Mature rated video game shockingly found to be, well, mature
The Founding Fathers of the United States roll over in their graves today as the media, politicians, and lawyers line up to launch a new witch-hunt against the First Amendment. In their sights, as anyone who has seen any type of news lately may have noticed, is none other than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA:SA), its publishers and developers, and the gaming industry as a whole. And the impetus for this attack on game developers' right to free speech, strangely enough, boils down to a third-party modification (mod) to the PC version of GTA:SA entitled "Hot Coffee". A mod which was made and published by end-users, with neither the consent or help from Rockstar Games or its parent company, Take2 Interactive. Nor were the aforementioned companies even aware of the mod's development until well after its release.
At the root of this rather knee-jerk reaction lies the argument that Rockstar Games somehow "hid" pornographic content from the ESRB with the intentions of it being "unlocked" later after avoiding an Adults Only rating. While it may be true that portions of the Hot Coffee mod were created from assets found in the retail version of the game, to say that Rockstar knowingly hid and sold pornography is absurd. For starters, most (if not all) of the allegedly "obscene" animation assets found in the mod can be seen elsewhere in the course of regular game play during less "graphic" sequences. Secondly, the audio assets used in the mod exist in the retail game during the default censored "Coffee" scenes. As such, it would stand to reason that these parts of the game were already seen by the ESRB, and the game was labeled as having "strong sexual content" accordingly.
The primary difference between the retail version of the game and that of the modded version is that the above content has simply been rearranged and intensified by the consumers. By using the logic that this content was illegally "hidden", one could just as easily claim that any R rated movie has covertly crossed the limits of decency because the end-user could very well pause their DVD player on a scene containing nudity, thus exceeding the length of such scenes by which the MPAA decides whether a film is to be classified as R or NC-17. The same could be said of even a PG-13 rated movie which contains brief nudity.
Perhaps what is most absurd about the accusations against both Rockstar Games and the gaming industry, is that those making the allegations seem to have no idea how the technology they're condemning works. Had they done even a moment's worth of research, they would discover that the online mod community for GTA:SA (and many other PC games) is not only capable of recycling various fragments of game code and art to create new scenes for the game, but we do it all the time. If Senator Hillary Clinton, Leeland Yee, Dr. David Walsh, et al, were to give even a cursory glance at the websites which published the Hot Coffee mod, they would see that it is but one of thousands of modifications made by users which create new game play scenarios using the existing assets. Given the very nature of the interactive digital medium, an industrious "modder" could within minutes create things far "worse" than Hot Coffee if they so desired simply by swapping a few items and lines of code about. Then, on top of just shifting around pre-existing assets, it is also quite easy and common for players to create entirely new content from scratch.
Furthermore, the existence of such user modifications is as old as PC gaming itself. Many of the most popular PC games have had communities of fans who make and share content with each other dating back to bulletin board systems before the internet. So to look at what has been done to GTA:SA as something "new" is simply ridiculous. The concept of more mature modification such as Hot Coffee isn't something new either. Name any PC game which features female characters, and chances are someone somewhere created and uploaded a patch to remove their clothes. Even family-friendly The Sims (which was rated Teen) by Electronic Arts had a cheatcode to remove the in-game censorship blur during scenes involving nudity (genderless, granted, but still 100% less clothes than the original Hot Coffee scenes) and adult situations. Scenes which shipped with the retail game, no less, and this was nearly half a decade ago, and have never been complained about. Yet this is all of a sudden a "new" problem which is to be blamed on Rockstar Games?
Above and beyond all else, the question begging to be answered is this: Why are these so-called child safety advocates so upset that children might be seeing nudity in an extremely violent game they should not be playing to begin with? Granted, the ratings system is enforced haphazardly at best, but regardless, the game still carries the gaming industry's equivalent of an R rated film. Even with the Hot Coffee mod installed, the blocky and pixilated soft-core sexual action hardly touches the graphic nature of scenes involving actual human actors which can be found in many R rated movies. Movies which can generally be seen by kids just as easily as they can get their hands on a Mature game, and with little to no public outrage.
But, then again, history does show this same sort of fearful overreaction was exhibited towards explicit movies in the past. And before that, heavy metal, rap music, The Beatles, and comic books were to blame. Hundreds of years ago, this same mentality was applied to the printing press as well, while further back the stone wheel was surely labeled as a menace to children. At what point does society step back and quit blaming new forms of media which they don't understand for all their children's woes? Especially when anyone with eyes can look back and see that the previous generation did the exact same thing, only to turn around reconsider the previously harmful things to be quite acceptable. Once upon a time, Elvis Presley was thought by many parents and politicians to be a dangerous influence on their children. Now, he's regarded by most to be one of the greatest American musicians of all time.
So what is it that makes video games so different than the previous forms of media? Well, most child psychologists would have us believe the fact that games are interactive has a far more immersive effect than simply watching events unfold on a movie screen, which somehow alters one's perception of reality. If that is the case, then perhaps books should be the first thing which are outlawed? While a player may be controlling the actions of a video game, they are still presented with exactly what the developers want them to see and hear. All the visual and aural details are provided for them as is, and given the limits of technology today, are rather far from realistic. On top of this, all tactile feedback is handled via input into a joystick or keyboard/mouse, which, again, is far from realistic. These simple limitations, coupled with things like in-game score boards and player health displays leave little room for the imagination, and even less room for suspension of disbelief. Books on the other hand (especially fiction) are just as conducive at generating a suspension of disbelief and temporary detachment from reality, if not more so. While the story in a book is of course laid out in a more rigid format, there is far more room for the reader to fill in the little sensory details in their mind, thereby drawing them in to an alternate reality which is just as much their creation as it is the author's. The simple description of "a dark, damp room" in a horror story may in one reader elicit the mental image of an abandoned building with a leaky roof, but to another person they may think the room is damp with blood given the context of it being horror-related. These psychologists might be surprised if they review cases of tonic-clonic type seizures brought about by Primary Reading Epilepsy against their fanciful theories about games causing kids to go into a trance-like suggestive state.
Finally, one really has to wonder if all the outrage surrounding some pixilated female breasts is a symptom of what the real problem is. Nearly all free countries in the world have no problem with nudity or sexuality in the media. In fact, in many countries, it's not uncommon to see a topless woman on daytime TV or at the beach. Yet here in the land of "freedom", the puritanical moral crusaders continue to enforce their dogma of sexual repression on the people, teaching the children that the human body and its natural urges are something obscene. Not to mention causing a national panic due to a "wardrobe malfunction" which happened during an extended beer commercial shallowly disguised as a sporting event. But ultra-violent movies and TV are just fine? Has a single so-called child protection advocate ever thought for a moment that such institutionalized sexual repression might just be part of the reason for pent up aggression in teenagers and adults? Or that perhaps instilling self-hate in people for simply having natural reproductive urges drives people to commit sex crimes later on in life since they subconsciously feel they're evil either way? Then of course they seem to completely ignore the underlying socioeconomic factors which drive many teenagers to crime and violence anyway. But, I guess it's probably a lot easier to use a game as a scapegoat.