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What's So Wrong With the ESRB?
1up has an in-depth look at the Hot Coffee hoopla, and the resulting impact on the ESRB. From the article: "Hot Coffee's wake was also the tipping point for The National Institute for Media and the Family. Its strongly worded 10th Annual MediaWise Video and Computer Game Report Card awarded the ESRB an 'F' for ratings accuracy and a 'C+' for ratings education. More damning was the Report Card's statement: 'The so-called 'hot coffee' scandal does not simply reveal the bad faith of one of the industry's most prominent companies; it has shown once and for all that the present rating system is broken and can't be fixed.'"
Great, government regulation of video games. Just what the world needs. If there's anything that the Hot Coffee Mod fiasco has made clear, it's that the media and the public are doing a pretty good job at being a ESRB-watchdog. Rockstar has felt the results in its bottom line. What's the problem? More info:
ESRB, Video game controversy, Family Entertainment Protection Act.
"They have tweaked things," said Olson, "but there is blatant pornography on the best-selling game of the year. That says that the ratings system didn't work."
But there's NOT. It is a FLAT OUT LIE That GTA:SA contained pornography. As soon as someone makes that claim everything else they say becomes null and void. They have proven that they are not qualified to speak about the subject. It is absolutely pointless to talk about anything else related to the subject until people actually know what the fuck they're talking about.
The laws of probability forbid it!
Personally, as someone who works in the computer sector, hot coffee realistically was perfectly fine, and should NOT have impacted their ESRB. If so, then everybody should be charged with public nudity, because if someone were to come by and rip your clothes off, you would be naked, and that is NOT acceptable. This is exactly the same thing. Yes, the programmers as a gag threw this in. Yes, they left the code in, but disabled it. Yes, someone figured out how to enable it. It is standard practice NOT to gut code when a feature is not desired, but to simply disable the feature to prevent side effects in otherwise tested code. As a result it made it easy to reveal, but it is NOT the fault of the developer for it being released. If modifying code to reveal something unintended should be put on the ESRB labels, then every ESRB label should have "warning: ESRB rating can change if code is modifed", much like online ESRB labels warn about changing ratings for online play.