hot Coffee is like pulling off the fig-leaf. Suddenly it dawns on most luddites that there's a whole world out there they know nothing about - an empire being constructed right under their noses. They are now aware that to a segment of the population, they are naked and defenseless.
Someone above posted that they should just print out the code and have the pols pick out the offending portions. That's exactly it. They can - and you can. And no one in power or invested in the status quo wants that at all.
I've said it before. Coders devalue themselves - coders have ALL the power in this world. They then turn around and give it away for a paycheck.
un burrito me trampeó.
If renoir painted a nude orgy on a canvas, and then changed his mind and painted most of it over and put clothes on everyone so it looked like people spraweld on the grass at a sunday church picnic would there be a problem. If some currator scraped off the covering paint to reveal the draft orgy form should we go after renoir for public obscenity?
IN the case of the game there were some dark corners that were painted over. Someone wrote some code to expose them. They presumably were not inteded to be exposed. If anything they suggest the probity of the maker in deciding to remove them. But they did not excise them they painted them over. There could be lots of reasons to do this. Like the great painters they might have just been trying to save cash on canvases and just swithed off access rather than paying someone to carefully extract the sexy bits from the main code.
On the other hand another analogy is to prohibition era vinters who while forbidden to make wine except for sacraments, would ship barrels of "grape juice" to New York city with explicit instructions no to add so much sugar and certain kinds of yeast because then it might accidentally turn into wine which would be illegal. This winking cover up of the underlying product was of course intended to sell more grape juice because of it's unauthorized potential.
So perhaps this comes down to proving intent. Did rock star intend hot coffee to happen? Did they want to create a whisper marketing regime. And did they actually seed the hints that it existed?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I prefer to sue over tea myself.
But will Rockstar be able to recover damages if they can prove that the city attorney is filing a frivolous lawsuit?
On technological merits, as has been discussed before, being able to manipulate the game engine into performing activity that was not originally intended seems out of scope of liability for the manufacturer. It's a bit like suing gun manufacturers for vicarious liability. I understand that this code exists in the product, but I do not understand to what lengths the users had to go through to expose it. Which would seem to be the crux of the argument against Rockstar.
I read the article and I read the comments, but I still don't exactly understand what this is about. Can somebody enlighten me? What exactly is the infamous hot coffee sequence? I take it it has something to do with nudity or sex?
-- Cheers!
My roommate just finished playing Indigo Prophecy, and that game had a lot more adult situations right in the intended story of the game. As of yet, I have heard no big-time lawyer complaining about that game not being rated AO. (Indigo Prophecy was a really cool game actually).
...Wait, that's all inferred by the title "politician," isn't it?
Based on GTA's popularity versus Indigo Prophecy's popularity, I would argue that anti-gaming legislators are just looking for some more headline space to boost their political stance rather than honestly wanting to make any meaningful change...
In fact, in GTA:SA with a set of cheats and quite a bit of skill, you can uncover several (I know of two) partially-furnished, somewhat-non-solid bordellos. R* left them in the game because, well, it wasn't worth to cut them. I think this points in the direction of Hot Coffee being a similar left-over.