I was at Target last night–originally to get printer paper, but ultimately coming out with a copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. Best laid plans, and all that.
As I shopped, a man was standing at the electronics counter, enthusiastically quizzing the Team Member about whether Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas would be appropriate for his preteen/early teenage son. (I didn’t catch his exact age.)
Specifically, he wanted to make sure there wasn’t any nudity in it. The clerk said he didn’t think so, but ther was plenty in the game that might also be cause for concern, particularly when it comes to violence. It didn’t matter–all he wanted to know was whether there was any nudity.
He ended up buying the game. When he was asked his date of birth (as I guess Target won’t sell the game to minors–a good policy, IMO), he looked puzzled; he once again confirmed that there would be no nudity in the game, as if that were the only reason why they might restrict a minor’s access to it.
This is a game in which–at least in the incarnation of two sequels ago, the last one I played very much–one can gain health points by scoring in one’s car with a prostitute, and then get one’s money back by killing said prostitute. This is just fine, I suppose, as long as we don’t get a glimpse of the ho’s titties in the process.
This says more about our society than I care to think about this morning.
Just a note: I am, of course, utterly disgusted by the bankrupt morality of these games and their corrupting influence on society. But I’m more disgusted by the fact that I don’t own a Playstation, so I’ll have to wait so long for the PC version.
Well, you know, I have a theory about this sex vs. violence thing. Almost everyone is worried that their kids are going to be exposed to sexual stimulation, and probably because they don’t want their children becoming involved in sexual activity. The sexual urge is very strong and they don’t want their children exposed to material that would excite them sexually and hasten them along the road to the time when they eventually do become sexually active.
Violence is a different story. The urge to commit violence isn’t really all that present in most people, and among those who do feel the urge from time to time, it isn’t nearly as constant and pervasive as the sexual urge. There are also severe penalties imposed by the law upon people who commit violence, but not upon people who engage in normal sexual activity.
Therefore, the risk that sexually provocative material will possibly cause someone’s child to behave in way the parent wants to avoid is much greater than the risk that exposure to violent material will cause them to do so.
I know there are people who will disagree with this and feel that violent material both desensitizes people to violence and makes them more likely to commit it. I don’t necessarily agree with this, but I know there are those will feel this way. Still, I think most people find violent movies and games less threatening than sexual material for the reasons I mentioned.
Boy, will that father be disappointed when his son finds the purple, two-headed dildo in the police station showers. And then proceeds to beat hookers to death with it for the cash.
GTA San Andreas does not have any nudity (as I’ve seen so far anyhow), but I can only imagine what the guy did when he heard the language in the game.
Hi Opal!
Once again, the language in the game is a bit harsh. The F-word, the N-word, and then there’s the drug use issue. One of your neighbors is a serious weed-head, and you go out robbing a house with him, robbing a military base, etc. I’ve only scratched the surface of the game too.
All of the food is unhealthy. (well, that’s kinda bad)
Fun game. Not for kids.
That guy should have looked it up on the intarweb, and read some articles!
On a positive note, the game does recognize that muscle, endurance and fat are affected by exercise, and sex appeal as well (there’s a graph for it, I shit you not). You can either ride a bike, run, or go to the gym, either way, exercise is good. If you overeat, you get fat, and you lose endurance, and running speed, so it’s somewhat realistic there, but that’s where it ends. Otherwise it’s a bloodfest, with plenty o’ cussin’, shootin’, and bloodlettin’ violence. Not a cerebral game, but a fun one.
Those muthafukin’ niggas curse like shit is goin’ outta style, yo. Fuck that shit, any muthafukin’ nigga under 11 will be beggin’ his ass off for some big tittied ho with a bucket of ice water to put out his burnin’ ears.
I’m not pitting the game at all. My second quote was meant in the spirit of a line commonly attributed to Bill Maher: “The cable TV sex channels don’t expand our horizons, don’t make us better people and don’t come in clearly enough.”
Or, as I so often hear in the hospital, the food is horrible, and there isn’t enough of it.
And it isn’t a bad one, but the issue here is one of scale. Even if I don’t want my kid to see glorified images of cigarette smoking, it would be pretty silly to ask the clerk at the video store if anyone smokes in Faces of Death, as if it would be perfectly OK for my twelve-year-old if the answer is “no”.
Huh? You mean the store employee was told this game was being bought for an ‘early teenage son’, was asked if there was any nudity, and didn’t say: “No, I don’t think so, but there’s a hell of a lot of graphic violence, swearing and scenes of drug use. This game is not suitable for a 12-year-old”? In Britain, GTA games are 18 rated and not to be bought by or for under-18s.
Reminds me of an interesting example I witnessed in a video a while back. Japanese law forbids pubic hair or genitalia to be visible in movies or videos. I was watching Guinea Pig: Flower of Blood and Flesh, thought by some to be an actual snuff film (it’s not), in which a woman is drugged and very slowly dismembered (by some measurements, it not a very violent movie, since there’s only one death; it just that the one death lasts a full hour long). As the woman is lying naked on a table, a gray circle is blurring out her pubic hair, because that’s obviously obscene. After the dissecter cuts open her abdomen, though, he pulls out her innards and drapes them over her crotch. Since the offending genitalia was then obscured by the woman’s own viscera, the entire scene could now be shown without censoring, as the bits which would endanger the public morals with their appearance had now been tastefully concealed behind a pile of dripping, bloody intestines.
I think it not unlikely that that is the intention. But no one’s going to know if you buy an R18 game for yourself and then never play it while your 15 year old son spends 10 hours a day on it.
The employee said more than once while I was listening, “We don’t recommend this game for people under 18.” He explained the violence and foul language. It didn’t seem to matter.
Sublight–that’s really, really disturbing, though I’m probably more disturbed by the existence of the video than the odd double standard.
Less disturbing example: in the Japanese release of Trainspotting, they blur out Ewan McGregor’s penis (Kelly Macdonald’s pubic hair is, however, briefly visible in the same scene). Ewen Bremner also receives a censor blur. Because those are the most disturbing things in Trainspotting. Not the drugs or the violence or the dead baby or the filthiest toilet in Scotland or any of that. No, the one thing in this film that the people must not see is what Scotsmen have under their kilts!
For a long time I have been puzzled by the way the term “sex and violence” is casually bandied about. How the hell did sex get lumped in with violence as A Bad Thing? Very strange. It seems to me that this attitude is more prevalent in America - in Europe nudity is pretty much fine but we are more likely to censor excessive violence, which makes far more sense to me. Young minds are far more likely to be warped by graphic scenes of skulls being mashed than by a brief glimpse of beaver.
Well, I work at a game store that shall remain nameless (we’re a national chain) and I can tell you our store’s policy. When someone asks for a game (I didn’t work the day of GTA: SA, thank God) that’s rated M, we are only required to ask if the person is over 17. We don’t have to check, even though we usually do. However, as the store’s policy works, if an eight year old walks in and asks for an M-rated game and he says he’s 18, we could just sell it to him if we’d like.
I have GTA II. For release in Australia, the censors demanded that the “earning points by taking a prostitute into your car” part be removed. There are still plenty of prostitutes though, and they still say “Hey Joey, when are ya gonna drill me?” But for the player, the only fun you can have with them is blowing their brains out with your assortment of semi-automatic weapons.