GTA: Sex, Violence, and Video Games - Huge Ramifications

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Just as Blockbuster and other retailers refuse to sell or rent movies with an “X” rating, the “AO” rating for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas serves as a kiss of death for the game with many large chains. Despite Rockstar’s offer to ship updated box stickers to any retailer who chooses to continue carrying the game, the latest version of GTA has been pulled from the shelves of Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart, and Target, among others. Since the rating change, Take Two saw its shares drop 13 percent.

These financial problems might be the least of the company’s worries. The U.S. House of Representatives voted 355 to 21 in favor of requesting the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Rockstar Games intentionally deceived the ESRB to avoid the AO rating. Congressman Fred Upton expressed the belief that Rockstar and Take Two knew such a rating would have severely limited the game’s sales in retail outlets. “It appears that the publisher has blatantly circumvented the rules in order to peddle sexually explicit material to our youth, and they should be held accountable. A company cannot be allowed to profit from deceit,” he said.

For Take Two’s part, it is creating a replacement version of GTA that it hopes will earn an M rating from the ESRB, on which the Hot Coffee hack won’t work. The company is also cooperating fully with the FTC in its inquiry and stated its belief that it has acted “in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations.” Having just settled a Securities and Exchange Commission probe into its accounting practices in June, Take Two must feel rather as if it climbed out of the frying pan and into the fire.

The situation puts the entire video industry on notice. On the surface, it appears as if an improbable chain of events precipitated this company’s crisis. First, overly explicit scenes must have been rejected, but left in the source code for the game; then all of the quality checks must miss that vestigial code; then, after the game passes the ESRB and makes it to the market, hackers must crack the game, figure out how to access the scenes, then post the hack. In fact, this sequence of events is not as improbable as it appears. It could all too easily happen again.

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Comments On: GTA: Sex, Violence, and Video Games

· It's fun to blow stuff up in the tank and run around with the flame thrower!!    · It looks like this topic has a lot of people talking, though it's not showing up...    · What I want to know is, how did the guy who hacked the game, find out that there was...    · I wouldn't know myself. But I do know there is an active modding community. The only...    · Ah yes... there is a big problem with all of this nudity in the game... but this is...   >>> Post your comment now!