From a web site titled “The Best Page in the Universe” (a pretty funny site, albeit a bit frat boy-ish, if you ask me) comes this commentary on the controversy surrounding the video game “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” called “I just wanted a video game, not eternal damnation in hell.” If you missed it, there is a secret way to alter the PC version of the game so that you can see the characters having badly animated video game sex. ABC Nightly News (I suppose the other networks too) ran this story over and OVER again for about a week as if it was somehow as much a national tragedy as, oh, I don’t know, real people actually getting killed.
I like this passage from Maddox’s entry on the game:
The creator of the game, Rockstar Games, has stated that it will offer a downloadable patch to fix the sex issue in the PC versions, and is working on a new version of the game that will prevent this content from being unlocked in the future.
Thank God. I’ll be the first person to download and patch my PC version of “Grand Theft Auto.” I want to shoot people in the face, bang prostitutes, traffic drugs, steal cars, and terrorize police officers without this filthy smut in my game. Frankly, I’m appalled that Rockstar would allow such wholesale corruption of our youth. Years from now when America has become a withered husk of the morality it once stood for, historians will look back at what triggered it all and point to one event: a boolean variable that unlocked a simulated sex scene in a video game.
Oh, and I didn’t realize this either: the original rating for “Grand Theft Auto” (and most of the other games that are rather violent) is “M” for “Mature,” meaning that they recommend that players be 17 or older. “AO”, which stands for “Adults Only” and which is the new rating assigned to the game, means that the game should only be played by folks 18 or older. Ah yes, what difference a year makes….