Hot Coffee, Mississippi

Hillary Clinton can ram it. She's all upset because some guys figured how to modify Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to allow you to play a minigame where you have sex. Think of the children! The children who, according to the ESRB ratings, shouldn't be playing the game in the first place, since it's already rated "M". Regardless, she wants the game's rating changed to "AO" due to the "sexually explicit content" (seeing two fully clothed, low resolution polygonal figures bumping and grinding is hot stuff, let me tell you). Never mind that the minigame is completely inaccessible in the game as purchased from the store, and that the only way you can get to it is because some enterprising persons who had nothing to do with the production of the game found some abandoned code lying around and poked around to find a way to add it in. By this logic, The Sims should be for adults only because it's possible to download nude skins for them. By this logic, any game where the user can customize anything should be for adults only because someone might draw boobs on the side of their race car or something. Oh, and then she wants to make a law prohibiting selling violent or sexy video games to minors, i.e. completely defeating the purpose of the voluntary ratings system.

I don't have any statistics, but I'd guess that the majority of eight-year-olds playing GTA didn't walk into Gamestop and buy it themselves with their hard-earned cash from selling lemonade. Either a parent bought it for them, they pirated it, or they're playing someone else's copy. In any of those cases, the proposed law would change nothing. Ignoring everything else, if everyone actually followed the game ratings crap, it would mean that kids would miss out on almost all the good games. If not for Nintendo, there would be practically nothing worth playing that wasn't at least rated "T".

Anyway, violent/sexy video games never did anyone any harm, but if you really don't want your kid playing 'em, that's your problem, not the game manufacturers or distributors'. This pandering to the "concerned mother but not concerned enough to actually take any notice of what my kid's doing" crowd sickens me. So ram it.