'Hot Coffee' Scandal Officially Resolved 189
kukyfrope writes "Take-Two Interactive today announced that the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) inquiry concerning hidden sexual content in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has formally closed. All outstanding matters pending before the FTC have been settled and no penalties or fines have been assessed. Although Take-Two was not fined, the company will be subject to civil penalties of $11,000 for future violations. 'We look forward to putting this behind us and focusing on what we do best - creating videogames,' said Take-Two President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Eibeler."
slap on the wrist (Score:2, Interesting)
More evidence that sex is expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
From the last line in the article:
The removal of San Andreas from most retailers' shelves followed by a re-rating of the title resulted in a loss of nearly $25 million.
Ouch!
Re:It's only a speeding ticket (Score:2, Interesting)
Which, as I understand it, means San Andreas was originally rated suitable for people aged 17 and up, but with the restoration of the supposedly deleted scene it ought to have been rated only for people aged 18 and up.
Yeah. I can see why this is a major upset. I mean, with the enormous difference between a naive, callow youth of 17 able to deal only with baseball-bat beatings, drive-by shootings, murder by bludgeoning with a massive purple dildo and armed sieges with the cops... and a grizzled, seasoned old 18-year-old who is mature enough to view a sex scene.
Re:they do that best? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not just rate every damn thing 'AO'? Certainly in the UK, GTA and similar games are rated '18' just for the violence, so 'Hot Coffee' wasn't a problem. Had it been included fully in the game, it would still have been an '18'.
There's no way a GTA game should be aimed at children. What's the quarrel between an 'M', which I gather means '17', and an 'AO' which means '18'? Shame to lose out on the seventeen-year-old market, I suppose, but it would free Rockstar to put what the hell they liked into the game without worrying about whether some deleted scene will resurface and cause trouble.
Re:they do that best? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm. Interesting.
Very well... when the time comes to release GTA: TOKYO 2050 or whatever the next version might be, release the FULL-BLOODED version which Rockstar actually want to put out, and also the PARENT-SAFE version for Wal-Mart, in which we replace all the sex scenes with, oh, our hero dancing happily with Barney the Dinosaur or something like that.
Then put up the patch to convert PARENT-SAFE up to FULL-BLOODED on ftp. Like the Carmageddon guys did back in the day, when censors forced them to replace pedestrians with green-blooded zombies. Back then, every PC games magazine put the Carmageddon blood patch on every cover disk for months, for the benefit of non-wired readers. I'm quite sure the same would happen with GTA.
If you make it absolutely clear that the patch is AO content and will convert your wholesome, ultra-violent GTA game to a sexually deviant, ultra-violent GTA game, and that it's for those who accidentally bought the wrong version, you should be in the clear. There's no sex on the disk bought by the parents in the shop - so they knew what they were buying. There's plenty of sex on the later download, but hey - if you install AO patches, you expect AO content, right?
Bullsh*t! It was NOT a violation of ANYTHING! (Score:5, Interesting)
The segment in question was included but was never meant to be accessed! It took someone else's hack, which might or might not have been in violation of the game's EULA, to release it. Therefore, the accessibility to that whole section of code was not authorized by Take Two or Rockstar. Yet they were made the scapegoat in nothing more that a politically-charged witch hunt. There was abosultely NO REASON for Take Two/Rockstar to disclose that information because they had NO EXPECTATION that it would ever been seen by any customer.
For example, let's say that I included the following type of code in a huge program that I'm writing. (No comments about the Perl. I'm just making an example.)
$ESRB = "Neutral";
if ($ESRB eq "Evil") {
print "The ESRB is a bunch of fucking, holier-than-thou, moralistic morons.\n";
print "And you're mother's ugly, too.\n";
}
Obviously, that code is never meant to be seen because $ESRB is being explicity set to bypass the if statement. So, I compile the whole program, with the code that was never meant to be seen, get a "T" rating for the whole program, and release the program. In my EULA is an explicit statement that no one is allowed to modify the code.
Then some moron sees it in the compiled code and releases an unauthorized hack to change $ESRB to "Evil". Suddenly, there's a big bruhaha because it should have been "M" due to the language of the code.
Now the ESRB and Thompson are on my case for not revealing the code that was in there. WHY? The code was never meant to be seen - not even as an Easter egg. There is no reasonable expectation of me letting the ESRB know that the code was in there because there was no reasonable expectation that it would ever be seen. Someone went in without my permission and modified the code to see something that was never meant to be seen.
There is no reason why Take Two/Rockstar should be held accountable for the release of something that was never meant to be available in the first place. This was nothing close to a "truth-in-labeling" violation. It was a do-gooder, "for the sake of the children", witch hunt. Rockstar took the high road and just let it slide, which was probably the best PR they could have done, but they were nothing more than a scapegoat.
Re:Problems like this are easily solved (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. If people want to know how liberals truly think, look no further than 1890-1920, the progressive era.
Yeah, there was stupid shit, like Prohibition that was the last gasp of the movement as it died. But, actually, Prohibition has an interesting story.
What people don't realize is that prohibition wasn't intended to protect people from themselves, it was intended to prevent a common problem in those days: Men who wouldn't support their families, spend all their money on drink, and absure their wives. And women couldn't get a divorce and they couldn't get a job and there was no child support even if they could.
So it was, mistakenly, thought that banning alcohol would get rid of alcoholic and abusive husbands. Yes, it was stupid, but it wasn't the puritanic motives people think, it was fighting a real problem with a somewhat naive solution. And, yes, liberals fixed that problem later, in other ways.
Most of the 'liberal', or 'enlightenment' solutions have good motives. Sometimes they are stupid, but the motives are usually good.
OTOH, so were most conservative motives, at least until the neocons got ahold of them. And the neocons, least we forget, were a bunch of liberals who got, basically, really fascist in the 70s with the idea of 'improving' the entire fucking world, instead of just the US, and switched parties because the liberals said 'hell no'. They said 'Hey, let's coop the religious right' and tada.
Consider that the next time you look at the borrow-and-spend 'conservatives' running the government. They do that because they aren't 'conservatives', they're fucking discredited-by-the-left 'liberals' who've decided to go 'progressive' on the whole fucking world, and found, like Prohibition, you can't just dictate things and have them happen.
There's a theory around that every other country's center is this country's left, but, at least in foreign policy, that theory is exactly wrong. Our foreign policy is way to the left of where current liberals stand, to the point where our government can fix every country in the world with the right law(s). The is the Enlightenment on Steroids, it is 'progressive', extremely so, way past any sane point. This is why our internal and foreign polices seem completely out of joint with each other at times.
I keep waiting for someone to stand up on TV and say 'Hey, isn't starting a war not a conservative position to take?'.