Tag Archives: violence

Penn Jillette on video games

From gameinformer.com:

The thing that old people don’t understand is – you know if you’ve never heard Bob Dylan, and someone listened to him for 15 minutes, you’re not going to get it. You are just not going to understand. You have to put in hours and hours to start to understand the form, and the same thing is true for gaming. You’re not going to just look at a first-person shooter where you are killing zombies and understand the nuances. There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to The Rite of Spring once and understand what Stravinsky was all about. It seems like you should at least have the grace to say you don’t know, instead of saying that what other people are doing is wrong.

That’s basically why my plan to write an article titled “In defense of GTA” turned into a three part epic. I wanted to try and explain to people who haven’t been playing video games for 30 years, why GTA is not just a dumb game about shooting prostitutes.

He continues:

It just seems so simple, and yet I’m constantly in these big arguments with people on the computer who are talking about, “I would never let my kid do this and this in a video game.” And these are adults who when they were children were dropping acid and going to see the Grateful Dead. I mean, the Grateful Dead is provably shitty music. It’s impossible – it’s theoretically impossible to make a video game as bad as the Grateful Dead. I throw that out there as a challenge.

Quite a challenge. It is, however, possible to make The Grateful Dead interesting: I quite like Grayfolded.

Waiter, there’s sex in my violence!

Let’s have a quick fact check here:

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is rated M by the ESRB, meaning it is rated as unsuitable for anyone under the age of 17. The rating label notes “Strong Sexual Content”.

The game features a mission where you rescue a prostitute who is being raped and murdered by two johns. It allows you to have sex with bikini-wearing prostitutes in your car, accompanied by bouncing suspension, steamed-up windows and explicit sound effects. You can also kill the prostitutes with a chainsaw afterwards, if you so wish. Or, you can wander into a strip club, watch the dancers on stage, then go into the back room and pay money for a private lap dance, depicted in 3D polygons.

None of that was a problem for the ESRB when they issued an M rating. However, if you modify the game you can make it show a scene where two adult characters have fully clothed, completely consensual sex, with no money changing hands, no exploitation, and no violence.

That’s apparently a horrendously damaging image, which means the game should have been rated for people 1 year older—because the difference between an AO rating and an M rating is that AO is for 18 and older, whereas M is for 17 and older.

As a sidenote, 17 year olds in America can have actual sex with real human beings in 43 states in the nation; I’m assuming they can legally do it with the lights on, perhaps even after taking their clothes off.

One of the previous installments of GTA featured a length lesbian S&M scene. Meanwhile, the (reportedly awful) game BMX XXX features topless women riding BMX bikes while their breasts jiggle, and full nudity; it’s rated M. No problems there.

So those are the facts. Now the House of Representatives has voted, almost unanimously, for the FTC to investigate whether Rockstar Games deceitfully misled the ESRB in order to corrupt America’s 17 year olds, rather than only those 18 and up.

Well, that’s money well spent. Thank goodness we don’t have any more important problems that need attention.