EA Defends The Sims' T Rating (July 22, 2005)

[ChrisReid]

GameSpot is reporting that anti-game activists have seized their momentum and are now attacking the best selling PC game of all time, The Sims. Having forced the ESRB to upgrade its ratings of GTA San Andreas to Adults Only, various forces are now working to mark up The Sims' Teen rating. No normally accessible content in either game is in question. The root of the problem stems from what is viewable after the game has been modded.

"The nudity placed there by the publisher/maker, Electronic Arts, is accessed by the use of a simple code that removes what is called 'the blur' which obscures the genital areas. In other words, the game was released to the public by the manufacturer knowing that the full frontal nudity was resident on the game and would be accessed by use of a simple code widely provided on the Internet."

The "simple code" is a software hack that reveals the featureless Barbie doll bodies underneath the blur filter. EA has called the mess "nonsense" and says there is "no content inappropriate for a teen audience" in the game.

Next Thursday EA will be broadcasting its quarterly stockholders' meeting online. It'll take place at 2:00 pm Pacific time if anyone wants to listen in. Fiscal first quarter results should be announced Tuesday.

--
Original update published on July 22, 2005

 

[Moonsword]

This is crap. Why doesn't this guy get a life?

 

[Death]

Maybe he thought attacking digitized featureless nude bodies would be more likely to succeed than attacking the phhysical featureless nude bodies of most dolls and action figures nowadays?

 

[Haesslich]

Yup. Next on their list - Barbie dolls, teddy bears without clothing, and Disney!

 

[Moonsword]

That should be amusing to watch.

 

[Eder]

I read something about the ESRB ratings on Penny Arcade the other day. If what the guy said about the difference between the "AO" rating and the "M" rating is true and representative of their rating levels, then the ESRB is crap, has no understanding of the gaming industry whatsoever, and serves no purpose.

 

[cff]

Excuse me, but how IS EA supposed to program the game? Should they place a big flesh colored cube instead of the genital area? This is 3D, they cannot just simply do only a blurred 2D mesh.

 

[ChrisReid]

I read something about the ESRB ratings on Penny Arcade the other day. If what the guy said about the difference between the "AO" rating and the "M" rating is true and representative of their rating levels, then the ESRB is crap, has no understanding of the gaming industry whatsoever, and serves no purpose.

Well, the definitions they had for M and AO were correct. AO just isn't a real rating. It's a bogeyman rating for anything too big for M, of which almost nothing exists. It's a political rating. It exists just like NC-17 for movies. The ESRB does serve an important purpose though. The basic content descriptors they put on the back of every game here are very useful to parents. Nobody should base a purchase because of the broad E/T/M category labels on the fronts. And having an internal ratings board like the ESRB is very important to keep government intervention at bay. As out of touch as the ESRB might be, I have much less faith in random politicians and religious lobby groups trying to create actual laws about video game purchases.

 

[Quarto]

Let's be fair, though. The Sims thing is stupid given the level of detail involved, but as far as San Andreas goes, Rockstar knowingly walked right into it. Let's not have any doubts about this - that Hot Coffee thing was supposed to be unlockable. It was cut from the game because you just couldn't sell a game with that kind of content (not without an AO rating), but it wasn't actually removed from the game, because they wanted people to spread rumours about it through the internet, to generate additional publicity. Well, now they got themselves more publicity than they bargained for.

Rockstar of all people should know the costs of such behaviour, both financial and political. In fact, in terms of financial costs, they've been through it before (GTA3 was banned in Australia after a few weeks on the shelves, they had to prepare a specially-modified version for the Australian market), and as for the political costs... anybody in the games industry that doesn't remember how and why the ESRB was set up is a dangerous idiot. The ESRB is an industry body that was set up in the mid-1990s specifically as a political deal - at the time, the Congress was seriously considering action against the games industry, and the ESRB was established to take away the Congress' excuse for intervention. It was basically a "we'll police ourselves, just please leave us alone" deal. Anyone in the games industry breaking this deal by trying to subvert the ratings system is asking for trouble.

 

[Eder]

I don't think Rockstar is "breaking the deal" any more than the ESRB is proving that it doesn't know how to rate stuff in the first place. Not giving San Andreas an AO rating from the start shows that they just throw ratings around based on insufficient knowledge of the products and hope to be right.

It was obvious that shit was going to hit the fan and that politicians would eventually get a new excuse to take action against the games industry - because the ESRB ratings don't carry out their purpose, not because someone coded a game in this or that way.

It's a programmers job to code a game, period. It should be the ESRB's job to rate it accordingly or to demand changes to the game should the publisher not be happy with the rating it got (as used to happen with some shooters in Germany, or as GTA3 in Australia, etc).

I don't care if "Hot Coffee" wasn't unlocked by default - it has always been in the game, and the institution that's supposed to rate games missed it, while John Doe From Teh Intarweb unlocked it. How is this not incompetence on the ESRB's part?

 

[Delance]

Ah, banning games based on sex content is so stupid. The simulated sex on GTA:SA is no more "hardcore" than simulating sex with barbies, to use the same analogy. It's more like the sex scene on Team America.

 

[ChrisReid]

Let's be fair, though. The Sims thing is stupid given the level of detail involved, but as far as San Andreas goes, Rockstar knowingly walked right into it. Let's not have any doubts about this - that Hot Coffee thing was supposed to be unlockable. It was cut from the game because you just couldn't sell a game with that kind of content (not without an AO rating), but it wasn't actually removed from the game, because they wanted people to spread rumours about it through the internet, to generate additional publicity. Well, now they got themselves more publicity than they bargained for.

There's no evidence of that. Lots of stuff gets stuck in the game after it gets cut. Knights of the Old Republic 2 had bits of an alternate ending. Wing Commander Prophecy had things like Leech gun/missile effects left in. Things like that get lost in the woodwork. Rockstar made a creative decision to cut the scene early on. The issue is *not* that you can't sell a game with this content. Many other games have real sex scenes or nudity that are part of the normal course of the game, and they get by just fine with their M ratings. The material we're talking about in San Andreas is a fully-clothed parody bit. M rated games are already for "adults only" and not sold to minors. I've personally refused to sell GTA titles to hundreds of kids. The reason GTA got an AO in this case is purely political. Too many politicians and jerks were getting involved, and the ESRB felt it had to take some sort of action. If the ESRB were really concerned that Rockstar hid content in the way you described, it is fully authorized to levy fines and other embargoes against Rockstar. It chose to do neither. This AO upgrade is purely symbolic to chase off the anti game activisits.

I don't think Rockstar is "breaking the deal" any more than the ESRB is proving that it doesn't know how to rate stuff in the first place. Not giving San Andreas an AO rating from the start shows that they just throw ratings around based on insufficient knowledge of the products and hope to be right.

I don't care if "Hot Coffee" wasn't unlocked by default - it has always been in the game, and the institution that's supposed to rate games missed it, while John Doe From Teh Intarweb unlocked it. How is this not incompetence on the ESRB's part?

The Hot Coffee portion is not something that can be "unlocked" within the game. There is no "code," as has been described in the media, which unlocks these scenes. You need to use third party tools to do it. The ESRB should *not* be rating the content that is not accessible within the game by normal means, or else you open it up to ridiculous stuff such as this new Sims litigation. All games are subject to more explicit content once third party intervention is introduced. The ESRB has disclaimers in games that say the ESRB rating no longer applies when you go online. This applies here, as you must go online and access reverse engineered EULA breaking mods to access the Hot Coffee scenes.

Ah, banning games based on sex content is so stupid. The simulated sex on GTA:SA is no more "hardcore" than simulating sex with barbies, to use the same analogy. It's more like the sex scene on Team America.

This can't be overstated enough. The whole game is about a hundred hour crime spree where the main character runs around murdering cops, brutally mugging hookers and killing innocent bystanders in drive-by-shootings and home invasion robberies. It's completely ridiculous that a normally inaccessable five minute sexy minigame somehow ratchets up the explicit factor. It's much less risque than the sex scene in the Team America movie. The Hot Coffee portions don't even show any nudity. They're a couple of fully-clothed dolls next to eachother going "ooh" and "aah" for a couple minutes. People need to understand how incredibly trivial throw-away code this is. There is no giant secret bomb that was released. Rockstar didn't "get what they deserved" and the ESRB didn't "miss the big one." Some idiots, who have been unsuccessful at attacking GTA and other games for years, found a harmless nugget they could use to inflame passions. They took it and rode the ignorant misinformed hype train around, and the ESRB played the AO card, which was specifically created to bail them out of ridiculous messes like this.

 

[Quarto]

There's no evidence of that. Lots of stuff gets stuck in the game after it gets cut. Knights of the Old Republic 2 had bits of an alternate ending. Wing Commander Prophecy had things like Leech gun/missile effects left in. Things like that get lost in the woodwork. Rockstar made a creative decision to cut the scene early on. The issue is *not* that you can't sell a game with that content. Other games have "worse" sex scenes that are part of the normal course of the game, and they get by just fine with their M ratings. The reason GTA got an AO in this case is political.

I never said that it wasn't political, and that was my point exactly - Rockstar was well aware of what the result would be. It was sheer stupidity on their part to leave that stuff in there. Once they made the decision to cut this content (which wasn't early on, but at the very end of the process - otherwise, the minigame would be nowhere near complete), they should have removed it completely. Yes, tons and tons of stuff gets left over on game discs all the time. To a certain degree, it's inevitable, and to a certain degree, it's intentional (easter eggs). In this case, I'm pretty certain it was intentional - Rockstar North was told that the game absolutely can't be released with a sex-based minigame, and so they disabled it... but they knowingly made the decision not to remove it altogether, and they didn't even do a very thorough job at disabling it. The most likely scenario, IMO, is that the designers at Rockstar North were disgruntled about Rockstar's the decision to cut this mini-game, and so they decided to merely disable it, knowing full well that anything you leave on the game disks can and will be found by end users within a week of the release. Had they wanted to remove it, it would have been as easy as removing and unlinking a few source files from the project. And "we didn't see the point of going through that much trouble" isn't much of a defence, because the point of going through that much trouble is self-evident in this case.

However, it was too rash of me to accuse Rockstar of knowingly and intentionally leaving this stuff in there. Rockstar North, their subsidiary, did that - Rockstar just gets to clean up afterwards.

It's also worth noting that the presence of hidden content like this is far more damaging than the presence of a visible and accessible sex mini-game would have been. When one hidden thing is discovered, people start wondering if there aren't others out there. "The developers have hidden sex content in this game... how do you know they didn't hide it in others?!" - that sounds like a really great rallying cry for anti-game activists worldwide. And no, it doesn't matter one bit that it's not the ESRB's job to rate content unavailable to the normal user - to make the distiction between available and unavailable content, you have to be knowledgeable about computers and computer games. Anti-game activists, even those that possess this knowledge, will ignore it - they will try to lie and blur the distiction because they are looking to score political points.

Feel free to complain all you like about the ESRB system, the politicians, and whatever else - I'm not defending any of that. But trying to defend a bunch of idiots that knowingly walked into an ambush - worse still, they sent the enemy a message telling them where they would be marching and where the best spot for an ambush would be - that's just kinda silly. Because no matter how stupid the ESRB system may be, no matter how stupid the politicians and anti-game activists are - game developers know how the system works. They understood the consequences, and they decided to go for it anyway.

 

[ChrisReid]

I never said that it wasn't political, and that was my point exactly - Rockstar was well aware of what the result would be.

They couldn't possibly have been. There was no reasonable expectation of this. As I described, there are plenty of games with far more explicit scenes in the normal course of their gameplay. M rated games are already only supposed to be sold to adults. And the entire game is a horrible malicious monstrosity. A tiny funny discarded minigame should not have earned such a reaction. I worked on the front lines educating people about and enforcing the ESRB rating systems for five years. I have quite an excellent understanding of how games get what ratings. This rating defies all standards, precidents and expectations of what M and AO are to be. There is no way that they should have been well aware of what the results would be.

Rockstar North was told that the game absolutely can't be released with a sex-based minigame, and so they disabled it... but they knowingly made the decision not to remove it altogether, and they didn't even do a very thorough job at disabling it. The most likely scenario, IMO, is that the designers at Rockstar North were disgruntled about Rockstar's the decision to cut this mini-game, and so they decided to merely disable it, knowing full well that anything you leave on the game disks can and will be found by end users within a week of the release.

Well, the game's been out for nine months now. Even if the scenario you describe is true, there's absolutely no reason for it to earn the game a different rating. The game already shipped with a "Strong Sexual Content" descriptor written on the back of the box and a rating that prohibited sale to minors. Other games have far more explicit sex scenes and get by fine with the Mature rating. There's no reasonable expectation that this "easter egg" should have earned the forbidden AO rating. One of the first things you do in Sony's God of War for the PS2 is engage in a threesome. You have to time your thrusts to get the girls so excited that they knock over a vase on the nightstand. It falls off the table, cracks open, and reveals a key or something that you need to proceed. This scene is, in every way, more explicit than the hidden code in San Andreas. It's a part of the game every player is expected to play. And the game has done just fine with its Mature rating.

Because no matter how stupid the ESRB system may be, no matter how stupid the politicians and anti-game activists are - game developers know how the system works. They understood the consequences, and they decided to go for it anyway.

Once again, there is no reason why an AO rating was a reasonable consequence of any of these actions. Want to have sex with a hooker, then beat her and take her money (GTA3 & Vice City)? Mature rated. Want to set someone on fire and pee on them (Postal 2)? Mature rated. Want to stick the barrel of your gun of a kitten's ass to work as a silencer (Postal 2)? Mature rated. Want to have a raunchy bed-knocking three-way (God of War)? Mature rated. Want to ride a bike around to collect coins to unlock real video of real topless girls in a strip club (BMX XXX)? Mature rated. Want to watch real video of real underage naive teens take off their tops (The Guy Game)? Mature rated. Include the half-finished code of a fully-clothed jagged polygon sex scene? BANNED! There is no sense in that.

 

[cff]

Include the half-finished code of a fully-clothed jagged polygon sex scene? BANNED! There is no sense in that.

Welcome to the BPJGS (thats the guys that are responsible for censorship in Germany and even tho they don't have any powers in Austria we 100% suffer from their ratings). Thanks to them we got a GTA 3 without blood, witout the ability to rob someone (they don't drop weapons or money) and without the ability to take a hooker in your car. Its also generally easier as people don't randomly shoot at you in the streets.

Fortunately Rockstar didn't really disable this stuff either and it can be easily reactivated if you look on the web.

Personally I couldn't care less if they label it M, AO, put it on the index (and thus forbidding to show it on the shelves or do ads for it) or whatever. I just want it to be possible for adults to experience a work of art as it was intended by the author.

 

[TurboTim07]

One of the first things you do in Sony's God of War for the PS2 is engage in a threesome. You have to time your thrusts to get the girls so excited that they knock over a vase on the nightstand. It falls off the table, cracks open, and reveals a key or something that you need to proceed. This scene is, in every way, more explicit than the hidden code in San Andreas.

the funny thing is... i was gonna mention that game. God of War does have the sex minigame and you don't get something you need to proceed. it just provides you with a buttload of experience (interesting huh?). you can clearly see the chest of almost all the female characters in the game (the gorgons, the oracle, etc) and in the making of extra in the game one of the game designers actually said that he was glad the female monsters got to keep their nipples even though the cyclops lost his special part. and yet i don't see anyone yelling about God of War

 

[Mace]

http://www.classicgaming.cc/pc/privateer/ wrote:

Privateer us a fantastic game that was porn in 1993.

 

[Quarto]

They couldn't possibly have been. There was no reasonable expectation of this.

Wow, they were making the sequel to the game that was cited by almost every anti-game organisation out there, with gameplay clips being shown in almost every TV program about game violence... and there was no reasonable expectation of this? Don't be ridiculous, man - this game would have caused an uproar even had it not included hidden sex minigames. This is the game anti-gaming activists were waiting for.

And yes, there are plenty of other games with far more explicit scenes out there. But none of those games are the sequel to GTA3, so none of them count. Anti-gaming activists aren't known for their knowledge of games - remember how back during the Columbine thing, they were still making a big deal about Doom, even though compared to the average 1999 FPS game, Doom's pixellated imagery was so tame you could hardly take it seriously? They knew about GTA3, so they were bound to make a big deal about San Andreas, and there is no way this could possibly have been a surprise to Rockstar. So, for Rockstar North to feed the frenzy by leaving this stuff in there... that's just plain irresponsible, no matter how many other games out there include more explicit material that nobody notices.

There is no sense in that.

Well, one thing which I believe I've repeated several times already is that this is not about sense. This is about the way things are. You can't rely on logic and sense when you're dealing with the real world .

 

[Bandit LOAF]

So, your argument is that the fact that the sequel to game whose claim to fame is that its full of sex and violence is also full of sex and violence is part of some kind of a conspiracy to ruin the ESRB?

I see the elements of what you're saying, but I don't see anything that points to any sort of definitively malicious intent. The idea that they'd dare have sex in a game whose sales are based entirely on appealing to prurient interests is about as shocking as the fact that they have space ships in Wing Commander.

If keeping these unfinished elements in the game was intentional, it was because sex sells - (... nine months later?)... I don't see how anyone can say it was part of an evil plot to ruin how ratings work.

... and is there even any reason to assume that much? It seems like you're mixing up cause with effect -- if this was some kind of coherent, intentional plan on Rockstar's part that you're able to see through, shouldn't you have been lecturing us on Richard Garriott's terrible plot to include naked girl sprites in Ultima VII's unused graphics for a good decade now?

I can see how it's normal to leave unfinished bits in the game - I can even believe but *absolutely cannot prove* that leaving these elements in GTA was an intentional PR ploy (that is to say, it's in the realm of possibility, but to say definitively that it is the case would require proof that we do not have)... anything beyond that seems like an impossible leap to me.

 

[Ptarmigan]

Grand Theft Auto has been a controversial game for years. If I recall, GTA San Andreas has been out for a while. Same with DOOM, when it first came out in 1994. GTA probably got picked on and got the AO rating as a result. They just need a whipping boy, somthing to blame.