Counter-Strike Porn

Costik is all up in Rockstar's grill:

But--there are two problems with this. First, it lends aid and comfort to The Enemy, by which I mean censorious blue-nosed faux-Democrats like Lee, Schumer, and Clinton. Second, it's a violation of Rockstar's contractual relationship with the ESRB. 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. Which would have meant no Wal-Mart exposure.

-- Someone Bitchslap Rockstar

And I would argue that firstly we should be debating with The Enemy on the basis of logical and rational facts as opposed to giving into their knee-jerk reactions. And second I would ask - are you sure it's a violation?

Content gets hidden in various ways with games. For Unreal Tournament 2003, Epic left in a rather humorous vehicle involving a toilet. To find that, all someone had to do was look in the right place and make reference to it. Epic provides all sorts of tools for this with the game itself.

However, the "Hot Coffee" mod requires a code change. According to the mod author, Patrick Wildenborg, the gameplay, animations and textures were there - but there's a censor flag which blocks any of the material from being shown. To change this, you have to take a save game, manipulate the file with an external program to flip this flag, and then start up again. There's no way to directly reference the mature content without making an explicit alteration to the game itself.

So my question is ... where was all this hubbub when Counter-Strike was flashing pornographic images to thirteen year olds all over the world? Sure, Valve didn't leave behind naked tags that could be unlocked with a hex editor ... but they didn't need to - because they had created an extremely simple and user-friendly method of uploading your own. There have been naked mods for games since the beginning of mods, but Counter-Strike allowed a third party to inflict their pornography on you, without much but a server admin to block it.

The contention, I suppose, is that because this is Rockstar's own content, no matter how well hidden, that they should burn at the stake for it. But I go back to my initial point - let's look at this rationally. What's the difference in impact between creating a mechanism for adding porn and allowing the code to be alterable to unlock porn? If Epic had left pornographic material on the UT2003 disc, they'd be somewhat responsible on both fronts. They gave the content and the means to explore it. Valve may not be responsible for the content, but they sure were responsible for the delivery.

Rockstar may be responsible for the content, but it took some very creative people with a hex editor to make it public. This wasn't a code they could enter with a controller or a command line flag they could alter at startup. So what, precisely, are the critics of the ESRB expecting here? For them to hire some white hat hackers to delve bit by bit into code to judge whether or not some angry Disney animator left in a dirty animation that could be found only by swapping some 0's and 1's in a save file? Perhaps they'd like an extended rating system describing all the potential outcomes of user created content, so that when someone puts naked people in their version of Sims, they won't be surprised?

When people purchased San Andreas, it came with a rating. For the game they purchased, the rating was accurate. If they alter the game after that point, I'd say no matter how small of a change, the end user themselves have become responsible for the outcome.

And if the EULA on San Andreas doesn't clearly say that, then that is what I would be chastising Rockstar and Take Two about.