The recent hullabaloo about a sex game in GTA: SA brings to mind an experience I had on Meridian 59. We got angry mail threatening to sue us because, and I stress I’m not making this up, someone decrypted a file in their Meridian 59 and found it was full of every possible profanity you can think of, stuff that’d make a sailor blush. The file, of course, was the index we used for the profanity filter.
As to the GTA:SA thing, it’s perplexing. As Grand Text Auto points out, once you’ve got a game that encourages you to go on a copkilling rampage, it’s hard to claim that a crappy, hidden game about consensual sex is really more fuel on the fire. And sex in games isn’t really new. It seems to me that there was another huge game last year that allowed you to have sex, and in fact it was a fairly core gameplay component. Oh, yeah. This one. No modding required for sex, though a 30 second google search is required to depixellate the naughty bits.
Even more curious, The Sims 2 gets a teen rating, whereas the critics crying wolf over the nude patch in GTA:SA want to move it from a Mature rating to an Adults Only. Clearly, the lesson here is: white suburbanite hot tub sex = good. Black gangsta sex in the hood = bad.
GTA was actually the subject of one of my earliest posts on this blog. My point remains effectively unchanged: almost any game can be deviant if the player tries hard enough – that’s what interactive MEANS. Wanna commit genocide? Go play Civilization. Wall up your neighbors and watch them collapse, sobbing, in puddles of their own urine? The Sims is right up your alley. On the other hand, if what you really want to do is pretend you’re an EMT saving lives, GTA is pretty much the only game in town.
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