Who is the Master of Unlocking?

I've found the recent controversy over the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sex mod / unlock extremely fascinating (thanks Gamespot). If you believe what the modder and critics are saying, Rockstar left the code for the sex mini-game in the final copies of San Andreas. For one reason or another, the theory goes, Rockstar blocked off the feature so it would be impossible to access. There were a few rumors that the code existed on the PS2 version, but it wasn't until the PC version that someone actually unlocked it and made it available. Or modded it, depending on your viewpoint.

Now politicians and watch groups are up in arms. Folks who thought the cop killing and hooker stomping was bad are now going nuts over the prospect of young children pretending to have sex using an awkwardly timed minigame. Whether the code was modded or buried by self-censoring game makers, someone has added fuel to the fire and it won't die down anytime soon.

This hullabaloo has raised an interesting legal trouble. How responsible are video game makers for features they never meant to see the light of day? Even if the mini-game was development in-house, Rockstar still buried it and blocked it from being accessible. No button combination would've called up CJ and his hos making a night of it. Someone outside of Rockstar had to go through an unsanctioned effort to reveal something that was never intended to see the light of day.

Who's at fault, then? It's not as simple as it appears. As gamers, we'd like to say that it was the modder's fault. Even if the code was already there, the fact that someone outside of Rockstar made this feature available to gamers should mean that the company isn't responsible. And with the tight schedules and the complexity of a modern video game, who can expect the company to go back and clean-up every single loose thread? I tend to agree with this perspective.

Yet at the same time, this isn't like a bootleg copy of a movie with deleted naughty scenes. The code was reportedly already there. Even if someone had to unlock it, the fact Rockstar left it in can be argued to be at least a little negligent. This was unlocked on the PC, a version released over six months after the release of the PS2 version. One could argue that Rockstar had the time to really polish up their code and get rid of the features they didn't finish or want. The code was accessible to anyone with good programming skills and, if you believe what the hacker/modder says, it was pretty much a complete feature. This wasn't like the infamous, incomplete Knights of the Old Republic 2 code which needed to be pieced together to make any sense. It apparently just required the code censoring the game to be removed.

A lot of people could argue that Rockstar therefore didn't do enough to take this feature out.

I'm not saying this argument is right. Or even smart. And if sex is so naughty and dangerous in an MA-rated game, I'm curious why nobody running for office has railed against God of War. Sex isn't even locked in that game. Personally, I think that the anti-GTA crowd has even less of a case with scenes of consensual, relatively unrevealing acts of intercourse versus the regular anti-violence argument.

But I don't imagine this is a problem that will disappear anytime soon. As games become more complicated, as we see development cycles rushed up, and as we especially see more and more companies start to self-censor content, I wouldn't be surprised if we happened across more people finding abandoned code in games and revealing undesirable features, art, dialogue, or FMV clips.

Who is responsible for revealed features? The modder for unlocking it? The game company for leaving it in some form? The player for downloading the fix? Should the ESRB be criticized for a feature they never knew existed?

Of course, this assumes that it is an unlocked feature and not a mod as Rockstar claims. If it's a mod, that raises all other kinds of issues. Older, easier-to-deal-with issues that game companies are more used to, but real issues nonetheless.

Comments

[bowler]

I think the sex here is laughable at best. I haven't seen any actual animation, but from the screen shots, they're all fully clothed.

The mod/unlocked argument aside (I side with Rockstar here, it's impossible to access without modding the code), if a parent is worried about their child having consentual sex in GTA, but is okay with them playing the game otherwise in its intended format, they have some serious issues.

I really just wanted to say though that you win the contest for best entry title. Ever.

[Mike]

Yeah, the animation is awful too. It's awkward, full-clothed sex that isn't even in the same ballpark as erotic. Or dangerous. It looks more like awkward middle-school dry humping than any form of risque sex act that anti-game groups are now making it out to be.

Hell. The fact that CJ keeps his clothes on convinces me that San Andreas can teach those vulnerable sponges of mimicable actions known as children a lesson or two about safe sex.

I tend to also side with Rockstar. But I'm not completely convinced that the less technically-oriented mainstream will understand the difference between a cheat code blocking out a feature and the developer programming a coded barrier to keep the feature from fuctioning. The public might see the two as too close for comfort.

[Clubberjack]

Greg Costikyan has a much less charitable take on the situation. He basically reasons that it's entirely possible the sex game was intentionally left in, and Rockstar may have even gone as far as surreptitiously leaking info on how to unlock it. Costikyan argues that in addition to adding fuel to the anti-videogame fire, this is actually a breach of Rockstar's contract with the ESRB, as developers must disclose all pertinent material.

"There is no question that, had the ESRB known that this material existed on the disc--even without an in-game way to unlock it--they would have insisted on an AO rating."

The difference between M and AO in this case would be the actual depiction of sex (no matter how rudimentary). God of War didn't quite go that far.

Whether or not you agree with the rules that govern the rating system, you have to admit that undermining the ratings system isn't a particularly good way to engender goodwill in the general population. Of course, that's only if Costikyan's analysis is right, which he admits it might not be. In any case, it's an interesting perspective on the situation.

[raf]

I do not agree with the whole movement towards burning Rockstar on the stake. They designed the game to be played without this content. Who knows what content is available in other games that tweaking some resource files with a hexeditor will get to come up. As long as this content can not be made available from the game design then the ESRB rating should only be based on that experience.

If a game is designed to be moddable then I think that the ESRB rating should include a tagline along the same lines of online games: "Game experience may change if game is modified."

[Clubberjack]

I agree, raf. I like your disclaimer idea. However, I do think Rockstar is undermining the ESRB at a time when videogames really need that credibility (that's assuming that Rockstar knowingly included the sex games in the final code).

On the other hand, Damion Schubert at Zen of Design makes some good points about the absurdity of a crappy hidden sex game in GTA. Choice quote: "It seems to me that there was another huge game last year that allowed you to have sex, and in fact it was a fairly core gameplay component. Oh, yeah. This one [the Sims 2]. No modding required for sex, though a 30 second google search is required to depixellate the naughty bits. Even more curious, The Sims 2 gets a teen rating, whereas the critics crying wolf over the nude patch in GTA:SA want to move it from a Mature rating to an Adults Only. Clearly, the lesson here is: white suburbanite hot tub sex = good. Black gangsta sex in the hood = bad."

[Mister Toups]

I am inclined to think it's rockstar's responsibility. All of their previous GTA games on PC have been heavily modded and hacked in the past so there's no way they couldn't have predicted this happening.

At the end of the day, the fact of the matter is that Rockstar included pornographic content on the disc. It's irrelevant whether or not it was "immediately accessible" or "intended to be seen" -- the content was there, waiting for some industrious hacker to pull it out. If I manufacture a music CD with a photograph of hardcore pornography underneath the jewel case (in the space underneath the spindel that holds the CD, which can only be viewed by completely disassembling the entire case), I would still get in trouble, despite the fact the end user is never "intended" to completely disassemble the case.

It's not that different here. And there's no way Rockstar couldn't have predicted this. I think Costikyan is on the money, here.

[Ishichan]

If it were only the PC version, then it would be possible for it to be a mod. But if you can unlock it through a PS2 save file, then there's pretty much no way in hell the content *wasn't* on every disk when it shipped.

They should've know the PC version was going to be hacked. This would inevitably lead to other versions being hacked. Thus, either they were extremely negligent at Rockstar, extremely lazy, or planned this from the beginning to boost sales.

In any case, putting the thing in the PC version was irresponsible at best, a calculated ploy at worst.

They should face stiff sanctions, regardless.

[raf]

The Sims 2 modding is a good point. I don't think the depiction of sex in The Sims 2 is worth of an M rating. Both "consenting adults" are clothed and the act is never explicitly shown.

I think that in some respect that Mister Toups is right. They knew it was in there going in. What I think is more astounding is that people are in uproar when the game already has an M rating. This is for gamers 17 years and older. At that age, you can get into a rated R movie alone and see real people do it. I have only seen screenshots and I am assuming the content is pretty much to the extent on what you could see in an R-rated movie or on skinamax.

Is there this much uproar for kids sneaking into R movies? I think the rating is fair as long as the activities depicted in hot coffee are not of a hardcore pornographic nature.

Game Rating Descriptor Guide vs What Ratings Mean (MPAA)
M seems to be a correlation with R.

[RegularX]

It's not that Rockstar couldn't predict this kind of content.

It's that they couldn't stop it. Just like every other engine on the planet that has ever been modded to include pornographic material.

Which for the record, is an awful lot of them.

It's completely pointless to blame Rockstar simply because some of the content was theres ... for every mod some of the content belongs to the original development. So if I make a pron game with UT2k4, should you sue Epic?

This "scandal" has taken the debate about video games to new lows. It's purile sensationalism, and nothing more.

[Mister Toups]

Except that ALL of the content was there. All that was modified, according to the person who made the mod, was a single bit of data that blocked the content from being visible.

That's a little different than drawing nipples on Lara Croft.

[RegularX]

Who cares if the content was there?

What's the difference between content only available via a code change and content added by a code change?

None. Same result in the end.

What's the outcome of having someone decode a flag to unlock naked breasts and retexturing a model with naked breasts?

That would be ... naked breasts.

So let's say it's Rockstar's content. Why is that so much more damning then just someone modding someone's engine? The actions to get there are the same. In fact, the Hot Coffee mod is FAR more esoteric and required much more technical prowess than 99% of the porn that has shown up in games throughout history. So why is Rockstar anymore responsible than Eidos or Tecmo or Valve or Epic or id or anyone else who had their game turned into smut? The answer is simple. They aren't.

If you mod someone's game and turn it into porn, you're the one who made the porn available.

But I'm in danger of repeating myself: http://cathodetan.blogspot.com/2005/07/counter-strike-porn.html

Basically everyone is acting like Rockstar left a working mini-game which was part of the retail game, just cleverly hidden. It wasn't cleverly hidden ... it was completely unavailable. It wasn't part of the game.

This is like crucifying someone for putting a dirty limerick into their source code. Code that by the user agreement you weren't supposed to be looking at anyway.