Grand Theft Auto Sex Scandal

[alexxkay]

By now, practically everyone has heard at least a little about the Grand Theft Auto sex scandal. As is usual with an issue I actually know a good deal about, I find most of the reporting to be distorted at best, false at worst. Some more information:

You can see a video of the gameplay in question here. It is, like most GTA content, far more funny than prurient. It's also clearly unfinished. Any kid who is savvy enough to download the mod to see this can also find plenty more hardcore porn without significant effort.

The severest two ratings that the ESRB can give are M ("Mature"), which restricts sales to 17 and over; and AO ("Adults Only"), which restricts to 18 and over. Technically, it's a really small distinction. In terms of marketing, however, it's the difference between an R-rated movie and an NC-17. Several major retail chains won't stock AO titles at all, so they don't generally get made. Now that GTA:SA has been re-classified as AO, there are 19 AO titles in existence.

The controversy is, at root, due to a previously untested boundary case, the exact line between an "easter egg" and a "mod". The ESRB requires game developers to include all of the most extreme game content including easter eggs when submitting a game for rating. Easter eggs are things that the programmers put in the game which are not encountered by most players, but whch any player *could* experience, by doing a particular unusual thing. For example, if (in a standard, unmodified copy of the game) typing "naked_lara" on your keyboard made Lara Croft take off her clothes (fictional example), that would be an easter egg. Mods, by contrast, are third-party software that changes how the game works. You can, in fact, download files people have made that, when applied to a Tomb Raider game, will make Lara look naked. The ESRB, correctly, holds developers responsible for easter eggs, but not for what outside parties do to the game outside of their control.

So what's the problem? In this particular case, it's not clear whether the content in question should be called an easter egg or a mod. The content was created by the game developer, and included on the disc, but could not be accessed by any player in the normal course of gameplay, no matter what they did. In order to access it, a 3rd party mod needs to be downloaded from the internet (or you need to be enough of a hacker to modify the code yourself). Which is it then, an easter egg or a mod? The answer isn't obvious.

You may wonder why the content was included on the disc at all, if no player could, normally, access it. There are (at least) two possible answers, and I don't know which is true. The sneaky interpretation: They knew hackers would eventually discover this, and wanted the extra publicity. The benign interpretation: They took it out fairly late in production, and didn't want to risk something else breaking because they removed those assets. Both are plausible to me.

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

If they wanted the publicity, why not render the thing better? The woman's got holes in her shoulderblades!

Thanks for the link, though. Now I can be fully armed in my contempt for people that think this is a huge problem.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

The woman's got holes in her shoulderblades!

That's part of what I meant by "clearly unfinished".

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

... and most sex scandals involve real people. So peculiar.

[londo.livejournal.com]

This is pretty much what I had gathered from the reports on this I'd seen.

But then again, my angle of looking at this stuff is not the same as everyone's, eh?

[londo.livejournal.com]

Also, the best part is the final progress bar.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm talking here to the non-gamer segment of my audience.

[jducoeur]

There's another possible answer, which is that "they" is poorly defined. Depending on how the company (and the software) works, it's entirely plausible that this little gag is due to a few designers having some fun and it simply never being caught and scrubbed. I wouldn't consider it certain that more than a few people ever knew of its existence. Indeed, if the producers *did* know of it, I have to say that they're idiots -- turning yourself into a legal test case over something this dumb is simply a mark of carelessness.

And yes, I agree that this case straddles the definitional lines. But when you touch a third rail like this, being able to say, "Well, it isn't *clear* that we broke the rules" rarely helps much...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't consider it certain that more than a few people ever knew of its existence.

Uh uh. It may not be completely finished, but it's received a level of polish that indicates that a *lot* of people knew about it. They recorded dialogue for it, with the professional actors; the mini-game control scheme has to have used at least a small amount of custom code; and there are custom animations as well. This is something that was definitely part of an approved design doc, that they later got cold feet on, and decided to take out.

I could buy that there were only a few people who were in on the decision(s) that resulted in an insufficient "taking out" -- but not on putting it in in the first place.