Something has enraged Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democratic Senator from New York, and for once, it’s not the latest stratagem of the Republican Party. What has inspired her ire is… a video game. Specifically, this:
I haven’t played the game, but I’ve read it allows players to control a main character who fights both street gangs and corrupt police, during the course of which he can hijack cars, participate in shoot-outs, etc. A lot of people say it’s fun, but definitely not for kids. The game carries a rating of “M,” for “Mature,” to reflect that. This tells parents Grand Theft Auto is only for players above the age of 17.
Senator Clinton, casting herself as a defender of American values before her probable 2008 presidential election bid, has condemned the game and demanded the Federal Trade Commission investigate Grand Theft Auto, from Rockstar Games. Why? Not because of the game’s violence. Not even because of how the game was when it shipped. Instead, a user modification of the game is what has drawn Clinton’s anger. This mod permits Grand Theft Auto‘s main character to have sex with his girlfriends in various min-games, which if available in the standard game, would have earned it an “Adults Only” rating, keeping it off many store shelves. The creator of the mod, known as Hot Coffee, claims he unlocked content already in the game’s code that Rockstar had disabled. Rockstar contradicts the modder, saying that the content was never in the game, and that the modder added it all himself.
Clinton’s ruckus is much ado about nothing. Let’s presume the sex games were indeed part of the original code of Grand Theft Auto. That’s still nothing scandalous. Inactive programming from discarded features ships all the time with games. Eliminating code from abandoned ideas can be difficult, and it could even break algorithms for concepts a game’s producer wants to keep. So the game’s programmers leave the code as inactive, and it’s not part of the game as it ships. A bored modder could sift through a game’s code and write files to reactivate the dormant code, which might have occurred with the Hot Coffee mod.
Rockstar Games, though, cannot be accountable for what a modder does to Grand Theft Auto. They are responsible only for the game they distribute to the public. And the sex adventures are not part of that game. Whether someone chooses to change the behavior of the game is solely the affair of the person in question.
Besides all this, let’s not forget Grand Theft Auto bears an “M” rating. The M appears right on the box, informing parents about the game’s potential inappropriateness for children. The addition of slightly more risque sexual content by an independent modder hardly changes the overall nature of the game. If parents don’t want their kids playing such a game, then they should forbid its purchase. The use of government power to threaten investigations in order to scare game developers violates the First Amendment and imperils an activity many adults legitimately enjoy.
I don’t expect these arguments to concern many politicians or commentators. They seek easy answers to America’s problems. Rather than trying to determine the flaws with our society itself, that lead to unsafe underage sex, for example, blaming and attacking a video game is simpler. It enables politicos to sit back at their desks and say, “We’re doing something,” while the hard task of attempting to resolve our difficulties remains undone. Heaven forfend the original thought we would need otherwise!
About the Author
I'm Jason Vines, a web developer at a research institution in Washington, DC. I graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor's degree in political science, with a minor in journalism. I enjoy philosophy and web scripting, as well as reading, writing, history, video games, travel, and photography.
