Advent Calendar 17: Won't Somebody Think Of The Children?

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

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I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

Video games, like animation and footie pajamas, are one of those things that is often unfairly dismissed as "just for kids". There is nothing about the medium that is inherently more childish than not; this image is largely down to Atari trying to justify the cost of the 2600 -- much higher than single-game Pong consoles -- by marketing it as 'fun for the whole family', and later Nintendo strictly regulating the contents of their games to keep them suitable for all ages. 

PC gaming has notably gone through no such phase. Desktop computers were pricey and owned by adults, and there has always been market share available for games with sex, violence, drugs, or other mature topics. Arcade games were likewise spared a lot (though not all) of the censorship, under the assumption that anyone who could get themselves to a video arcade under their own power was at least a tween.

Not all publishers applied the same standards to their console titles, and not all titles followed the same rules in all countries. Although Nintendo made an effort to keep their Japanese Famicom titles as family-friendly as their American NES games, Japan has a very different idea of what's suitable for kids. Nintendo of America was particularly bent on censoring any mentions of death or religion, resulting in significant edits to the text and graphics of series like Castlevania.

The greatest bugbear of the industry, however, has been the contention that violence in video games begets violence in real life. Since the 1970s, parent groups have been up in arms, ranting and raving in a moral panic whose internal workings are frankly a rather boring redux of the 1950s panic over comic books, and the even earlier panic over degenerate behavior in movies.

(I've read Seduction of the Innocent. It's... wow. I used to work for a publisher of erotica, and none of our authors had half as filthy a mind as Frederic Wertham. That man saw a confusing jumble of vaginas and licentious gay men in everything. It's a shame he was born before fanfic was really a thing, he could have just let his freak flag fly on AO3 and been a much happier person.)

Basically, in order to write a story about good triumphing over evil, you have to depict evil behavior, and that is at least one evil behavior too many for the bluenoses. They were particularly opposed to violence for violence's sake, especially on games consoles kept in the home where children too young for arcades had access. And there is perhaps no better, more widespread example of this than Mortal Kombat.

If you have been living under a rock for the past 30 years, first of all, congrats on digging yourself free! Mortal Kombat is a series of video games whose "plot", if you can call it that, involves a lot of weirdos coming together for a fighting tournament to see which weirdo is the best at beating the snot out of all the others. I think the fate of the universe hangs in the balance or some shit. In any case, unlike other series like Street Fighter or Karateka, in which you theoretically just pummel your opponent into unconsciousness, Mortal Kombat lives up to its misspelled name by letting you execute special moves called "fatalities", where you do things like rip your opponent's head right off their body and hold it up for the crowd, spine dangling free. There's a lot of gratuitous blood. There's also a lot of things like ninja lightning magic and a big dude with four arms, but apparently the spine-ripping was the thing moral guardians were worried about kids emulating.

The 16-bit home console ports of this game sparked outrage. Nintendo censored their SNES port heavily, turning the gouts of blood into buckets of unconvincing sweat, but Sega did not, and their version had all the gore they could fit on a Genesis cart. Having mostly lost their fight about dirty words on records, people who don't have enough to do with their day lobbied Congress to put a stop to all this. Mortal Kombat wasn't their only talking point; there was also a lot of furore about lightguns like the NES Zapper, but Mortal Kombat was the one that made the news, and the most recognizable to people who didn't actually play any of the games they were complaining about.

The video games industry, having learned an important lesson from the movies, comics, and rock albums, graciously offered to label games that had sex, violence, drugs, or swearing. They said this was so that parents could keep their kids from playing inappropriate games, but as with everything before it mainly had the effect of telling you right on the label which games were the coolest. Despite the pretense of the industry that video games were for kids, a significant number of gamers were, and are, full-grown adults with their own money.

Perhaps the second-most famous series, after Mortal Kombat, is Grand Theft Auto. The title tells you right up front that your protagonist is not exactly going to be a paragon of society, but as upset as people were over the larceny, they were way more upset over the way your character can hire a prostitute, avail himself of her services, then beat her with a baseball bat to get his money back. This is absolutely offensive, but your character isn't supposed to be a good guy -- he's a protagonist, which is different. As the name suggests, your main character gets to steal cars, and you can use them for a variety of other less-than-legal things, like smuggling drugs, running over pedestrians, and evading your well-deserved arrest. And frankly the thing everyone got most upset about was a depiction of a totally consensual and non-commercial sex act that was technically not in the retail game.

The "Hot Coffee" scandal burst onto the scene in 2004 when the gaming public found out that the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, CJ, had once been planned to engage in sexual relations with his girlfriend, where the player would have to, uh, "win" the event by pressing buttons in rhythm. This minigame was considered slightly too far even by GTA standards, and access was removed before the retail game shipped in order to retain a Mature (rather than Adults Only) rating, but the material itself was left in. Typically this happens when a section of the game re-uses shared assets or animations that need to be present for other parts of the game to work properly -- it's less risky to just leave stuff on the disc and remove whatever leads into the cut content, than it is to remove files and possibly break other things that won't be noticed or fixed before the game is finalized for retail. Rockstar just snipped out anything that would have led into the minigame, rendering it impossble to be accessed by anyone who was playing the game as designed.

People who were not playing the game as designed, specifcally the modding community for the Playstation2 version, went mucking around on the game disc and found what was left of the "Hot Coffee" minigame. Modding PS2 games is a hackish proposition; you need special software to read and alter the game files, and a stock PS2 won't play burned discs holding the modified code. Anyone who went into the "Hot Coffee" game on the Playstation2 version was specifically looking for it, and breaking every applicable warranty on any of the pieces involved in order to get into it. The PC versions of the GTA games, on the other hand, are easy to mod, and any idiot with an internet connection could find and download the mod that re-enabled CJ to visit his girlfriend for some "hot coffee". Inevitably one of these idiots blabbed, various software ratings boards got very angry, and a verdict was handed down that any explicit sexual content on the game disc could get you slapped with an Adults Only rating, even if that content was not accessible to anyone using your game as designed.

GTA:SA is not the only game to receive a revised rating after release. Part of the problem here is that, while getting through a movie just requires you to sit there for a couple hours, investigating the content of a video game can take 40+ hours and require skills that are unlikely to be found in the demographic that thinks protecting the public from blood and/or boobies is their highest calling. For the most part, they rely on the game's publisher to tell them what's in the game and provide examples, and game makers and game raters tend to not agree on the, shall we say, intensity of the content in question. And on top of that, there's little you can do to guarantee that the players of an online game will keep their interpersonal interactions at a PG level, even if your game is entirely about petting fluffy kittens.