schweblog

A lot of people have been crying foul about the recently discovered mod in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that allows you to enter a code that will unlock a sexually explicit scene between the main character and a female character. The content, when unlocked, gives the game the AO (adults only) rating, not the M (mature) rating that it was released with. Rockstar, the studio that released the game, is receiving a lot of heat from politicians, “concerned parents,” and Hillary Clinton. On the other side, gamers and many others are crying foul, claiming that holding Rockstar responsible for the content is unreasonable and is just an attempt at censorship.

The problem here is that so few people understand the issue that they’re really just talking past one another. The politicians, of course, are milking the issue for all it’s worth, painting themselves as martyrs out to save the public from demoralizing bastards in the game industry. The gamers and anti-censorship advocates are exploiting it as a classical example of big D.C. censors running around abusing their powers. And Rockstar has remained mysteriously quiet about this.

Let’s look at the facts:

*The law clearly dictates that any in-game content with this degree of sexuality will be rated AO. At this point, it doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with the law–I don’t think it’s reasonable, but it doesn’t really change anything.
*At the time of release, Rockstar had not reported that this material was in their game.
*The “Hot Coffee” mod isn’t a mod at all–it was placed their by the designers of the game, not members of the modding community or an entity separate from the studio that designed and released the game. It’s on the Playstation 2 version of the game, which would be incredibly difficult to mod. A regular copy of the game, played on a regular PS2, will have access to the content.

Rockstar broke the law. Whether or not they agreed with this law is irrelevant–studios have been abiding by the ESRB rating system since its inception. To claim that Rockstar suddenly deserves exemption from this law is ludicrous. They intentionally broke the law. Putting the content behind some kind of protective “firewall” that will only allow those who know the code to access the content is silly. Rockstar knows full well that once the information was released, people of all ages would have access to it via information from the internet and–probably–magazines.

Equally ridiculous is the ESRB rating system to begin with. There are definite descrepancies in the law. You can run over cops, hire hookers, kill hookers, shoot people, catch people on fire, and several combinations of the aforementioned in the game. And yet it all remains within the M rating. But a few minutes of normal activity that adults (and several teens) enjoy regularly being shown on screen bumps it up. And really…the difference between 17 (the minimum age for buying M rated games) and 18 (the minimum age for buying AO rated games) isn’t significant.

I realize all of these things. Rockstar probably did too. But their actions were illegal. They deserve the fines or punishment as determined by the law. If they didn’t like the legislation, they should have been lobbying Congress to change it. Even if you can chalk this up to run-of-the-mill civil disobedience, one of the most essential parts of civil disobedience is accepting the punishment when you do the crime.

Rockstar broke the law. They deserve the punishment. End of story.

Filed under: culture, politics by Jesse