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MADD Targets GTA IV Over Drunk Driving Scene
eldavojohn writes "The watch-dog group Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) has set its sights on the rating of GTA IV, primarily because a player can drive drunk in the game. MADD released a statement saying that 'Drunk driving is not a game, and it is not a joke. Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime and it is also 100 percent preventable.' MADD also is asking Rockstar Games to consider removing GTA IV from distribution 'out of respect for the millions of victims/survivors of drunk driving.' Rockstar replied to MADD by saying 'we have a great deal of respect for MADD's mission, but we believe the mature audience for "Grand Theft Auto IV" is more than sophisticated enough to understand the game's content.' As expected, Jack Thompson is making his usual attention-whoring remarks by comparing GTA IV to the polio virus."
The whole point of video games is to do things that you couldn't possibly do in real life safely. In my opinion, MADD should be ENCOURAGING people to drive drunk in GTA IV, using this logic:
"See how much harder and more dangerous it is to drive drunk? And this is just in a video game...imagine what would happen if you did it in real life."
Living With a Nerd
MADD condones drive-bys as long as you're sober?
Because the drugs and guns and carjackings aren't choices that are violent crimes right? This is stupid. This is also coming from the worthless group that lobbied to allow the federal government to extort money from the states if they didn't raise the drinking age. Feds collect income tax from state residents, then refuse to give the money back unless the state (who is supposed to be the final authority within its own borders) complies with what the feds want them to do. So screw them, I only hope that one day these people will shut the hell up.
Don't mistake me, I think they have a good cause, they are just a worthless bunch of whiners. For example, I think stopping all abortions would be a wonderful cause, but doing it through a massive expansion of education and adoption is a far better way than parading around with dead fetus signs, mailing plastic fetuses, making it illegal, or any of the other abhorrent things the anti-abortionists do.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I'll bet MADD really wouldn't have liked how I spent last Friday night.
Have you ever driven so drunk that you have to cover one eye to keep from seeing double?
Has anyone ever noticed that anytime something is labeled "Adult" or "Mature", it is almost inevitably juvenile?
That's funny last night I was thinking the exact opposite of what the MADD organization came up with. I mean the game tells you look this is NOT safe you really should get a taxi. And I not actually knowing how to hail a taxi yet decided to risk it. Sure enough it was a BIG mistake. The car was insanely hard to control I got within viewing distance of one patrolling policeman and he called in a ton of them to put me out of commission. I think Rockstar came through in this virtual world with a true to life scenario showing that drunk driving is not the way to go. I was thinking the whole time...next time I will take the cab this is crazy! What a waste of my time as I had not saved the game recently!
It's a way of life. Goddamn dipsoaurigaeophobic bigots
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
And, as usual, Slashdot is helping him get even more attention. I want to go on record here and now asking Slashdot to pull this story, out of respect for all of the attention-whoring victims that this jerk has already affected.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Rockstar's response is right on the money: adults should be able to distinguish between entertainment/fantasy/fiction (where murder may be depicted, or drunk driving may be a game) and reality (where these things are illegal and unethical). Adults who cannot make those distinctions are a danger to society (regardless of what video games are on the market).
...from an organization with a noble cause to a right-wing, Prohibitionist, Evangelical, whiny group that would desire a socialist nanny-state with breathalyzers in every car? I mean, sheeeesh!!!
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
What's even more ironic is that the game specifically says "Driving in this condition is a bad idea, better call a cab". The scene in question is designed to teach you how to use the cabs in the game. If you drive anyway the police will arrest you, even open fire on your car if hurt someone and refuse to stop. The game is actually very clearly anti-drunk driving.
1. Imbibe alcoholic drink of choice until plastered.
2. Put driving game of choice in console (or have non-inebriated person do it for you).
3. Play game.
This works just as well with GTA IV (or Vice City) as with Mario Kart.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
MADD's founder broke with the group in the 1980s:
... I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving."
MADD founder Candy Lightner broke ties with the group in the 1980s. In 2002, she told the Washington Times: "[MADD] has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned
MADD is a bunch of nutcases that want ANY amount of drinking to be illegal. If we let these special intrest groups take our freedoms away, one by one, we will no longer be a free people. Our founding fathers would be ashamed.
Games are just that - games. They are a convenient way to explain what would otherwise be called bad parenting.
-ted
Maybe someone should tell MADD that they would probably have better luck getting their message out if they didn't take positions that are somewhere between sophomoric and insane.
If they really think that people are so completely unable to distinguish games from reality then they should understand that it means that people are so stupid that they can't be educated to stop drinking and driving anyway.
http://www.autoworld.com/news/Dodge/Neon_DD.htm
"Chrysler has found a safe way to demonstrate this dangerous situation to teen drivers with the Neon Drunk Driving Simulator, a specially equipped Dodge/Plymouth Neon that mimics the effects of driving after drinking alcohol.
Sponsored by Chrysler Corporation, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Association of Broadcasters and local Chrysler Corporation dealers, the Neon Drunk Driving Simulator will travel to more than 250 schools. The vehicle has made more than 2,100 public appearances in more than 200 cities since the program began in 1988. To date, over 750,000 people have tried the Simulator.
So... it's OK to let people experience the negative effects of drunk driving in a real car, but in the safety of your own living room? NEVER!!!!
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
"Shut up"? I'd go with "Fuck MADD". Seriously. An orginization that started for a fairly laudable purpose (combating drunk driving and assisting the victims of it) has turned into a neo-prohibitionist organization that spends as much time demonizing alcohol as it does fighting the problem of drunk driving. Even the original founder got fed up with the group and left. She was quoted as saying something like 'I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving'.
This is an orginization that encourages practices that are (IMHO) un-American. Practices like random police roadblocks (normally associated with military directorships), implied consent laws (5th amendment, what?) and my personal favorite: Getting the drinking age raised to 21. Gotta love the irony -- you can get married, join the military, sign a contract and borrow money from the bank -- but you can't legally purchase booze. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. Besides which, you could make the argument that this is counterproductive in terms of reducing drinking -- prohibit something and you just make it that much more attractive for teenagers.
Recently I heard that they've come out in favor of mandatory ignition interlock systems for all automobiles -- not just as a punishment/deterrent for those previously convicted of DUI. Yeah, I should have to pay extra money for my car and blow into a tube every time I want to start it just because a small minority of people make stupid decisions and drive drunk.
Want some sanity on this issue? Take a look a the DUI positions of the National Motorist Association. Turns out there are ways to combat the problem of drunk driving that don't involve shredding our civil liberties or demonizing alcohol.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The drunk driving scenes didn't seem so bad to me, then again I was drunk.
Yep. When you go drinking ingame, you're usually accompanied by another character. And they will almost always dissuade you from drink driving.
Even Roman, Niko's lazy drunkard cousin, says "If you drink and drive, you're an idiot."
('course... Roman does turn up drunk during the intro sequence, but hey.)
I had a lengthy conversation with a MADD representative one day. She was calling to solicit contributions. I spent probably twenty minutes with her debating their position on alcohol in general and their "mission creep".
:)
She was essentially irrational about it. I pointed out that possession and consumption of alcohol was (generally) not illegal. She went off on a tangent about how drugs and alcohol kill children. I pointed out that she was calling as a representative of MADD and was, in theory, attempting to prevent drunk driving, not drinking in general. The conversation quickly meandered back over to a general anti-alcohol rant.
Eventually I told her that I had no respect for an organization that claims to fight drunk driving, a laudable effort, but is actually a bunch of teetotalling prohibitionists. They've never called back.
man, I feel like mold.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I tried to drive away and it was impossible to drive that thing anywhere, especially when the cops showed up.
I would have thought they would make a case for Rockstar saying thanks for showing how stupid it is to drive in that condition!
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"MADD released a statement saying that 'Drunk driving is not a game, and it is not a joke. "
Maybe Rockstar should release a statement saying that 'GTA IV IS a video game, and is an amusement.'
Hey MADD - did you see the word game in the description 'video game' on the box? Did you really think that tiny box included real alcohol and a real car? I am all for reducing drunk driving, but that being the case MADD should be doing things to actually reduce real drunk driving and stop wasting their time on this non-issue.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I hate to say this, but MADD is an organization that complains but often has no idea of what it really wants. Some years back they pushed to have free pour taken out of the bars in my state and replaced with mini bottles. They assumed that with the higher taxation people would drink less and that bartenders could be more easily charged with selling alcohol to someone under the influence. Of course it had the opposite effect since the mini bottle only guaranteed drinkers 1.7 ounce in every drink. So when the number of DUIs rose they went out, picketed, signed petitions, cried on television and had the demon mini bottled removed.
I'm not saying I have anything against their motives, but they often tend to put the histrionics before rational thought.
This is what kills me. We've become so obsessed with stopping "drunk drivers" that we've lost all rationality about this issue.
One of my favorite things is to see two or three police cars sitting outside the local pub. They find some excuse to pull over people who leave (dirty license plates being the favorite in winter -- summer it's usually something like "you forgot to signal") and give them a breath test. Anybody a hair over 0.08 is arrested and charged regardless of whether or not they are actually impaired.
Meanwhile the streets aren't being patrolled (all the cops are outside the bar), so anybody who got drink at home or at a friends house can almost always drive without being bothered -- even if they are so ridiculously drunk that they are swerving all over the road. Meanwhile other crimes aren't being deterred because there's no active police patrols until after last call -- the cops don't have the resources to patrol AND monitor every bar in town, so they opt to monitor the bars the overwhelming majority of the time.
The last DWI fatality that happened in my hometown was a 15 year old kid who was mowed down while walking home (on the sidewalk). The driver who hit him had three previous DWI convictions, was driving on a suspended license and had a BAC of 0.17. He was seen to have been swerving all over the road and two different drivers had actually reported him to the police before his accident. They didn't catch him in time because all of the on-duty patrol cars were again sitting outside the local pub. They didn't even bother to dispatch one of them when the reports came in about his car swerving all over the road. Guess the fact that some people consume alcohol outside of bars never crossed their mind?
Yeah, our DWI policies make sense.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I was playing GTA IV last night and took "my cousin" to a local bar to hang out. Watching two virtual russians stumble around plastered was quite possibly the funniest scene in the game (so far). I could barely control my character and he was tripping over his cousin while they were both laughing and mumbling. The scene was simply great.
Hailing a taxi (well trying to at least) got random incomprehensible shouting as my pretend character and his cousin stumbled in the streets of Libery City. Finally after 3-5 minutes the pretend character I was controling was "sober" enough to actually drive a car. So after 10 attempts to jack a car I finally managed.
Driving now was a horrid affair. The car was very unstable and hard to control. A slight left would smash my character into the walls, lamp post, pedestrians... The bar, silly me was well across town so it was a huge challenge to navigate there. But that's not all...
COPS, POLICE, 50... would see my pretend characters virtual drunken ass driving and give chase. Yes, even in a pretend game drunk driving was illegal and had I gotten caught served a penalty. Luckily It is only 1 star and easy to evade even at the slow drunken pace.
My assumption is that MADD had only caught wind of the drunk driving in GTA and didn't actually witness it. Had they experience the same scene i had, they'd know that while funny as all heck, there were penalties.
Now... My mother had been an alcoholic in my youthful years. She loved to be out all night at bars drinking her life away. On a school night when I was 8 she was out with her friends drinking till 2am. Yes that is a horrid act in it's own right leaving a kid in the car to drink but that is not the case to prove only back ground... Well her Beau of the time was going to drive us home, her more sober friend offered me a ride and somehow I refused and stupidly allowed me to ride with my mother and her drunken boyfriend who was driving.
Well the car didnt get far before hitting a stone wall, flipping 3-4 times and landing upside down in someone's yard. I woke up in her friend's car. I suffered a broken tibia and elbow and got to spend christmas in a wheelcheer. She suffered most of her life with a bum hip until a recent replacement.
Long story short my mother smartened up and will never get into a car after drinking, nor with anyone who has drunkin. I would qualify myself as one of MADD's statistics. One of the "Millionas of people" who have suffered drunk driving trauma in their life. While no life was lost it is still traumatic.
Speaking on my behalf I found the GTA IV drunk scenes hilarious. I found it to be a fun and refreshing challenge to an ever increasing stagnating market. I love the game and have played every GTA released so far. I've yet in real life to drive drunk, shoot cops, run over people, jack a car, pick up use and shoot hoes, deal drugs, participate in a gang war, drive by shooting, break an enter, steal and save someone from a burning fire and do unique stunts. Though I've managed to do all that and more playing GTA...
Jack Thompson needs to get a real education and job. MADD needs to stop speaking for me and quite honestly STFU. MADD served their purpose and needs to vanish. THey got draconian laws passed. what more do they want? "Driving while buzzed" now? What's next "Smelling Alcohol before driving is bad and will get you tossed in jail and lost license for 10 years"?
... mugging, shooting, armed robbery, theft, running from the cops, etc is all a game - but DUI is not. glad we got that one sorted.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I had the same thought once, in regards to roadblocks... How are the police able to pull you over with no probable cause, and investigate your vehicle, when they can't do anything even close to that to your person as you walk down the street?
Turns out the law is funny on this one - Since driving and using vehicles is a licensed and controlled activity, they are allowed to routinely pull people over for things that relate ONLY to the operation and licensing of the vehicle, ie. Is the driver intoxicated, are the plates up-to-date, are things falling off the car, etc...? They aren't allowed to search inside unless given permission by the driver.
Not sure how this 'licensed activity' thing will hold up as it has become essentially a necessary thing for anyone in the US, and should probably be considered a basic human right at some point, which would render it free of much government control.
When I was younger, the science center here in Atlanta had a DUI driving simulator. I'm not sure if it's still there. Regardless, you would drink/smoke/inject various substances and attempt to drive down a street as your car wobbled all over the road. IT EXISTED TO PERSUADE KIDS THAT DRINKING AND DRIVING WAS A BAD COMBINATION BY SHOWING THEM HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO CONTROL A CAR WHILE INTOXICATED. GTA 4 does exactly the same thing. It's not like Rockstar portrays drugs as giving you superhuman powers. *cough* NARC *cough*.
"How will MADD know if I'm playing any of the other driving missions in the game...but I'm drunk in real life while doing it? Surely that must be worse than simulated drunkenness."
I was wondering if they'd have double vision or some kind of delay on when you press a button and when you get a response, after all without those features it's not really a drunk sim but just a 'slightly buzzed sim'
I don't play GTA games at all myself, but i would think a simulation that really really made the game harder to play (just as it would if you really got drunk) might make it easier to demonstrate to people how much harder it is to drive drunk. It's pretty sad when one of the major beer vendors slogan is 'drink responsibly' eg: don't drink and drive. I've seen people who only get drunk at home, vs those that only drink at bars, and often are too stupid to have a ride home, and the latter is far far more sad a state of denial to be in. Especially when you've gotten your third dui and you still aren't getting that you have a problem.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Does anybody actually take a look around the U.S.A.?
1. Bars have parking lots next to them. They get built in strip malls on highways with no public transportation. I always snicker: Drunk driving is illegal and for good reason, but let's face it: What the hell do you expect people to do? It's not like we have public transportation in this country, and, really, how realistic do you think this "designated driver" bullshit is? The fact is, most people drive drunk occasionally. It's dangerous and stupid, but if you're going to be drinking anywhere besides your next-door-neighbors' yard, it's not like the U.S. gives you many practical alternatives.
2. The drinking age is 21. Tell me who the hell starts drinking at 21. Nobody. Everyone breaks the law, and everybody knows it.
We've been engaging in doublethink on alcohol for so long that when facts stare us in the face we can't even see them. Social drinking is a requirement in American culture, but it is incompatible with the way Americans have built their laws, their suburbs, and their society.
I wish something would clear up this cognitive dissonance.
---
And more directly on-topic: It's obvious that MADD hasn't played the game. Once upon a time, the father of a friend of mine wrote Disney a very angry letter about the movie Dogma, which he said was anti-Catholic. Of course, he'd never even seen the film. MADD is doing the same thing here, I'm sure.
There needs to be some rule: Do a cursory fact check; then get outraged.
---
Basically, I just wish people would think more instead of relying on stupid emotional animal instinct. The fact is, MADD would prevent a hell of a lot more drunk-driving deaths by lobbying for convenient trolleys that run by the local pubs -- y'know, the way cities used to be built before this happened -- than they ever will by being angry, screaming, and vengeful. They should think about what they are actually achieving, instead of lashing out emotionally.
Understand that I'm no apologist for alcoholism. I know that's a popular position to take here on Slashdot, but I've seen far too much damage done by alcohol than to just ignore the harm. But you see, I'm practical. Alcohol isn't going away. People who want to drink, will. I will even have a beer on occasion. So let's try to at least make our society compatible with that.
These people are insane. When is everyone in this country going to start worrying about our own actions rather than our next door neighbors. This is the reason our society is so fucked up.
I have the magic cure you blameless assholes. Be good parents and teach your children about consequences. Not right and wrong, becauses people will distort that with experiences. Teach them causality. Teach them that every action has an equal and opposite reaction and it should always be considered before making a judgement. I fucking hate drunk drivers. Two friends of mine were killed by one years ago, but you know what... I'm gonna go play GTA4 and drive drunk in it. You know why? It is a fucking video game you ass holes.
So, the good people of MADD are, well, mad about a violent video game?
Let me see if I have this right--the GTA series is historically riddled with sex, drugs, and violence but adding a little booze is over the line?
Those are some f**ked up values.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I love it when activists harm their cause, just like 1980s anti-nuclear environmentalists are to thank for our coal power plants.
My point is, what a better way to show people the dangers of drunk driving by letting them experience it in a game? People have no idea how bad at driving they would be once drunk. And people tend to use virtual experiences as experience anyways when that's all they've got.
So let people see how dangerous drunk driving is by letting them experience it first hand in the only way that can be safe, in a computer simulation. It's so much more valuable than ignorance.
You just got troll'd!