I have seen the future.

A large chunk of the American system of jurisprudence is absolutely retarded.

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If you can sue a company who makes a product the express purpose of which is to cover up human flesh for "making such indecent exposure possible", then the legal system is totally fucked in the head.

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Oh, please. It's not like hackers just totally modified the game data to do something totally and originally unintended by Rockstar. They just unlocked data that was already on the disc. And believe me, unlocking data on game discs that is left there beyond the game is *not* anything that Rockstar wouldn't expect to happen.

Believe me, I'm not one for "censorship," and being a writer I'm all for free speech and all that. But in this case, Rockstar just went too far, and now wants to try to blame everyone else for something they did.

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aimisdirty.livejournal.com

What is 'too far'? The game is for people 18 years or over in Canada. If kids get their hands on it, that is a shortcoming when it comes to parenting. Is a graphic sex scene in a video (I say graphic, because there are plenty of scenes in San Andreas where sex is heavily implied) game more or less objectionable than a game where the intent is to carjack and kill?

The problem here, is that soccer-mom type groups aren't willing to recognize that adults play more video games than children. So they feel the need to impose their will on us (adults). It is absolutely pathetic.

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jsbowden.livejournal.com

The nudity patches are third party, the unlocked bits of the game showed simulated sex acts of fully clothed people. You don't get nudity unless you explicitly modify the game with third party patches.

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theweaselking.livejournal.com

I'm suing Microsoft because I saw porn on Internet Explorer.

SCARRED! SCARRED FOR LIFE!

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Is a graphic sex scene in a video (I say graphic, because there are plenty of scenes in San Andreas where sex is heavily implied) game more or less objectionable than a game where the intent is to carjack and kill?

Well, that's for people to decide for themselves (or even more to the point, for parents to decide for their kids), isn't it? To some people, the sex *is* more objectionable than the violence. Yeah, I think it's a bit warped as well, but it's still a parent's... I'm not sure if I want to say "right" or "duty" here... to try to govern what their kids are exposed to. If Rockstar's going to hobble their ability to do that by trying to slide more objectionable stuff under the radar (things which would have given the game a higher rating if the ratings board knew about it, at least here in the U.S.), then yeah, they're totally at fault.

To me, it's not along the lines of clothes manufacturers being at fault when their clothes are removed. It's more like Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" from the Superbowl. "Oh gee, how did that breast get out there? But... I had it totally covered! I can't IMAGINE how that got exposed like that. The shock! The horror!"

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But you still get the sex scenes, which are what's the breaking point for some people. I'm not saying they should have had to yank the scenes from the disc...but if left there, they SHOULD have let people (and the ratings board(s) ) know about them, rather than trying to slip them under the radar. And they shouldn't have tried to point the finger at everyone else for that matter, only to have it turn around and be their original material on the disc. If that disclosure would have jacked up the rating more, then... so be it. They put the material there, they have to deal with the consequences.

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theweaselking.livejournal.com

That's the thing.

They're not part of the game.

You can't get them from the game.

They're "dead code".

I'm willing to bet the PR and legal guys never even knew of their existence.

It takes an EXTERNAL PATCH to add them to the game, and all that patch does is allow you your pixellated (clothed) sex scene. That's all the patch is for, and you downloaded it KNOWING that that's what it was for.

This is, in fact, JUST like my putting mirrors on my shoes and then suing because OH MY GOD I CAN SEE UP YOUR SKIRT YOU WANTON HARLOT.

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harald387.livejournal.com

Not that I want to give anyone ideas or anything, but...

GTA is expressly for adults. It may be listed as '18+, graphic violence and language' and not mention nudity, but it is *definitely* a game for which Rockstar says 'kids should probably not play this'.

The Sims, however... Now there's a game you can do unintended naughty things with. And the ESRB on it is a mere T.

-K

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aimisdirty.livejournal.com

But that is just the thing. The game is rated for people 18 years of age or older. The game also makes no attempt to claim that it is a pure or wholesome story/setting. The game is extremely violent, crude, inappropriate (without any third party patches) - and I love playing it occasionally.

If parents don't want their kids to play an extremely violent game, then they should enforce their internal family rules regarding such things - not try and make up for their poor parenting by taking legal action which affects the majority of video gamers (adults), who just want to be left alone for a change. The same thing goes for games with graphic sex scenes of any sort. Adults have the option to not buy the game. Parents have a responsibility to ensure that their kids aren't being exposed to things that they consider inappropriate.

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theweaselking.livejournal.com

> Parents have a responsibility to ensure that their kids aren't being
> exposed to things that they consider inappropriate.

You've missed the point, partially: The complaint is that the box says "horrible violence and naughty words" when it's possible to play the game with "horrible violence, naughty words, and EEEEEEVIL SEX!".

The fact that it requires an explicit patch is not really relevant to the complainers - it's the fact that they approved the horrible violence, not the sex.

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jsbowden.livejournal.com

The code in question had been locked out. The only way to get there is to edit the binary by hand, or download a patch from a third party. The code was likely not stripped out completely to avoid requiring yet more testing before release. Someone reverse engineered it. Can I sue Microsoft because I was stupid enough to run a virus that patched the OS and ate all my files?

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Pretty much. Like I said, I agree that it's kinda silly to be okay with excessive violence, but not (whispers)sex(gasp), but that's one of the choices parents have to make - just what they want to allow their kid access to, and when the company hobbles their ability to make that choice by not even bothering to say that there's graphic material of a sexual nature on the disc... well, then they're at fault.

And for the record (to the previous poster), in the U.S. GTA:SA *was* marked as Mature, which is theoretically 17+, and the extra material bumped it up to Adults Only. Not much of an age difference but then, some parents very well might still let slightly younger kids play Mature titles (especially since a lot of them aren't quite *that* bad) who would never consider letting the same kidlets have an AO game.

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I'm willing to bet the PR and legal guys never even knew of their existence.

It takes an EXTERNAL PATCH to add them to the game, and all that patch does is allow you your pixellated (clothed) sex scene. That's all the patch is for, and you downloaded it KNOWING that that's what it was for.

Well, a patch, or just a simple code on a code device for the console versions. Not exactly that difficult - and it was still *on* the disc, in playable form once unlocked. And in this case, it's *well* known that people WILL find the extra code on the disc, and unlock it, and tell other people how to unlock it. Period. You cannot tell me that at least the programmers didn't fully realize that someone, somewhere would find the minigames and point them out, allowing others to access them. Because it's been done before in well-known examples. (A South Park episode hidden on a Tiger Woods golf game and a bunch of extraneous voices/dialogue/etc on the first Soulreaver game are just two that immediately come to mind.)

And I think the point here is more that kids download the patch (or plug in the code) knowing what it's for, after the parents bought the game not knowing the material was on there.

This is, in fact, JUST like my putting mirrors on my shoes and then suing because OH MY GOD I CAN SEE UP YOUR SKIRT YOU WANTON HARLOT.

Not really. It's more like a parent buying a pair of shoes for their kid, and finding out later that they came supplied with extendable mirrors on little poles, *if* you pry a small flap of leather off the front of the toes.

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The issue here with Rockstar is that they had a game, who's content shoudl have been Adults only and they had it rated M (17+). While it's a really silly distinction, they fasly claimed the content was one, when it should have been another.

ANyone who designs a video game and expects people to NOT be able to find hidden content is a morom.

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They should at least have the decency to make their up-cover-things *resistant* to such attacks! Remember kids, not having steel cables in your underwear makes you just as guilty as when you let your kid wear non-flame-retardant pyjamas!

Kidding aside, how about suing "Double take micro wear"? "Express purpose of covering up" doesn't really cover their stuff -- especially the "invisible" line (I'm not linking to it because it's fairly NSFW, but google should help).

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But this is *not* "cheat code" stuff, AFAIK. It's actual "patch the game to unlock it" type of thing -- there are plenty of patches for all manner of games that make them EVIL SEXY ( Lara Croft Nekkid patches come to mind, frex). The 'difference', such as it is, seems to be that this time, some data is already there in the game data. So fucking what? Games, most software for that matter, are full of no-longer-used code and data because nobody bothers to clean the shit up.

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I looked it up; I still don't care. It's a sign of a serious problem with American culture that people tend to be more offended by nudity and pixilated sex acts than about gross levels of blatant violence.

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People who find sex more objectionable than violence are irrational in that respect.

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That was me.

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Can you sue a movie producer who made an NC-17 movie because your child, who snuck into the movie theatre was exposed to soft core porn? No. Therefore, you shouldn't be able to sue Rockstar games in this case either, because you shouldn't be letting your under 17 year-old child play GTA if you're going to freak out about what they might see.

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this "patch" didn't add anything to the game, so it really wasn't a patch. it was just a key. i don't know about other patches, but from what i understood, this was the first time, it was simply just unlocking content already in the game.

"So fucking what?"
Is simply that they were careless enough to let this happen. The industry rating remained government free because there was an inherant trust in it's integrity. This broke that trust. I couldn't care less about sexual content in video games, but somethign that makes the "counsil of anti-sex-obsessed parents, who can't take enough time to learn about their children and related idiots," salivate does irritate me.

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I didn't say I cared, I said that if you wanted to sue someone for making clothes that could conceivably be cut open and therefore expose your Fragile Little Mind to Naughty Bits, it might be easier to go after *them*.

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No, you see, it really *was* a patch. It's not a 'code'. It's a *patch*. There's no functional difference, and there's not even a significant difference in download times between a patch that references some dead code that should never come up, and a patch that has the code and introduces it.

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but this patch did nothing but unlock something that was already there. They should have taken it out it's as simple as that.

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