According to an Associated Press wire story, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the "Hot Coffee" modification for the video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" was part of the original released version from producer Rockstar Games, or whether the mod's sexually explicit content was simply an add-on officially unsanctioned by the game's creator.
According to Patrick Wildenborg, 36, of the Netherlands, the modification adds nothing illegal to the game and merely allows users to see what is already written into the code – allegedly, a male character engage in various sex acts with a virtual girlfriend – not too difficult to believe, since hiding things in code has been a hallmark of software authorship since operating systems were invented.
Rockstar, on the other hand, has issued a statement saying, "So far we have learned that the 'hot coffee' modification is the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game. In violation of the software user agreement, hackers created the 'hot coffee' modification by disassembling and then combining, recompiling and altering the game's source code." The company also says it's looking into how to increase security for its code, which it claims was "reverse-engineered" to produce the sexual content.
Worse (for Rockstar, at least), the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), an industry organization that rates games much like the MPAA rates movies, is looking into whether it should change Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' rating from M (Mature) to AO (Adults Only) – and as one gaming blogger noted, "for a mass market video game for a hugely popular franchise -- one that probably cost Rockstar a great deal of money to produce -- an Adults Only rating could be death. Why? Well, because very few places would carry it. Video stores for rental? Nope. Your local Best Buy? Probably not. EBgames? Maybe you could order one.... So instead of having been a consistent top seller since its release in 2004, it would have been a little known installment in the franchise, virtually inaccessible to hundreds of thousand of (adult) gamers."
And this for a game, already banned in Japan, whose TV commercial opens with a character walking down an urban California street with a rocket launcher perched on his shoulder, ready to blow anything in sight into tiny bits.
So into this fray has jumped Sen. Clinton, currently smarting from an unauthorized defamatory biography by right-winger Edward Klein, who seriously tags Clinton as a lesbian and a rape victim – and what better way for a politician to attempt to rehabilitate her public image – or at least deflect attention from it – than to bash porn?
According to a New York Times story, Sen. Clinton has asked the FTC to determine "'the source of this content,' especially since the game can fall into the hands of young people," whether the ESRB "erred" in giving the game an M rating, and whether retailers were "adequately enforcing" the ESRB ratings in any case.
To make her case for the latter, charge, Sen. Clinton quoted statistics from the National Institute on Media and the Family, which claims that 50 percent of boys between 7 and 14 are able to buy M-rated video games. The National Institute, founded by Dr. David Walsh in 1996, is a softer version of the fundamentalist Parents Television Council, spending most of its energy encouraging parents to take a more active part in policing their kids' media access – and is likely one of the few such organizations that would even give the time of day to a Democrat; most of the others consider Democrats the cause of their kids' problems, not in any way possibly part of the solution.
But the fact is, an M rating from the ESRB already means that the content "may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content, and/or strong language." The "Adults Only" rating adds exactly one (1) year to that – and it's only the more rabid fundamentalists who think there's a significant difference in the ability to process sexual and violent imagery between 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds. So beyond enforcing retailers' adherence to ESRB rating recommendations, one has to ask, what is Sen. Clinton "on" about?
Well, it's most likely about the 2008 presidential election. In March, Sen. Clinton gave a speech to the Kaiser Family Foundation in which she termed sex and violence in the media a "silent epidemic" among children, and championed federal research into how exposure to such graphic content affects young minds. During the talk, she singled out Grand Theft Auto as particularly harmful, saying it "has so many demeaning messages about women and so encourages violent imagination and activities and it scares parents.... They're playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them. You know, that's kind of hard to digest."
Possibly for a 57-year-old like Sen. Clinton, but in an age where more than half of the 13-year-olds in the New York City school system have already had some sort of sex, we suspect less so for 17-year-olds.
The point is, it's a trend to watch out for as the 2008 election draws closer.
