Now we take a break from the discussion of all the various and sundry frauds, lies, and criminality of the Bush maladministration to take a look at the seamier side of everyday life.
I found this blog called PervScan. It’s not the place for everybody. They round up all of the weird perverted news stories from around the world. You know you’re not exactly on Yahoo! News when the first story listed is entitled “Giving the Dog a Bone” and it’s filed in the Bestiality category. In case it has to be said, it’s 100% wrong to engage in sexual activity with animals, because even if you can train your pet to lick your naughty bits and your pet does so willingly, that’s not consent. Besides, kitties have such scratchy tongues…
The story that led me there, though, was the news that the popular violent videogame, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas [GTA], has hidden code inside that (when unlocked with a special hack called “Hot Coffee”) allows the player to engage in hot steamy uncensored sexual activity. Parents are outraged, of course, because the video game has a “M-Mature” rating, meaning 17-year-olds can buy it, which also means that it often falls into the hands of younger kids. Now with the explicit sex scene hack, people want the game upgraded to “A-Adults Only”, which means that kids will have a 2.73% harder time getting a hold of it.
In fact, the story has such the potential to motivate soccer moms and family-values blue noses that you just knew some politician would use the issue to try to solidify their morality-cred with the Bible Belt set. Cue the inevitable…
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sen. Hillary Clinton pressed on Thursday for a government investigation into how simulated sex cropped up in a modified version of the blockbuster criminal adventure video game “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.”
Clinton asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate the origins of a downloadable modification that allows simulated sex in the personal computer version of one of the most popular and controversial video games in history.
“We should all be deeply disturbed that a game which now permits the simulation of lewd sexual acts in an interactive format with highly realistic graphics has fallen into the hands of young people across the country,” Clinton wrote in a letter to the head of the Federal Trade Commission.
Yes, yes, deeply disturbed. Spending all that time in GTA unlocking the secret sex scenes detracts the children from all the fistfights, drive-by shootings, and drug deals that make up the regular game. The funniest thing to me is that without the “Hot Coffee” hack, regular gameplay leads to the player seducing and getting invited into the woman’s home for some hot coffee, which leads to sex, but you only get to see the exterior of the home and hear the moaning of the sexplay inside. So the kids were already playing GTA for sex scenes, they just had to imagine them. That didn’t get any senator’s attention?
Senator Clinton*, you couldn’t find your conscience to vote against the awful Bankruptcy Reform Legislation, but pixellated boobies in a video game gets your attention? Gawd, this feels so much like when your friend Tipper got all outraged about curse words in rap records. Yes, we should probably take a look at the immensely popular video game industry and yes, we should be enforcing limits on what kinds of games children have access to, but did you have to bring it up?
Because when Hillary Clinton is attached to that issue, it smacks so much of political opportunism, whether her position is valid or not. Why not throw this one to some other Democratic senator whose name is not in the top of the list of potential 2008 presidential nominees? Save your name recognition and time for the things that really matter and will be defining the 2008 race, like Iraq, terrorism, corporate crime (Mr. Lay, Mr. Ebbers), Republican corruption (Mr. DeLay, Mr. Cunningham), political malfeasance (Mr. Rove, Mr. Cheney), poverty in America, jobs, the economy, or any one of the myriad truly important issues more serious than videogame pixel porn.
Anyway, my level of caring about whether kids see digital representations of sex (wanna see for yourself?) is much lower than whether they see digital representations of violence. And infinitely lower than whether they end up experiencing real violence in Iraq. Next subject.
* Full disclosure: I’m not a Hillary Clinton fan. Oh, if she’s nominated I will vote for her, I’ll even do work for the campaign, but only because she’s not a Republican. But to me she represents that mealy-mouthed moral flexibility of the Republican-Lite side of the Democratic Party. I think the Democrats would be better off nominating General Clark & Barak Obama in 2008, since the #1 issue will still be Iraq. Hillary can be Secretary of State or something. Besides, I just don’t want this segment of American history to go “Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Clinton…” I don’t think “ruling families” was the idea the Founders were going for.
