The Rodeo

30 Days of writing: Day 20
I want to be the good guy.

Specifically, when I play computer games I don’t want to be the bad guy. I don’t want to be hurting innocent civilians, I don’t want bonus points for running them down. I don’t want to be rewarded for doing the ‘wrong’ thing.

It seems that because of Grand Theft Auto’s success, every game developer is jumping on the anti-hero bandwagon. I can understand the draw of the morally ambiguous avatar — everyone loves Han Solo and movie characters like him, but ultimately he is a good guy, even though he might ‘bend’ the rules every now and again. I don’t see the glory in being an out and out criminal.

I want to be the good guy however, running down innocents isn’t my idea of a good game, I want to save people (even if that involves beating up the baddies), and I want to be the hero.

If you are thinking about making a game and you read this, please make the player a good guy.

Hot Coffee
If you haven’t heard, a code/download has been discovered that allows the player in GTA:San Andreas to ‘go up for coffee’* with women in the game. The visuals aren’t exactly explicit (from what I’ve heard - I don’t have, and haven’t played, the game), but it shows what is happening quite blatantly. The ESRB has recalled the game from shops, saying that it should have been rated AO(18+) rather than M(17+), and are considering fining Rockstar (the game’s makers).
Rockstar have claimed that the program code was never meant to be activated, and can only be done so by modifying the code. The ESRB claim that the scenes are fully rendered and stored on the disc in an accessible format.
I’m not sure who is in the wrong here. While I don’t like the game’s ideals, I can understand leaving code in the game that should not be able to accessed, and am not sure that they should be fined for people being able to access it. An appropriate analogy might be having a pornographic artwork painted over and then sold to a family. A child in the family then removes the paintwork and sees the porn. This is a similar kind of thing, although in the GTA case, it is a bit more complicated for the child to uncover it. Although the data is on the disc, it is not accessible in it’s original form without modification.

I’m not sure if this is wrong in and of itself, and whether the ESRB is in the right or not. It feels like they are using this to justify their existence. However, if Rockstar released the details on revealing the section of the game, then I think they should get everything that’s coming to them. If they didn’t, and the code was something they were thinking of including, but then commented out rather than deleting, I’m not sure it is their fault or not.

I think the ESRB’s ratings are fairly stupid too. What is the difference between a 17 year old and an 18 year old in terms of ‘maturity’ (although I’d suggest anyone who wants to play the mod isn’t very ‘mature’ anyway). I think either way this goes, Rockstar is going to get even more publicity, and that can’t be bad for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did release this for this very reason.
It’s a difficult situation.

*have sex with

-RodeoClown

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