Tonight I did the Hot Coffee panel. I think it went well. I was smart enough to get one panelist who clearly wanted to agitate – which was a good thing. Nothing’s more dull than watching a panel with three guys who agree with each other. Still, I think there were some people in the crowd who were shocked that a game industry professional under the age of 40 would be preaching the need for social responsibility.

I started off with a short timeline of what’s happened in the last 60 days, and included some screenshots of Hot Coffee in action. I also included my favorite description of Hot Coffee in action, with my favorite snippet (as J pointed out in an earlier thread):

[S]uccessfully pleasing the girl leads to a climactic scene where the girl has an orgasm, failure leads to CJ ‘leaving the station early’ and collapsing on top of her. At this point the screen will read ‘Failure to satisfy a woman is a crime’.”

The six questions I asked (which consumed almost the whole hour):
1) What went wrong?
2) Should we be scared?
3) Is this really about the relative scandal of sex vs violence? Or is there something else that made Hot Coffee cross the line.
4) Does the current ESRB-centered system work?
5) Is there really a problem with youth violence caused by video games? And if so, could we ever convince anyone of that?
6) How will this affect modders?

A couple of people are writing write-ups – I’ll link ‘em as soon as they pop up. The general consensus amongst all of the panelists is that everyone in the industry should be really mad at Rockstar.