Those of you who pay atten­tion to the media have prob­a­bly heard about “hot cof­fee.” This is a mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas which adds hot, steamy, polygon-based sex scenes to the game. The author claims that the con­tent was already there, and Rock­star games, unsur­pris­ingly, is claim­ing that they did noth­ing of the sort. Who­ever is respon­si­ble, I’m really grumpy at the response that this is getting.

In the last few months, the usual polit­i­cal play­ers have been blast­ing the game for caus­ing a small hand­ful of peo­ple to kill other peo­ple. This is hardly sur­pris­ing — vio­lent video games have been blamed for such things, with­out any real sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant proof, ever since vio­lent video games first came out. Before, GTA was a con­tro­ver­sial game, but it seemed like it was still accepted by a lot of peo­ple. Now, appar­ently, the game is com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate for chil­dren, and may be granted an “adults only” rat­ing, which pretty much requires that retail­ers fol­low the same rules as they would for hard­core porn.

Wait, did I hear myself right? It’s OK for kids to play a game that glo­ri­fies killing police offi­cers, but a game that glo­ri­fies sex, that’s inex­cus­able? Accord­ing to our elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives and media watch­dog groups, that’s the case.

Never mind that with 10 sec­onds and an inter­net con­nec­tion, teenagers can get access to sig­nif­i­cantly more explicit pornog­ra­phy fea­tur­ing actual humans. Never mind that get­ting access to these scenes requires down­load­ing the mod. Ban GTA! Ban Rock­star Games!

Tags: games, rant