Yes, Zomby, but we live in a country where the airwaves (or cable lines or satellite beams) are filled with violence and murder and lying and all other imaginable ill of society, and that’s a-ok.  However, let someone see a naked boob bounce along and it’s the end of the world.

From what I understand the characters aren’t even naked.

If that’s true, then the whole thing is even more idiotic than I thought.

You guys act like all violence is the same, and all sex is the same.

“The Power Rangers” can be fairly violent at times (though lacking blood).  Yet I wouldn’t say it has as much negative effect on kids as, say, “American Pie”.  And the problem isn’t the couple of naked boobies, as much as the context in which those naked boobies are placed.

It’s all about the context, you know?

Using violence to defend the weak against the voracious is entirely different than a glorification of violence for the fun of it, like, say, in many Taranto movies.
Not that I’m arguing for banning of Taranto movies...I’m just not going to see them.

Interesting thing about Grand Theft Auto: Vice City:  While you can do lots of violent, despicable things, the context of the violence you have to do to win the game is pretty much the same as you might see in Scarface, upon which the game’s storyline is loosely based, I hear.  Far less than the violence in Terminator and T2, for instance.
The fact that you can do more violence, be more depraved?  Well, that’s a lot like real life, you know?  Free will and all that.  You can have a quite enjoyable game just killing various lowlifes in the drug-trafficking industry and doing the jumps.  At least as far as I’ve played.

Now, this post is about VC: San Andreas.  I’ve never played it, so I can’t really comment on it. I’m probably not going to buy it, mainly because I don’t care enough.

However, it does seem silly to me to put an adult-only marker on a game that you need to download a patch and install it to see the low-res sex.  Does that mean they have to put adult-only markers on blank CDs, since you can download and burn porn on them?

The govt ‘crats can be major idiots.

This isn’t government censorship, though. The ESRB is a voluntary ratings board set up by the industry themselves. Of course, they only formed the ESRB under threat of censorship, so the end result is really the same.

I just realized I nullified my own comment. Might as well delete this one.

Nathan, I think you underestimate the nature of the violence in the game--and that’s coming from a guy who owns all of the versions except the newest. When I say I wouldn’t let my 12 year old play it, that’s me making a judgement about the nature of the violence involved with regular play of the game.

I don’t think all violence is created equal, and didn’t say that I did. Nor do I think that all sexual content is the same, and didn’t say that I did. I just don’t think that the inclusion of sex scenes make this game worse than the inclusion of being rewarded for going on murder rampages where you have to kill a certain number of people in a set amount of time to gain the reward. That isn’t just something that you can do, it’s something that comes up in the normal flow of the game.

This isn’t Road Runner v/ Coyote. This isn’t justified by events and context. It is cartoonish to an extent, but not Spy v/ Spy cartoonish. It is violence for violence’s sake--it is the very definition of gratuitous.

Shoot, I won’t even play Vice City while my kids are awake. So, yeah, I can agree it’s nothing for kiddies with or without the sex.

I think I was half-responding to Andy’s statement that a naked boob is treated as the end of the world, and half responding to South Park’s movie, and not at all to what you were saying.

And yet, I said, “you guys”.

Well, I’m an idiot, too.  Just a different kind of idiot than the govt folks like Hillary.  I’m the friendly kind that doesn’t raise anyone’s taxes.

That’s one of the many things I like about you.

PS-- You aren’t an idiot. I just wanted to clarify my position.

And I am too an idiot.

...but I’m okay with that.  There’s nothing quite like the quiet confidence of a confirmed idiot.

Or a fool.  I can’t remember which, which kind of makes my point.

Shades of the PMRC.

My problem with the ESRB is that it’s pointless. These games cost, what, 50 bucks when they’re new? The preteens that are buying these games are obviously doing it with parental permission because where else do they get the money. So who does the ratings system protect? Stupid parents, the ones that don’t know what the game is about (nevermind that it’s named Grand Theft Auto), or the ones that just hand little Johnny five twenties and tell him to have a good time at the mall.

I never understand the laws that protect kids from their own parents’ idiocy. (Like the warning label on a bag of marbles: Do not put in crib. Does anyone think that someone that dumb can read?) Once again “think of the children” is the political slogan likely to do the most damage to free speech (and lots of damage to freedom in general) in our country.

Well, besides “we’re going to get corruption out of politics.” But that’s a comment for a different post.

Oh, one other thing. We’re worried about cartoon sex in an expensive computer game when there are literally hundreds and thousands of hours of free and cheap porn available on the internet for anyone that knows how to run a P2P client. Not that I’m advocating trying to stop that though government action, I just think that parents need to be vigilant about much more than just what video games their kids are playing.

Just read one more thing to respond to. I doubt the sex was put in the game for a giggle. My first thought was it was there for export copies of the game to countries with less prudish sexual attitudes. Now I think it was content that was originally in the game that was yanked out so the ESRB wouldn’t give the game the AO. Instead of actually removing the code (game writers are notorious for leaving stuff like this in games. Once a game is finished, debugged and ready to go any change at all might create a catastrophic bug that will then be found by customers. This was the reason that cheat codes were left in early console games) they just coded around it.

Now I’m going to work, really.