For those of you who've been living under a rock the last couple months, the video game industry has once again come under fire politicians and "Family organizations" (and in the words of my hero Jon Stewart, "Any time they have 'family' in their name you know they're not happy"). Their complaint du jour? The "Hot Coffee" hidden sex minigame contained in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which shows CJ having sex with one of his girlfriends, unlike the main game where you don't actually see anything and can just hear some muffled groaning. By the way, this minigame can't be viewed in the console versions of the game without a Game Shark. Hysteria broke out, and all ports of the game were immediatel ripped off the shelves and slapped with an AO rating, the video game equivelant of NC-17.
For a game that's supposed to be intended for adults only, people sure are getting uppity about it having adult content. I could understand their outrage if CJ was raping those women or something, but in a game with murder-for-profit, gang wars, and countless F-bombs and N-words, I find it rather amusing that what has people most offended is the consensual sex.
And speaking of sex and adult entertainment, is the material in the Hot Coffee mini game really so bad they feel the need to slap it with the video game equivelant of NC-17? I admit I haven't seen it, but it's been described to me plenty of times. I know plenty of R-rated movies that have pretty raunchy sex scenes in them that nobody gives a second thought to. If M is supposed to be the video game equivelant of an R rating, then who cares if it has a little more T&A? It's still a hell of a lot more tasteful than Dead or Alive.
What I'm more interested to know is, did Take Two intend for this to happen? Did they pick this fight from the very beginning to challenge anti-game activists to some sort of legal showdown? Either way, I don't see this ending happily. Even if Take Two successfully repells the legal action being taken against it, their enemies will just get madder and madder and look for more stupid crap to use against them.
I have a theory as to why family groups have such a hard-on for video games. Movies, television shows, and comic books all end after a set number of minutes or pages. The amount of time a person will spend viewing them is extremely limited. On the other hand, the amount of time a person spends playing a video game is decided entirely by the player. If the player enjoys the game well enough, he may play it for days, weeks, months, or even years. That can translate into becoming a MAJOR source of influence for impressionable people.
The solution to this problem of influence is simple: Don't be so impressionable. Understand the differences between right and wrong, and don't be so weak-minded that a video game can influence you into negative behavior. Unfortunately, lazy and/or stupid parents find it easier to simply throw up their hands and blame society for their failures as a parent, and no company or politician is going to point the finger back at them. It's bad PR.
You know, when I was a kid and wanted to play Mortal Kombat, all I had to do was find a classmate with a cool older brother. Adults really seem to think kids are stupid. They're not. Even if you forbid them to play a certain game, all they have to do is go hang out with their friend who has the cool older brother. There's ALWAYS some kid with a cool older brother.
In my case, I AM that cool older brother. Thanks to me, my brother has been playing GTA games since he was 13. And I let him do it because I knew it wouldn't warp him. Why? Because we have good parents who were able to teach us how to put violent and sexually explicit material in the proper context. It's crazy, I know. We had parents who actually parented us.
There's an epidemic in society all right, but it's not a decay of values, it's a decay of responsiblity. I don't think it's ever going to end until the entire American culture eats itself while the rest of the world just watches, shakes its head, and says, "Well, what do you expect from a country founded by Puritans?"
Galleries
