serious journalists on Virtual Simulated Video Game Toon Porn

The New York Times
Saturday 23 July 2005

The Gamer
Is This Game Coyness a Crime?

By SETH SCHIESEL

At the big annual video game convention in Los Angeles two months ago, Rockstar Games, creator of the now-infamous Grand Theft Auto series, demonstrated perfectly its special role in the game world.

CAPTION: A mild scene from the controversial video game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, created by Rockstar Games. The Entertainment Software Rating Board has given the game an "adults only" label.

The hundreds of other game makers at the Electronic Entertainment Expo practically begged attendees to try their wares, clamoring for attention with colorful video screens, pounding music and scantily clad, anatomically improbable "booth babes."

Rockstar, meanwhile, surrounded its compound with a chain-link fence. Just inside the fence, a fleet of huge buses, arrayed nose to tail and covered with logos for Rockstar games, blocked any view within. For three days, hundreds of people crowded against the cordon. And for three days, impeccable, imperious receptionists turned away just about everyone. Even senior executives for major corporations that do business with Rockstar found it impossible to enter without an appointment.

The whole setup was typical, brilliant Rockstar marketing. Ever since the company's Grand Theft Auto 3 exploded onto the scene four years ago, Rockstar has cultivated a bad-boy image largely by shutting itself off from the mainstream world. Even as politicians and moralists lambasted the G.T.A. series for its raw depictions of urban violence, Rockstar executives generally refused to explain their work, much as some lofty composer might refuse to explain his latest symphony. Rather, Rockstar was content to let Grand Theft Auto speak for itself.

For years, that strategy worked because people who actually buy and play games appreciated the franchise on its own terms. The series has sold more than 21 million copies since 2001 not merely because it is violent -- after all, lots of games are more violent - but because its basic game-play dynamic of exploring vast cities stocked with myriad quests has been so engaging. As long as the nation's retailers were helping deliver the product to millions of consumers, Rockstar didn't need to care what anyone else thought.

That is over. With the recent Hot Coffee' episode, the outside world has cut through the chain-link fence, knocked over the wall of buses and forced Rockstar and its corporate parent, Take-Two, to confront the fact that the outside world does matter. More broadly, it is a wake-up call to the entire game industry that if it wants to avoid being continually used as a political piñata, it must do a better job of explaining itself to the majority of the planet, which still sees video games as corrupting, mindless, deviant diversions.

To recap: On Wednesday, the Entertainment Software Rating Board revoked the Mature rating on Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and replaced it with an "adults only" label. Since most mainstream retailers refuse to stock adults-only games, San Andreas was effectively pulled from store shelves across the nation.

The rating board's strike against the game came after independent programmers released a program on the Internet last month that allowed users of the newly released Xbox and PC editions to play a hidden "mini game" in which the game's protagonist has sex with a girlfriend. The Democratic senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut gave voice to the inevitable outrage from Capitol Hill, and subsequent investigation by Gamespot, a game news Web site, and others on the Internet revealed that the basic computer code for the so-called Hot Coffee scene was also present on the game's PlayStation 2 disc, which was released last October. (The PS2 version can only be unlocked with inexpensive third-party hardware like the Action Replay MAX.)

In all of this, perhaps the most fascinating element has been the vast disconnect between how everyday gamers and everyday nongamers have perceived the controversy.

To begin with, it is difficult for many gamers to understand why politicians and the rating board would react so strongly to the concept of sex when most of the country seems to shrug at the extremely graphic violence that pervades not only games but also television and film. In the basic Hot Coffee scene, the characters aren't even naked. Instead, the digital characters rub against each other with their clothes on. (Racier versions alter the game's code more extensively by removing the characters' clothes, but the results are hardly lifelike.)

"The level of detail in the graphics for this game are not high, and in any case you don't see any additional body parts that you wouldn't normally see in the game," said Greg Kasavin, executive editor of Gamespot. (Nonetheless, printing an image from Hot Coffee would violate the standards of this newspaper.)

Moreover, to gamers it was obvious that even with the special program, it generally takes hours and hours to get to Hot Coffee, while just about anyone who knows how to use the Web can, in seconds, pull up pictures and video of real people having real sex.

"This is definitely not easy content to access," Mr. Kasavin said, referring to Hot Coffee. "It took our news editor, a smart guy who works with games for a living, the better part of a full day to make this work, and even that required third-party hardware."

Of course, to most people none of this matters. There is a huge gap between how gamers see games and how most of the world sees games, because most people don't have 20 or 40 hours to sink into exploring a virtual environment. Anyone can watch a film in an evening or listen to an album in an hour and draw their own conclusions about the content of that media in context. Yet many adults would not even know what a modern game controller was if they saw it, let alone know how to use it.

And so most adults who never play games are left to draw conclusions only from sensationalized snippets that are carefully picked out and brandished by antigame advocates and the politicians who love them. Behind their fences and buses, the folks at Rockstar are finally figuring that out.

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