Disjointed Digression

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has been in the news quite a bit lately and today it has been announced that the ESRB (Electronic Software Rating Board) is changing it’s rating of GTA:SA from “Mature 17+ (M) to Adults Only 18+ (AO)”. A news article (found here) explains it all.
Basically the reason the game is getting the change in rating (the equivalent of a movie going from an R rating to an NC-17 which is the kiss of death for a film) is because you can get a program that will modify the game and open up a mini game that shows a naked girl having “sex” with your character. I’ve seen a video of this mini game. It looks like soft-core porn you’d see on Cinemax. Honestly, as the ESRB rating goes, I don’t think that one year age difference (17 to 18) really matters.
As you may or may not know Hillary Clinton has gotten in on the bashing of GTA:SA. Form an article on MSNBC.com ““We need to do everything we can to make sure that parents have a line of defense against graphic and violent video games and other content that goes against the values they’re trying to instill in their children,” Clinton said.” Let’s examine this, shall we? So according to Ms. Clinton the Mature 17+ ESRB rating was not good enough? This from a woman who’s husband made oral sex (which is not really sex, right?) a household word back in ’98. In 1998, eight year old little Johnny asks his mother “What’s sex? What’s oral sex? Why are they different? Why is it ok for the president to cheat on his wife?” But I digress…
The game has “adult only” content hidden away on the disk. That is the fault of Rockstar Games, the people who make GTA:SA. Yes, it’s inappropriate, it’s sexual content that should not be allowed for 17 year olds to see, they need to wait until they are 18, damnit! You know I can’t help but wonder what people expect from a game that is named after a crime. A game that includes rampant violence, that makes it obvious that to “regain health” you can have sex with a prostitute (then beat her up afterwards and get your money back), that has the main character commit numerous crimes and try to get away with them. This game is intended for an adult audience. This game was not made for children, and in my opinion, should not be played by children. Is it being played by children? I’m sure it is. Some parents just don’t pay attention to the games they buy for their kids. The parents think “Well, it keeps them off the streets, and I know where they are when they are playing.” So they buy little Johnny what he asks for and don’t look at it, or watch him play, or care about it, until it hits the news that there might be a chance that sex is involved. Then there are the “cool” parents (you know the ones: they hire strippers for their 16 year old boys birthday, they let all the neighborhood kids get drunk at their house, etc, etc, etc) who but this game for their kids. They don’t care what it has in it, as long as their kids, and the kids friends think they, the parents, are “cool”. Then there are the parents that try to be responsible. The gamer dads that want to play GTA:SA. They try to keep it out of reach of little Johnny. Just like my dad went to lengths to hide his Playboys. But the more a kid can’t have something the more he wants it. And this last kind of kid is the one that gets in trouble for playing GTA, because his parents know what it is, and care. (Hey, I got in trouble for looking at the Playboys.)
And just so you know, I’m not defending Rockstar Games, they shouldn’t have put that mini-game in there (even “broken” as it was) and tried to get anything less than an Adults Only 18+ rating. They should have either cut that code out of the game and gone for a M 17+ or just gone all out and headed for the AO 18+. It appears they tried to pull a fast one, and it turned around and bit them. To be honest the GTA series of games is not all that great, in my opinion. Some people are die hard fans of it, I know, but I’m not one of them.
In conclusion, I think that it was not so much a failure on the ESRB’s part. They had no idea that the adult content was hidden in the game. But I also don’t think that there should be this much outrage about a game having sex in it. We are talking about a game that 1) was already rated Mature 17+ 2) that has the name of a crime for a title and 3) has massive amounts of criminal activity and violence in it. As George Carlin once said “I don’t know who said this first, but I agree “I’d rather my children watch a film of two people making love than two people trying to kill on another!””

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2005 at 5:05 am and is filed under Current? events, Nerd stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.