McFreedom

So, [he said, as though anyone was listening after the prolonged silence], it seems that Rockstar Games has admitted that "is there is sex content in" Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Which is technically true - it's on the disc - but wouldn't matter in any kind of practical world.

Without any sex scenes, GTA (barely) qualifies for the ESRB's second-most-restrictive rating, M (17+). The ESRB ratings are vaguely analogous to the MPAA's ratings of movies, with one big exception we'll get to in a moment. When you produce a game, you give it to the ESRB, they look at the content of it (and the style of it), and assign it a rating. Many states have at least nominal legal restrictions on the abilities of minors to purchase games they're not supposed to. However, much like movie ratings, vendors often don't enforce the restrictions too strenuously. As well, many parents don't consider these games to be harmful and purchase them for their children in cases where clerks refuse to sell. This leaves the industry open to attacks that they are profiting from the sale of violent and/or sexually themed video games to children.

Prior to the recent admission, Hillary Clinton complained about "...the simulation of lewd sexual acts in an interactive format with highly realistic graphics..." Anyone who has played an of the GTA series can testify that its graphics are not "highly realistic." While very pretty at a distance, the game focuses on making a very large world available to explore, not at making the individual parts of that world look great on close inspection. The people look particularly cartoonish, and I suspect this is not just a technological decision - the violence in the game seems a lot more like that in a cartoon then that in a slasher flick.

In the game in question (I, unlike most of the people involved in this case, have actually played it), one of the many minor things you can do in the game is to date girlfriends. At the end of a date, a girl will ask you to take her home. If you've dated her for a number of dates, and she likes you, she may invite you in "for coffee." The game then gets a little strange - the outside of her house is shown. You hear her and the main character talking, but what they say doesn't match the subtitles. You then hear what sounds like two people having sex, and the subtitles admonish you "Remember! Nice Guys Finish Last!" The main character then comes out of the house.

In the game, this sequence is jarring. It just seems "rushed" in some sense, and I'd noticed that before this recent episode came out in the media. Some of what follows is speculation based on my knowledge of how computer programs are written, but I'm pretty sure this is basically what happened. In the original version of the game, Rockstar included a "minigame." They include a lot of minigames in GTA - it's one of its hallmarks. You can, for example, gamble in half a dozen ways, play video games, fly remote-control planes, drive remote control cars, shoot in a target range, play something like Dance, Dance Revolution and many others. The "sex" minigame involved you dating a woman until she would have sex with you. Then, if you go in her house, it would display a video as cartoonish as the rest of GTA displaying the two of you having sex. You have to move your joystick back and forth in rhythm so that the main character climaxes after she does (remember "Nice Guys Finish Last," above). I am unclear what benefits, if any, you get in the game from this performance.

Video games are rated, much like moves. The maximum rating most retailers will sell is "M," for "Mature (17+)". Rockstar was informed that they couldn't release GTA as an M game with the sex game included. They then changed the game so that, while the content of the game was on the disc, the sex game wasn't available in the game - there is no way within the game to get to it. It would be as if the old video game Pac Man had included a picture of a naked woman on the chip that the game was distributed on. Technically, there was a picture of a naked woman on the chip, but no way to get the game to display it - no pellet you could eat or place you could move to get it to appear on the screen. This didn't matter much on the PS2 and the XBOX because they are pretty much closed systems (with one exception I'll get to in a moment). But, when the PC version came out, someone wrote a program that altered GTA to make the sex game a part of the game, again. It was now possible to download a small, free program that would make GTA a game that could not pass the M rating, anymore.

The PS2 exception is that, once it became obvious this was possible, someone else figured out how to use a console "cheater adapter" to make a similar modification to the PS2 version. But, this change requires the purchase of separate hardware as well.

The root cause of this scandal is the fact that, in order to remain "kid friendly," the ESRB actually doesn't have a rating equivalent to the movie "R". The content restrictions on "M" games are much more analogous to those on PG-13 movies. Video games analogous to "R" rated movies must be sold as "AO," which stands for "Adults Only." Much as with the movies' "X" rating - which technically could be used to explore, say, emotionally difficult themes that are not for younger viewers - tainting by association with purely sexual titles has caused most mainstream distributors to view its stamp on a title as pure commercial poison. It's not hard to imagine a world in which movies had no "R" rating, and had to choose between PG-13's lesser sex, violence, language and emotional intensity or X's anything goes without widespread distribution. Studios would push PG-13 absolutely as far as they could and back off the line only when forced. In the world in which we do live - in which retailers like Wal-Mart absolutely refuse to stock "AO" games - video game companies have instead decided to push "M" absolutely as far as they can.

It seems unlikely that the legislators in our great nation - who apparently have the war so completely under control that their main concerns are flag burning and video game regulation - will keep their noses where they belong. A new rating between "M" and "AO" could go a long way to encouraging the growth of actual titles for adults. The standard we have now encourages video game producers to try to cram as much as possible into PG-13 - and then forces everyone to look the other way when actual thirteen year olds try to buy it. It's a disservice to video game consumers old and young alike. But I don't expect this recent debacle to move us any further in the proper direction.