Today, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto video game reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). This is a travesty. This entire issue should NEVER have reached the FTC, and the members of Congress who pushed the FTC to get involved (most notably Hillary Clinton) should be ashamed of themselves. Their complaints about this game show their ignorance and fear of technology and media.
The controversy over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas centered on the fact that there was “adult” themed content in the game. This content was NOT accessible to purchasers of the game as distributed by the manufacturer. A player could only access this content if he or she made changes to the game so that it would run sections of code the manufacturer had blocked out to keep the game’s rating more appropriate for teenagers.
For those of you who don’t see why I find Hillary’s objections so offensive, let me give you an analogy. Let us imagine that I own a beach house that I rent out to strangers 6 months a year. In that beach house, I have a closet that I keep certain personal possessions in (e.g., toiletries, cleaning solutions, medications, etc.) since I’m there half the year. When I’m not there, that closet is kept locked and renters are given an agreement to sign which says they’re not to go in that closet.
One of my renters has a teenage kid who figures out how to pick the lock on that closet. Inside, he finds something that interests him. He writes an article on his blog that tells his friends about the beach house and how to pick the lock on the storage closet. One of his buddies visits the house, picks the lock, and takes a whole bottle of my blood pressure medicine, believing it to be something that will get him high. He dies.
In this hypothetical example, I took reasonable precautions to protect that child. I locked the medications away in a closet. I made it a condition of rental that no one opens that closet. Getting into the closet required a person to learn to pick a lock, something most people can’t do. After the person picked the lock, they’d have to dig through some sealed boxes to even find the blood pressure medication. I think most of us could agree that the precautions I took are quite reasonable. Yes, I could have removed the medication from the house entirely. And I’m sure that after hearing of the death of someone’s child, I would have wished I had. But the bottom line here is that if people had respected my rental agreement and not bypassed the protection measures I had in place for their safety, the child wouldn’t have died. Period.
In the “real” example of the game, purchasers of the software were given a product that was designed to work a particular way. Out of the box, that software did not provide access to the sexual content Hillary found so objectionable. It was, like the medication in my hypothetical example above, locked away and hidden from people. The software’s license agreement probably contained language indicating that it was illegal to modify it, or at the very least that the manufacturer wasn’t liable if the user modified that software. If someone got to this sexual content, they got there because they violated the license agreement and took specific actions to modify the software to make the content available.
In retrospect, the manufacturer of GTA:SA probably wishes they had deleted the content from the game before shipping it. But from a purely business perspective, that would have required programming changes, added costs, and delayed the release of the game into the market. Game customers are generally not that forgiving of delays, so it might have hurt their sales. Their decision to lock off that content was a practical and reasonable one. It really isn’t their fault people modified their game to access content they had intentionally hidden away.
As someone who saw this hidden content, I can tell you that it was clear that the manufacturer did not intend for customers to play it. It was buggy code and not as polished as other aspects of the game, giving a clear indication that the developers abandoned the idea of including this kind of content earlier on in the process. If they had really intended for people to find and play it, they’d have cleaned it up and tested it more.
Personally, I think Hillary needs to keep her nose out of video games.
admin Games Games, gaming, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas settlement, GTA SAsettlement, Hillary Clinton
