Hidden Toon Poon cripples US economy; gamesters flame Japanese government's GTA ban

I think I can honestly say I've never been a porn addict.

But this Toon Poon Pixel Numerical Virtual Non-Existent Platonic Object Digital Porn ... oh man, I just can't seem to get enough! Help! Stop me before I post more about the Hidden Virtual Binary Smut in Grand Theft Auto/San Andreas!

FIRST ITEM TODAY: The above Image has nothing to do with GTA/SA. It's the videogame Our Man On The Ground in Helvetia was in the game store buying. No Porn! Porn-Free! Strictly Mindless Violence as Virtual Outer Space Aliens Invade Planet Earth and Try to Ethnically Cleanse Its Traditional Inhabitants.

Regarding Our Correspondent's two e-mailed stories ...

First I was entranced by the way The Secret Smut (discovered by an enterprising Dutch nerd, for free, a Labor of Love, and immediately transmitted to the world's obsessive video gamesters as a little Free Present) of GTA/SA was "growing legs" -- attracting the attention of the American media.

INTRO TO JOURNALISM HINT: It's Summer in the Northern Hemisphere -- very slow news season. Everyone on vacation. Nothing much happening. Editors are Very Bored. Stories they'd merrily throw in the trash and ignore in October, now it's late July and they are rooting through the bottom of the trash can, their hands getting smeared with icky discarded yogurt containers, to retrieve.)

Next I was fascinated by the American politicians who were grabbing at the Moral Depravity of Our Youth angle of this story, and using GTA/SA's Toon Poon to hose up votes from the naive and unsophisticated, particularly from voters not old enough to remember seeing this same sort of political Klown Cirkus many times before -- with Rap Music, Rock n Roll, Elvis Wiggling His Hips, Comic Books, Secret Kommie Messages Hidden in Hollywood Movies, Husbands and Wives Sleeping in the Same Bed in Hollywood Movies, the Hootchie-Koo, the Jitterbug, Beer, Marihuana, MTV, Jazz, Women in Combat Roles in the Military, Gays in the Military, Same-Sex Marriage, Evolution in the Schools, an Out-of-the-Closet lesbian with her own major prime-time TV show, Pacifist Defeatist Folk Songs, The Dixie Chicks ...........................

Not to name names, but two of our Elected Federal Officials who are currently sticking their fingers in the hole in the dike and keeping the Sky from Falling and preventing the Imminent Collapse of Western Civilization by making a Whole Bunch of Loud Silly Noise about the Hidden Toon Poon of GTA/SA are Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her New Pal, Bedfellow, and Philosophical Soulmate, Senator Rick Santorum, the Republican from Pennsylvania who says (out loud, on tape, to an Associated Press reporter) that homosexuality is okay with him, as long as the people involved don't have sex, but if we let them get married, the next thing we know, people will start marrying farm animals, brothers and sisters will start getting married, and one man will marry n wives, where n > 1 (polygamy, he said ... if you flip the genders, that's polyandry, but Santorum didn't specifically predict that).

Our Man On The Ground in Helvetia now brings us up to speed on the effect of the GTA/SA Toon Poon Scandal and Catastrophe on the North American economy.

Things which harm national and world economies are Very Serious. If you don't think so, then you don't remember The Great World Depression of the 1930s, or you were sick or played hooky the day the teacher talked about it in high school.

To get a flavor of, a personal feel for The Great Depression, try this: Spend the next three years BEGGING for all your food. Eat as much as you want, eat whatever you like -- but instead of buying it, you just have to agree only to eat what you can successfully beg from people -- relatives, churches, the Salvation Army, Quakers, whoever's giving away free food or can be talked into it. Dumpster-Diving (behind restaurants and supermarkets) also allowed. Try the same with Shelter and Clothing.

But here's the good news: You don't have to work. Because there aren't any jobs.

Oh, you can also eat all the soup you want from the Free Charity Soup Kitchens, and you can sleep at the Free Charity Homeless Shelters. If the weather's nice, sleep outside all you want. If the weather's horrible, sleep outside all you want.

Truly this GTA/SA thing is Silly, right? How can a dumb sleazy violent smutty video game intended for kids (though officially strictly for Old Mature Kids) possibly damage or even goose the US or North American or European or Japanese economies?

Well, here's the deal. And you're not going to like it.

Everyone needs food, a good pair of sturdy, sensible shoes, a suit of clothes suitable for labor, or three dresses which will be good for all conceivable occasions. Everybody needs a reasonably safe and comfortable place to live.

But modern capitalist national economies which aspire to be healthy, robust, powerful, competitive and wealth-generating can't just restrict themselves to the manufacture and sale of necessary and sensible things that everyone obviously needs.

A modern Western-style capitalist economy actually relies enormously on luxury goods -- things no one really ever needs, like hats with ostrich feathers, athletic shoes which blink red flashing lights from their heels, cappucino and espresso machines, iPods, video cell phones, Spongebob Squarepants and Star Wars merchandise, goop to reverse male pattern baldness, pills to give men long-lasting erections, implants to increase breast size, fuzzy dice for car and truck mirrors ...

And video games and the expensive special machines (PlayStation, X-Box, Nintendo) that play them.

Luxury goods are where the sudden, dramatic, explosive growth spurts of profit and the expansion of the economy come from. The levels at which people buy and consume "sensible," necessary goods stay pretty constant; you can't tweak people to buy and eat twice as much food as they bought last year.

But you can bombard them with advertising to inspire them to buy a million PS2s and 400,000 copies of GTA/SA where, two years ago, these products didn't even exist.

One of the first explosions in the luxury sector was the Netherlands' tulip boom around the 16th century. (A Dutch diplomat brought Turkish wild tulips back to Holland, where Dutch botanists bred it into the modern garden tulip.) You can't eat tulips and nobody ever really needs them, but you can make millions of people around the world think they must buy dozens or scores or hundreds of tulips for their gardens. All of Europe went wild over tulips for a century or two, and tulips for world export are still a Big Noise in the economy of the Netherlands.

An explosive spurt in a Western national economy clearly makes a few entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and investors rich.

But to make them rich in this way, it also requires the creation of hundreds or thousands of new jobs -- men and women who aren't getting rich off the popular craze for new luxury goods, but who join the labor force, pay taxes, and buy more goods, both sensible goods and luxury goods.

Well, enough economic theory for now; I really don't know beans about it. (HINT TO YOU-KNOW-WHO: Leave a Comment.)

But I'm learning. I'm learning, for example, that Toon Poon hidden in Mega-Violent Video Games can kick the living shit out of Western-style capitalist economies. Maybe Hidden Toon Poon can manage to drag the USA and Japan into a recession and put a lot of people out of work.

* * * * * * *

Pat's Pub e-mailed:

g'day Bob

nicked these 2 stories from gamespot.com. I was down at the local game store today to buy "Destroy All Humans" and saw GTA SA still on sale...

Funny that. Americans are the first ones to claim the principle of Freedom of Speech and ban everything that even remotely stretches the principle a tad bit.

O tempora, o mores ! (oh , and just WAIT 'till they find out about The Sims....)

Here's the first story

The price of Hot Coffee: >$50 million

As retailers pull games from shelves and eat the cost of used copies, money gets left on the table...or goes to other games.

As retailers count up lost revenues that would have been made from sales of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas this summer, some business writers are suggesting Take-Two is privately reveling in the publicity the "Hot Coffee" controversy has brought it. "After all, nothing says 'buy me' to a 15-year-old quite like a message that this product is too racy to sell at Circuit City and GameStop," Business Week columnist David Kiley wrote. "In my opinion, censorship and uproar will only make San Andreas and future GTA games more appealing to teen gamers, Take-Two's target audience," said Motley Fool editor Nathan Alderman.

Cheeky theorizing aside, it's clear who the losers on the front line are. Almost every major retailer in North America, including Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, and the aforementioned Circuit City, has pulled the game from its shelves. GameStop yesterday said it would lose more than $1 million just from not being able to sell used copies of the game.

Take-Two itself said in a statement that it's lowering guidance for the third fiscal quarter (which ends July 31) to $160-$170 million in net sales. "Accordingly," the company said, "guidance for the fiscal year ending October 31, 2005 is also being lowered to $1.26 to $1.31 billion in net sales and $1.05 to $1.12 in diluted earnings per share."

But when the new M-rated San Andreas is released--sometime in the next six to eight weeks -- it may still be hard to find. The New York Times today is reporting that some retailers, including Wal-Mart and Best Buy, have said they might decline to carry even the "cleaned-up" version of the game.

Given that San Andreas was the best-selling game of 2004, the losses could be staggering. Even six months into this year, the franchise has demonstrated continued selling power. The Xbox version of San Andreas was June's top-selling game, according to NPD Funworld.

One analyst's math? Starting with the numbers Take-Two put out yesterday--lowered guidance of about $40 million--and figuring that number to be 80 percent of the retail sales (assuming a markup of 20 percent), the analyst's estimate of lost retail sales could go as high as $50 million [ U$ 50,000,000 ]. "Specialty stores stand to lose more, as they had to pull their more profitable used titles off the shelves also," the analyst added.

But it's not just front-line retailers that stand to suffer. Renters of games are also reacting to the rerating. In an e-mail to its customers, GameFly said, "Due to the ESRB's new AO (Adults Only) rating for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, GameFly has decided to temporarily suspend rental and purchase of the current version."

Are there any winners in this game industry controversy? Maybe other publishers.

Another analyst told GameSpot that "maybe as an offset, more people go to the stores looking for the game--given all the publicity--and then buy something else." In a memo to investors yesterday, Shawn Milne of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. echoed those thoughts. He said that while "retailers are obviously upset with Rockstar/Take Two," given that the AO rating "blocks big box retailers, such as Wal-Mart, from selling the game," it opens the field up to other games. "We believe that the removal of GTA could benefit other publishers, such as Activision, with more shelf space (there is the possibility that True Crime 2 could be pulled forward)," he said.

And then there is the entertaining logic of Kiley to revisit. "Perhaps Take-Two should consider shrink-wrapping the game with a 16-ounce can of malt liquor and a pack of Luckys... In the long run, it might increase sales even if the company is taking it on the chin in the short run."

Yes, perhaps.

By Curt Feldman -- GameSpot
POSTED: 07/22/05 05:33 PM PST

========================
and the second one
========================

Japanese official attacked online
over GTA III ban

Japanese gamers flood governor's blog; criticize decision to ban the sale and rental of Grand Theft Auto III to those 18 and under.

TOKYO -- The Mainichi Daily News is reporting that hundreds of Japanese gamers have launched an all-out attack on the blog of Governor Shigefumi Matsuzawa over his ban of sales and rentals of Grand Theft Auto III to those 18 years and younger in Kanagawa, Japan. The ban went into effect in June after Matsuzawa and the Kanagawa Prefectual government declared the game "a harmful product."

Matsuzawa launched an online blog on his Web site last month, and Japanese gamers soon began to flood it with critical posts--numbering in the hundreds.

One gamer criticized the Kanagawa Prefectual government's lack of "scientific grounds" over its claims that such games as GTA III can promote violent behavior in players.

"The reasons for the (harmful product) designation is vague," another blog post reportedly said.

"We see an increased number of crimes committed by members of school sports clubs. You also have to review sports education," another post read.

Some of the criticism turned personal, the paper said.

Some comments ended up in the section on Matsuzawa's Web site that highlights his interest in jogging and rugby, where one poster took aim and commented: "If you have time to jog, you would do better to read people's criticisms of game regulations."

Matsuzawa has responded by saying that he is unable to post replies to every blog post made. That comment brought on a further 255 posts from gamers critical of the governor. "I've received some terrible comments, but I think it's good for me to hear a variety of opinions," the governor wrote.

Matsuzawa wants gamers to carefully review the comments he has made at previous press conferences over the controversy of regulating games sales in Japan. Meanwhile, the governor will keep his blog open, and continue to post his own comments.

"I will never stop [adding and posting to] my Web site," he wrote.

By John Andersen -- GameSpot
POSTED: 07/25/05 12:29 PM PST