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From Hot Coffee To Warm Tea
I've been avoiding posting about it, but Joystiq has a completely and utterly sane discussion of the non-story that is the Bully boy on boy kissing 'scandal'. Despite the ravings of Jack Thompson, the homosexual behavior in Bully was seen by the ESRB and is not the first game to feature such content. From the article: "The ESRB would be insane if they were bullied into giving an 'M' (Mature 17+) rating to Bully, as this story continues to gain traction in the mainstream press ... It would also force the ginormous Electronic Arts into the mix to defend the 'T' rated Sims. We're willing to wager that Electronic Arts, which has a Human Rights Campaign corporate equality index score of 88 and had transsexual game designer Danielle Bunten Berry on staff, will put up a good fight if challenged. Rockstar played this brilliantly, they slid in a topic that is controversial, but perfectly defensible, and those that would attack 'Warm Tea,' won't have an easy time of it compared to 'Hot Coffee.'" SFGate put up a thoughtful opinion piece / review of Bully this past weekend. If you're not familiar with the game, it's a great way to fully understand how there's really nothing to worry about here.
Hot Coffee = male/female sex
Hot Tea = male/male kissing
Oh, the brits aren't going to like this one...
Anyone who truely finds this offensive should be considered a bigot.
It's like a corporate Poison Pill for Jack Thompson. Nee-chay!
It should be interesting to see how this plays out because videogame content is under attack from both extremes of the political spectrum and on each side you should see the complete opposite reaction; on the socially progressive side the argument will be that anyone who doesn't support this is a caveman and the socially conservative side will see this as a continued destruction of the moral core of America.
In general you could have infighting and loss of respect between these two groups and it should be interesting to see how this plays out.
Is there anything Rockstar won't do to attract a little press attention?
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
.. us Brits will also never be able to use the words 'Anyone fancy a cucumber sandwich' again.
Rockstar tried pushing the envelope in GTA and got burnt. So, they just picked a different letter and moved it very slowly.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I just want a PC version.
I bought the game last week. I haven't found the boy you can kiss. So far, though, my impression is that the 'controversy' here is laughable at best. When you target people options appear indicating what you can do with them. With some females, for example, you can profess your attraction to them and potentially woo them into smooching. My guess is that there's a boy floating around you can walk up and the heart icon will appear. Wee. Polish those pitchforks.
I have to be honest: I think it's more controversial that Bully is described as having 'gay sexual content that deserves a higher rating' than it is to have the option to kiss a boy in the game. Nice little double-standard there.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
THAT... is funny.
Both Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire contained homosexuality. In the case of Star Wars: KOTOR it was fairly tame, with the female Jedi Juhani confessing she was in love with you, and you could agree to discuss it after the mission was over. Jade Empire was more unabashed, with the female or male NPC having the option to make a member of the same sex fall in love with them. Although in both cases, whereas the heterosexual kiss was a full on face-plant, if you'd fallen for a character of the same sex, the scene cut out just before the kiss.
They didn't have a release for anything other than Sony PS2, so I won't be buying it.
:)
Oh well, not my loss...I just won't be buying it at all.
If I created and wanted to market a game, I would spend a few days programming and animating in something contraversal like this to use the current (and foolish) political climate for for advertisment.
So the only thing missing in a game in which you have to beat up kids is controversy... Hmm... Yeah, kissing ought to fill that gap!
...it's tea, earl grey, hot!
I haven't played Bully, so I'm speculating wildly here, but here's my assumption:
:)
There's a "kiss" button combination, so if you stand in front of a girl and press it, you grab her and you kiss.
Now, what happens if you stand in front of a boy and press the same buttons?
It seems to me that if anything different happens, the developers have to explain why they're discriminating against homosexuality. The only fair and balanced thing to do is for the engine to treat boys and girls alike.
The only remaining question is how the NPCs you try to kiss react. My guess, and the way I'd design it (not that I have any qualifications to design games) is that some female NPCs will fight you off and tell you to piss off, some female NPCs will be happy to kiss you, some male NPCs won't take kindly to it at all, while others will enjoy it.
My neighbour's bought the game, so I expect I'll give it a try in a couple of weeks when he gets bored of it
I seriously clicked on this article to read about some Slashdotter switching from caffinated coffee to tea, and the experience he/she went through. I read and now see it's about virtual boy on boy action.
I wonder which situation would actually make more of an impact on the typical Slashdotter. =p
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Remarkably, it does seem to be the "left" that focuses on tearing down videogames ... which is just silly, if you think about it. Liberalism is supposed to emphasize being liberal, no matter whether the issue is gay rights or violent videogames, birth-control or gun ownership, pornography or hate speech (not that I'm suggesting conservatives endorse hate-propaganda; they just seem a bit more likely to consider it a form of protected speech).
It is starting to look more and more like maybe Jack Thompson is some kind of plant. It's not unlike the theory that the Westborough Baptist Church was actually founded to raise sympathy for homosexuals -- they're so ridiculously over-the-top that it gets easier and easier to hang on to the suspiscion that they're not for real.
Say, does anybody have the "Frothy Espresso" code for this game?
I hear it's... well, like it sounds.
Very few people want homosexual content in their games. There will be quite a number of people who were going to buy Bully and now they won't. The vast majority of heterosexual males are disgusted with homosexuality. This isn't something that liberals want to hear, but it's true. This is about forcing something on the consumer that they don't want. The standard reaction of the consumer is not to buy it.
... it was an arc of urine coming out from beneath her dress.
I'll give a non-homosexual example of where my digust for something made me regret a purchase. I watch a lot of movies in the theater. The movie Beloved had come out and I decided to go see it. There was one scene I was repulsed by. Oprah Winfrey urinating. God, I hope that was faked. It wasn't her sitting down and doing her business
So I don't like watching homosexuals kiss or watching Oprah pee. If a media product comes out which includes either, I will not purchase it.
""I'm sorry, no thanks, they make me insecure about my sexuality."
"...""
Too late for that.
Long before KOTOR, remember Fallout 2? Not only are there gay sexual encounters, there's actually the possibility of a gay wedding. In fact, a gay shotgun wedding. And, later on, a gay divorce.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I think I brought this up in a Hot Coffee thread a long time ago, and I'm stating it here again because I didn't notice that anyone else had done so yet.
Long ago, SimCopter included an unplanned easter egg that featured semi-nude male NPCs running around kissing. The guy who included it in the game--it wasn't planned or discussed with the rest of the team, it seems--was fired supposedly for the unauthorized inclusion, not for its content. That, at least, is how I understood what happened.
Now, nobody really complained about that to the n-th degree as we're about to/are seeing with Bully. Was it because these were supposedly grown men instead of kids? Was it because we are so much more sensitive these days? Was it because there wasn't anyone around to stir the pot of controversy? Was it because the target audiences were different?
(Somewhat related: Jack Thompson also thinks that Sims 2 is a pedophile's dream-come-true, as well, since you can remove the pixel blur for children and even apply third-party skins with teh boobies! Somebody please think of the virtual children!!!)
Method of processing duck feet
Pointing out bigotry.. is not itself bigotry.
But, don't let that stop you fucking asshats replying to the OP.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Nintendo's bringing back the virtual boy? Is Nintendo actually making a VR helmet for Wii?
I'm not saying that Bully should be banned. But there should be full disclosure of homosexual content. This would allow gamers and parents buying games for their children to make a fully informed decision. Just as Gears of War should have a label stating "intense bloody violence" on it. I like games with brutal violence, but I understand that many people don't. If Mario suddenly ripped off Luigi's head and started raping the eye sockets, there are many people who would be unpleasantly surprised.
Homosexuals don't tend to be major characters in film and television. It's usually a gay guy who is the platonic friend of a heterosexual woman. I have heard that there are quite a number of gay independent films, but they are probably watched by a mostly gay audience. When is the last time you watched an action in which the hero and his boyfriend saved the day. Most people don't want to watch a movie in which a gay James Bond sleeps with a bunch of guys while preventing the Earth from imploding. Yet a heterosexual James Bond who sleeps with a bunch of women has resulted in 20+ movies over 50+ years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_bond/. One set of movies get made, the other doesn't see the light of day. The only popular depiction of gay sexuality is when two heterosexual women are paid money to have gay sex with each other, simulated or otherwise. And then quickly leave each other when there are men available.
Ironically enough, the Hot Coffee scandal is a completely different animal from the Bully scandal. The simulated sex games were never meant to be available to the public, while the Bully gay kissing doesn't require a mod to access. And Bully gets a Teen rating.
Ohnoes! You can optionally kiss a boy! Now that I know I can offer flowers to a boy in the game, I simply can't resist, I'm somehow compelled by the homosexual agenda! I'm being forced get flowers, to track down a gay character, and offer the flowers to that character! Help, help, I'm being oppressed!
The same thing happened to me.
Here is a flower.
@}----
So, uh, do you want to go get some dinner?
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
First, there's nothing wrong with being gay.
There's also nothing wrong with being a lazy programmer. (If you make games.)
So let's suppose you've got to create a sprite for your game. You like the girls better, so you code them first. There's nothing wrong with that. I can relate. You've then got to create a matching set of male characters.
Do you:
1. Create all the male characters from scratch?
2. Copy the female characters into the male directory, reuse a lot of the code like the gestures, dialog options, friendship level, affiliation, etc., and just change the names, skins, voicepacks, and just quickly change this one flag from hey lunchtime and then compile?
If in the event of the extremely likely #2, they could never admit to the mistake nor fix it.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.