So, there’s this whole sex minigame scandal going on, with GTA:SA including a risque minigame that can be unlocked via an Action Replay. Hillary Clinton’s having some sort of inquiry, Leland Yee is causing a ruckus, and predictably, Jack Thompson’s talking crap about the industry again.

So… what?

Here’s a minigame that is maybe at *worst* R-rated content, that was locked away by Rockstar, in such a way that you have to purchase another product that is used to modify variables during the execution of the game code to get it to work.

Who’s responsible? Why?

IMO, Rockstar made a mistake – they should have scrubbed the minigame from the disc. However, personally, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the minigame was originally intended to ship on the disc, not locked out, as the reward for finishing the “girlfriend” quests. I’d suspect at some point, the producers got cold feet, and decided to submit the game to the ESRB with that content removed, as for a videogame, that sort of thing would probably garner it an AO, which is about as commercially suicidal as an X.

Given that that probably happened, if the scenario I imagine played out, sometime after Alpha, actually *stripping* the code from the game would likely have been riskier than simply locking it out, and removing access to it. Less chance of introducing bugs, and by alpha/beta, most game companies start putting on the “risk-averse” hats, and the smaller a change can be made to accomodate the design, the better.

As a result, I suspect that the sex minigame was simply bypassed in the script that controlled the girlfriend quests, and Rockstar simply left it at that. If you couldn’t access it in the released build, what did it matter whether it was physically on the disc or not?

So… basically Rockstar created something, removed it from the game, but left it on the disc, inaccessible, because they didn’t think they’d get a suitable rating from the ESRB had they included it. That’s my take on the situation from Rockstar’s view – the most likely scenario, IMO.

I don’t believe it was a publicity stunt – I genuinely don’t. I think they’ve *very* savvy about marketing over there, but I don’t think this was done as a stunt – I think it was simply their original intention that they didn’t follow through on because they thought it was too much.

So, is the hacker to blame? Not really, I think, though I couldn’t say for sure whether legally, he was in the right – I suspect according to the EULA, he violated that – but not in a way that would make him say, culpable for the controversy.

I think the people to blame, genuinely, are the people who felt this required publicizing. Had no national outlet picked it up, it would have been a weird footnote on an otherwise truly astonishing game. But instead, you’ve got opportunists like Hillary Clinton and Jack Thompson jumping on the wagon of, “Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children!??!!?(tm),” and as a result, this has gotten an extreme amount of publicity, a black eye for the industry, and has raised questions about federal regulation of the industry, and some notion that the ESRB should be responsible for rating *inaccessible* content on a game disc. Should Action Replay be held responsible? As much as Rockstar, IMO. I hate that company’s existance – a bunch of worthless fuckers promoting a worthless fucking product, but since someone’s buying it, I’m apparently not quite right on that count.

But I think that the fundamental problem is the game-illiteracy and inane opportunism among the people in power – the notion that a Senator could hold an inquiry on something like this, while the Downing Street memo goes without press, or the Plame investigation is going on is patently stupid – the minigame isn’t accessible in the game’s commercially released form. That’s it.

If anything, I’d suspect this will really hurt Action Replay, and PC gaming in the long run, as to prevent something like this from occuring in the future, one of the easiest things to do is going to be to put that company out of business, and not release on an open platform like the PC.