Rockstar Ruins It For The Rest Of Us

Ladies and gentlemen, Rockstar has officially opened the can of worms.

The government and parent's groups have been waiting for some real ammunition against the games industry for years. Rather than admit that the vast majority of game-related problems are really due to irresponsible parenting (you know, the ones who think video games make great babysitters), they basically want to make it impossible for anyone to buy anything other than Reader Rabbit and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, if such software could actually be construed as entertainment.

Well, they've got it now.

Leave it to Rockstar, the bad boy of the gaming industry, to finally take their continual boundary-pushing over the proverbial line. The Grand Theft Auto series has been the frontliner in the battle against violent/criminal/sexual themes in video games ever since its conception and especially since its breakout onto the console systems.

Here's the back story: Apparently there is a "girlfriend" minigame where the ultimate reward is heading back to the girl's place for some hubba-hubba. In the actual game this reward is visualized by an external shot of the house and some random (probably bad) audio of the dirty deed in question. Cue the clever PC hackers, who manage to turn this little reward into a minigame of its own, with controllable simulated sexual acts in glorious Direct3D -- I understand that no body parts are actually shown per se, but your ultimate goal in this little game is, of course, reaching your "ultimate goal", so to speak.

Of course, it doesn't take long for this to leak out, and before you know it Hillary Clinton is on CNN demanding for the game to be destroyed with an ICBM. In response, Rockstar chuckles and says, "Those dadgum hackers!"

Well, the hackers, not wanting to be the whipping boy on this soon-to-be-congressional outing, responded, saying that they only unlocked code that was already in the game. As the above article says, this was confirmed by unlocking the game in the PS2 version, which is unable to be modified by an end user.

Thanks, Rockstar. Gamers and video games have been under fire since the days of Wolfenstien 3-D, and you've really broken it open now. You snuck some content not fitting to your rating past the ESRB and now it's out. You thought you were clever, I bet. You thought it would be funny. But now the government wants to get involved and you know that it won't be pretty. Video games are now going to be situated slightly behind the porn videos at Hastings where only the deviant and perverted go.

I appreciate that, I really do.

There's an argument here that I'm not going to get into about the furor about game content among the government and other groups, given that the game is indeed rated M, the "rated R" of the video game industry, and the acts depicted in the secret little game are apparently tame compared to some rated R films; not to mention the fact that at most stores anyone can buy a rated R or even an unrated DVD while many of the very same stores require you to be 17 to buy an M-rated game. Also let's mention the fact that anyone too young to see this material shouldn't have been playing an M-rated game anyway and someone needs their parents' license taken away, the point of all that being this -- I don't see the same people getting into such an uproar about the same content in films.

I don't even really want to get into all of that, but it should give you a taste of what's wrong with the whole situation, anyway. There's not really any standards, and apparently only a few parents who manage to pay attention to ratings and tell their kids "no" once in a while (my in-laws are such parents, so I know a few actually exist). Then there's the ESRB, whose rating system is less than perfect.

Personally I don't think content like that is necessary in any video game, but if the software is properly rated I think it has a right to be sold, as long as everyone involved in the process is responsible and follows the way the system should be. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. Stores don't restrict the sale of M-rated games (should they? Well, why not? You people don't get all up in arms about showing ID to a ticket clerk at the theater). Parents not only buy the product for their kids but also fail to monitor what their kids are playing or watching. The ratings only work when people pay attention to them.

We didn't need subversive game companies thrown into the mix. I will say this for Rockstar -- it's possible that they added the content, didn't like it, and cut it out of the game. Sometimes that happens and programmers just turn the feature off while leaving the code in place. Hackers accessed the code on the PC and turned it back on. The only problem with that is that somehow the content is accessible on the PS2 without a hack, which suggests that Rockstar intentionally left in a way to get to it.

This doesn't bode well for us gamers.