L.A. Needs to Get Back all That Rampart Lawsuit Money Somehow
Brian Doherty | January 27, 2006, 11:27am
The city of Los Angeles files suit against the makers of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" for false advertising and unfair competition, since if the Entertainment Software Ratings Board had known about its secret sexual content, L.A. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo claims, it would have gotten an "adults only" rather than merely "mature" rating and supposedly sold fewer copies. This could make game maker Take-Two Interactive's stock a worse buy than Fortune is already saying it is.
Delgadillo could have a field day attacking one of his own city's greatest industries with this sort of close reading of the implicit meaning of entertainment advertising and marketing; I hereby publicly tip him off, for example, that the Laugh Factory only rarely produces mirth; and that despite what it says in many ads, it is altogether possible that Brokeback Mountain is not the "best picture of the year"--get some city attorneys on it, Rocky.
Bonar Law | January 27, 2006, 1:51pm | #
California's law may be "kooky" and oppressive, but that doesn't mean *only* California lawyers would have a problem with this situation.
A couple clicks led me to
this story, which explains the difference between the "Mature" and "Adult" versions of the game:
“Gamers have always been able to send the title's protagonist, CJ, on dates with women. If players could, through CJ, sufficiently charm one of these ladies, they'd get an invite to the her house for 'hot coffee.' At that point, the game's camera would remain outside the house, but the muffled noises emanating from within the digital domicile left no doubt as to what the 'coffee' really was.
“Wildenborg's [i. e., the hacker's] mod tweaked the game, so that an invitation for coffee would lead to an interior view of CJ and his date in the bedroom indulging in their affections, according to Internet reviews by people who successfully ran Wildenborg's programming trick. More than a non-interactive cut scene, the couple's copulation would play out as a controllable mini-game. Button presses affected performance.”
OK -- sex *sounds* are "mature," while graphic footage of sex is "adult." Whether it's a reasonable distinction is up to the ESRB.
Do I understand that the manufacturer submits its games for ESRB approval? If so, this might be problematic.
I don't know what happened in this case, but I can imagine being an unscrupulous game developer. I create a game with two version: One version would be accepted as "mature" by the ESRB, the other version would be rated "adult." I submit the "mature" version to ESRB, but (without telling the ESRB), I have the "mature" version behind some sort of firewall that needs a special program to break through. Then, after the ESRB gives the game a "mature" rating (allowing the game to be sold at Wal-Mart and other places which don't sell "adult" games), I send word through the hacker community about how to access the adult version of the game.
This results in a trifecta of beautiful, profitable publicity: First, the news of the adult version circulates, prompting more kids to nag their parents into buying the game ("I suppose I can get little Johnny a 'mature' game; after all, Wal-Mart is selling it!"). Then, the MSM learns about what's going on, and the "scandal" gives my game extra publicity, so I sell even more copies. The ESRB locks the barn door by re-rating the game as 'adult,' but I've already managed to sell lots of copies of the game thanks to its "mature" label. Then, if I'm accused of false advertising, I scream "Hillary Clinton is censoring me!" and hope people will swallow it.
grylliade | January 27, 2006, 2:35pm | #
All this presumes that
San Andreas would have gotten an AO rating if the minigame had been left in. That's by no means certain. A number of games with sexual content much more explicit than the Hot Coffee mod were given M ratings.
Singles comes to mind, a game that's basically
The Sims 2 with nudity. And oral sex. And sex. And masturbation. And homosexuality. All portrayed pretty graphically. Not hardcore, but definitely the equivalent of softcore porn, though I suspect that's the result of programming limitations rather than intent. But this got an M rating, as did the Playboy mansion game (the name of which escapes me at the moment). Would it have been the combination of sex and violence (not at the same time) that got
San Andreas an AO rating? Or is it just the ESRB trying to cover their ass by pandering to politicians that made them say that it would have?
Further, to unlock Hot Coffee isn't just as simple as downloading a file and executing it. Hot Coffee isn't an executable file; it's a zip of files that you have to unzip, then copy over into a subdirectory of the game directory. You can't unintentionally install the mod; you have to have downloaded it, read the readme file that tells you what the mod is, as well as what to do with the files, and then do it. It's easy, but it's not something you can do without realizing what you're doing. The argument against this is that kids might mod the game without their parents' knowledge. Well, damn, you mean that parents that are negligent enough to buy their kids this game should have a leg to stand on? I mean, you have to be a moron to have missed all the controversy over
Grand Theft Auto in the media, take your kid to the store, ignore the rating sticker, ignore the dude at the register asking you for your ID, and then ignore the sounds of gunfire coming from your kids' TV while he's playing it. I thought libertarians were against the government protecting us from our own stupidity, by and large.
Erik | January 27, 2006, 3:08pm | #
The PS2 and XBox versions sold the vast majority of the copies. PS2 requires a 3rd party hardware device to unlock the hidden content, which is not hardcore/X/AO to the best of my knowledge (no visible penetration, no ejaculation). The PC version requires a downloaded file and additional work.
Take Two didn't make these features accessable to the market. The Hot Coffee portion of the game is an unintended use of the product: Sony doesn't make the hardware that accesses the code, and your legitimate, purchased software doesn't run the Hot Coffee file.
If Take Two doesn't bring this content to market, yet it is on the software they sell, where does that leave us? If I masturbate using a can of cream of mushroom soup, did Campbell's make an obscene product (saw this at the LA Museum of Modern Art a few years ago)? If I kill someone with my chef's knife, should Henkel be held responsible for deceptive practices? If I play Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and don't put any armor on the female elf character, she runs around in a thong and triangle top. This isn't the intended way the game is to be played, but ut certainly makes me question the "Teen" rating when I get a face full of Elvish jubblies every time I look at the character.
GTA:SA is intended to entertain--if people manipulate it to entertain themselves in other ways, so be it. The game as sold was reviewed by an independent board, and they agreed on an "M" rating. ESRB is not as dumb as they look, and they know that at least on the PC version, people could easily make skins (alternate images) for characters in the game. You could easily make all the women naked as they walked around. But to do so, you would have to alter the product or the way it was used.
The product was sold as "M". Take Two may or may not of had the intent to hide "AO" content on the software. But it was not accessable without 3rd party assistance. Take Two did not gain any advantage on the marketplace or hurt sales of its competitors by having this content on the game. Unless there is proof that Take Two provided payment to the 3rd parties that unlocked the content, there was not commercial malfeseance. No minors are allowed to purchase the game with an "M" rating in the first place, so there is no "for the children" arguement to stand behind. Adults purchased a game with known violent and sexual content. There was additional sexual content that was accessable with non-Take Two hardware or software. But the fact stands that the game, used in the way it was intended and in the way that it was presented to market is an "M" game. Even if there was a deception involved, which has yet to be established, there is no damage.
Bonar Law | January 27, 2006, 4:24pm | #
“a face full of Elvish jubblies”
Sounds like a good name for a rock band. Darn it, you distracted me; I forgot what I wanted to say. Oh, yes . . .
“I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the more likely scenario is that the offending code was accidentally left in the game, rather tha[n] purposely installed to be found in a third-party hack.”
That would make them innocent. But if they admit installing the adult stuff, they should at least explain how they went about trying to delete it. Given that their attempts at deletion weren't successful, they should come up with a plausible account of the purportedly good-faith steps they took, and how come these steps weren't enough to remove the adult content from prying eyes.
“Take Two may or may not [have] had the intent to hide 'A[dult] O[nly]' content on the software. But it was not accessable without 3rd party assistance.”
If they deliberately (as opposed to accidentally – accidents happen) put extra content in a game, the question is why? For the purpose of a private joke? Or in the hope that at least *some* gamers might access the extra content? If the latter was the intent, then the intervention of “third-party assistance” shouldn't shield them from responsibility. If they intended that the game have extra content for *some* gamers, they should have so notified the ESRB.
“No minors are allowed to purchase the game with an 'M' rating in the first place, so there is no 'for the children' argu[]ment to stand behind. . . . Adults purchased a game with known violent and sexual content.”
If parents want to differentiate among degrees of sexual content, as the ESRB apparently does, that is their right, whether it makes logical sense or not. If the ESRB's ratings are arbitrary, the company shouldn't submit to those ratings. Unless (here's a wild guess) they *need* an ESRB rating to get access to certain stores (like Wal-Mart).
“I have no problem with thinking that they expected this mod to be discovered. Maybe they thought it was funny, and that a few people would laugh and talk about it.”
If they expected even *some* gamers to discover the extra content, they should have notified the ESRB of said extra content. If they lose more money on the gimmick than they expected, that shouldn't affect the intent.
grylliade | January 27, 2006, 11:23pm | #
That would make them innocent. But if they admit installing the adult stuff, they should at least explain how they went about trying to delete it. Given that their attempts at deletion weren't successful, they should come up with a plausible account of the purportedly good-faith steps they took, and how come these steps weren't enough to remove the adult content from prying eyes.
Well, probably they did what most programmers do: they just removed the ability to access the content from the game. Because it takes waaaaaaay too much time and effort to actually go through and find and delete every little file that you end up not using in the final product, especially if you want to get the game out the door in a reasonable amount of time. This isn't uncommon practice in the videogame industry; modders are continually finding content that the programmers just didn't have time to fully implement, or fully delete. Hell,
Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is being redone extensively, including readding voice parts that weren't in the final game, and restoring the story to something close to its original course.
There are many other examples. Making a modern video game is a vast, complex undertaking, employing hundreds of programmers for years at a time. All these people generate a vast amount of code, and it'll be hard to keep track of everything. So when you remove something, you just take the path of least resistance. More than likely the programmers just realized that the Hot Coffee code wasn't really all that good, so they removed it from the final game. It wasn't there with the intent that someone would find it and activate it, though I'm sure that the programmers didn't particularly
care if somebody did find it. Or if they didn't. It just was a matter of great indifference to them.
But whatever. I'm sure that, once the lawyers are involved, it won't matter one way or the other. There's blood in the water, and so what if some gamers have to give up having a GTA4, or if they pay more for that game when it comes out? They're just gamers. What's really important is the chiiiiiiiiildren. And that the nanny state takes one more step towards making sure that nothing bad ever, ever happens.
Assume these kids can download all they want off the Internet -- they still seem to think it's *also* worth their while to access the steamy "Hot Coffee" sequence in the game. Many of them are getting the Hot Coffee sequence in a game their parents bought for them -- their parents relying on a voluntary video rating body which (it turns out) wasn't familiar with this most interesting Hot Coffee sequence.
Whatever. Those poor, poor parents who bought a game rated M for their kids. And who didn't then review the game. Who could possibly know that a game that caused this much controversy
when it came out would be bad for their kids? Seriously, if you buy an M-rated game for your kids, then don't pay any attention to what they do with it, you don't have the right to blame the game's maker for your incompetence. Especially when said maker didn't include the material in the finished game. Wow, kids will get around their parents' wishes? No shit? Well,okay, but how is the state involved in this again?
And, point by point:
10) After having sex, the characters smoke cigarettes. *Philip Morris* cigarettes.
Not in the game, to my knowledge.
9) The male protagonist wears a suit and tie.
You can, indeed, do this near the end of the game.
8) The woman he has sex with is his *wife.*
Well, if the protagonist were married. But he's not.
7) Protagonist turns down a proffered crack pipe, explaining: "Can't smoke that -- have to be alert -- got to get to work at the insurance company on time tomorrow."
In
San Andreas, the protagonist does, indeed, turn down a proffered crack pipe. Twice, at different points. Which is actually kind of humorous: "I may be a murderer, a pimp, a thief, an assassin, whatever, but I don't do drugs. 'Cause drugs are bad, mmmmmkay?"
6) Protagonist speaks in grammatical sentences.
Protagonist speaks grammatical Black English, which is entirely appropriate. It'd be quite a crappy game if CJ spoke the Queen's English.
5) Protagonist stops at red lights.
You can do this, if you want to. The game doesn't force you to break any traffic laws, or to obey them. The cops only come after you if you hit them or hurt someone; you can break every other traffic law there is.
4) Protagonist stops at pedestrian crosswalks.
You can do this, too.
3) Protagonist drives on street, not sidewalk.
And this.
2) Someone jostles protagonist in crowd. Protagonist ignores it.
This too. You don't get points for hurting someone in the game. You might get money, but unless it's a drug dealer, it's not worth it.
1) Mozard CD in protagonist's car belongs to protagonist -- and he's playing it.
You can actually mod the game to do this. The game comes with preset stations, and on the PS2 and Xbox you can't change what they play. But on the PC, you can put whatever mp3's you want into the Music folder, and it'll play them when you drive. But that'd be, y'know, modding the game.
grylliade | January 28, 2006, 1:21pm | #
I think I begin to see the appeal to libertarians.
Actually, this detail of the game reinforced my committment to minarchy instead of anarchy. It's impossible to drive safely in the game, because no one else follows any traffic laws either (although they do stop at traffic lights). You'll be tooling along in the left lane, no one ahead of you, and someone will suddenly make a left turn from the right lane. Or just suddenly change lanes for no discernible reason. If people drove like they do in the real world, you'd probably be able to drive as fast as you want pretty safely, because the other drivers would be predictable. If people drove in the real world like they do in the game, no one would drive because it would be deadly. It's a pretty good lesson in the necessity of fairly-enforced rules, even if the rules are sometimes arbitrary. Predictability is much more important than absolute fairness.
Thank you for the details of how the game has the protagonist wearing ties, refusing drugs, etc. I had no idea it was so perverted!
Heh. I was just trying to point out that most of the things you thought would shock modern kids are, indeed, in the game. I've noticed that most critics of the game (or of most any game) have never played it, so many of the criticisms raised are based on their own conceptions of what's in the game rather than what is actually
in the game (witness the condemnation of D&D by many fundamentalists).
San Andreas is, in many ways, a game of morality. You see what happens when you follow a twisted sense of morality, and it's the sort of thing that makes you think about your own life. Many of the things that you have to do in-game are driven by some corrupt cops blackmailing you into doing their dirty work. A lot of the other things are done because of your loyalty to your gang, or because a CIA agent blackmails you into doing
his dirty work. Very few of the things you do are done because the character chooses to do them. Which isn't to say that the things CJ does are okay, but it's not just done out of pure self-aggrandizement. And if most gamers aren't self-aware enough to use this for moral reflection, well, so what? How many people watching
The Godfather really come away from the movie with a greater sense of moral awareness, compared to how many come away thinking, "That was a good movie"? Video games are a form of entertainment, the same as any other.
Reason on Facebook
Reason on Twitter
Reason on YouTube
Reason RSS
