9th August 2005, 12:02 AM
Well, I decided to e-mail the poor guy. I know he already has roughly 50billion e-mails to sort through, invited upon him by himself. However, I thought I really had to make my argument clear to him DIRECTLY. I at least made the attempt. I include MOST of what I typed here.
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I fear that my e-mail may be deleted or viewed with disdain, no thanks to my “peers” contacting you in somewhat rude context.
I am contacting you neither to hurl childish insults nor to “defend the honor” of my hobby. I want to know what sort of evidence you have to show that the ESRB is being criminally negligent. I also would like to see what evidence you present regarding the lewd content in The Sims 2 as well as Killer 7.
I only ask because I have recently read the text of a well publicized e-mail which, if the contents are true, shows a lack of understanding or proper research of the material. The first specific question I have is: how much of The Sims 2 and/or Killer 7 have you yourself either played or watched another play? I feel that either playing it yourself or watching another adult play the game (the latter being used in the case that you yourself are unable to actually play it) is the best way to accurately gather all the right facts for the case. As this is not an expensive thing to do and is the most accurate way to gather the information, I can only say that it would be expected of you to go about this as opposed to simply reading a review from a web site.
The site IGN refers to the sexual content of the game Killer 7 as “full blown sex scenes”. From what I have seen of said content, this description may be a bit premature. The scenes depict two fully clothed people. One is sitting in a chair and the other is “straddling” (excuse my description as this is the most polite way to describe it) the first and is moaning as though she enjoys it. No nudity is involved, though it is very clear what is happening in the scene. This may or may not be appropriate, but such scenes happen often enough in movies rated “R” or “PG-13” that it would seem to be a double standard. However, the only real point here is that IGN is not the most accurate source of information you could have obtained. IGN is, in fact, more of an entertainment service than accurate unbiased news. They advertise the very games they review more often than not, as well as being ones to say more what they think the viewer wants to hear than anything else.
Regarding The Sims 2, you have stated in another quote from a press release that: "Sims 2, the latest version of the Sims video game franchise ... contains, according to video game news sites, full frontal nudity, including nipples, penises, labia, and pubic hair." You have specifically indicated your source of information here as well. Your source was “video game news sites”. Which sites? How reputable is their data? Once again, I must ask if it would not have been much more productive and accurate to play the game yourself and test out the code (which is easily obtainable online as you yourself claim) to ascertain exactly how much detail is shown. The reality is, The Sims 2 does not show such detail. In fact, they only modeled the most basic outline of the human form. For adult females, this includes the basic shape of breasts. To say that the detail is akin to that of a Barbie doll with its clothes off is an understatement.
It is claimed that you responded to this information yourself by saying “"The sex and the nudity are in the game. That's the point. The blur is an admission that even the 'Ken and Barbie' features should not be displayed. The blur can be disarmed. This is no different than what is in San Andreas, although worse." This may or may not be an accurate response. However, I will respond to this anyway. The problem with this argument is that you are drawing from the blurring that this proves the makers of the game thought it was crude content, and thus if they included a way to see it, that is evidence they were skirting their perception of what was decent intentionally. However, this is a basic misunderstanding of two things. First of all, to actually detail out what a human looks like naked takes a lot more effort than just a basic shape underneath the clothes. A programmer on a tight schedule can barely afford to use up time on a feature that eventually is scrapped. They will not even consider doing extra work for something they know right from the start can never be included in the final product. It would be an unproductive waste of time in an industry where unpaid overtime hours are the norm. The second misconception is that the blur means that, even if they did not have time to detail the anatomy, they still felt it wasn’t proper to show it. The blur only means they added a blur. You must provide evidence that it is an admission of anything else. To do that, you must rule out equally valid explanations. For example, this may very well have been an artistic decision. The game is designed to be a “life simulator”. As such, realism is expected, even with a comedic twist. As such, they may have felt that when a character goes nude, seeing an incomplete model (it may not have been seen as even Barbie doll quality, but rather just a poorly rendered CG model) may have killed the look of the game. Instead, they went for a blur filter. Until you can rule out this explanation, which is VERY plausible, you have no evidence of anything such as that.
Now then, the last issue is an old case. This is just about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and the Hot Coffee scandal. You may recall that in this case, Rockstar was sued because they had some content on the disk that, although it was not accessible, it could be made so by modifying the game’s code. The issue here is this. To what extent is a company responsible for potential lewd content that must be actively hacked in order to unlock? The game was in fact not used in an authorized fashion when it was modified. This didn’t matter in the end though. It was still on the disk, even if in a broken form. However, I must point out another aspect of programming. Some code actively depends on existing code. Removal of code, as a result of this and just as a result of it taking time anyway, will take up as much time as inserting it to begin with. On a very tight schedule, the decision often has to be made that the content just has to be “dummied out”. “Dummying” involves simply making the content inaccessible. For all intents and purposes, it really is gone. It takes work to get any old code that may not have been deleted to come out. Some of it is already fairly deleted already so whatever may be recovered is “garbage”. This is a very old practice. I will cite some famous, in the gaming community at least, examples of this. In a first person shooter game for the Nintendo 64 video game console titled “Perfect Dark”, they were actually coding using a previous title’s code, a game called “Goldeneye: 007”. As a result, a lot of stuff from the old game was in that code. They deleted a lot of stuff because they simply had to in making the new game. However, a lot of the old content, including copyrighted material, made it into the game only as dummied, unused, or outright ruined data. Using game modifying devices like the “Game Shark”, various hackers managed to unlock this hidden data. Included were such things as copyrighted James Bond gadgets, copyrighted names from the Goldeneye movie, and other such things. Not once did the creators of James Bond decide to sue the maker of Perfect Dark for this “legacy” code that, while locked away so none would ever see it without hacking, still included copyrighted material that the game makers no longer had legal permission to use. It may be ignorance on their part, or it may be they agree that the programmers really did reasonably remove the content and it was really effectively added in by the hackers.
In the same game, the programmers actually wanted to add a camera feature. Using this feature, one could take a picture of themselves and “skin” it onto a head in the game. Basically, you could actually be you in the game while shooting people. If you are currently appalled at the idea of someone effectively “shooting” at people they knew well enough to get a snapshot of, then you see why the programmers decided to dummy the feature out. They decided that, while they didn’t actually think it would do any real harm, they didn’t want the media making a big deal out of it. (In the end, that same feature exists in ALL computer games. All one need do is mod a game enough to replace all the “textures” of the models with images they may have taken on a digital camera, and the only way for a programmer to stop that is by not making a game at all.) However, most of the remnants of this feature were still in the code. Not enough though. Despite most hackers’ attempts, it is unusable. This has happened in other cases, but eventually a hacker is clever enough to “fix” the outright broken feature into a workable form very likely to resemble what the programmers originally had in mind.
That data remained because it was much more time efficient and it did not affect the final product. The thinking was very direct. If the data is inaccessible, the data, for all intents and purposes, does not exist. This is actually a pretty skeptical attitude in general, and logical.
Another example of this is an even older game. In the game “Final Fantasy 2” for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (do not confuse with the game Final Fantasy 2 included in Final Fantasy Origins or Final Fantasy Dawn of Souls for the Playstation or the Gameboy Advance, respectively), there is a lot more “dummied” content. Japan too can be “lazy” in this regard. Among the dummied content, there was a pornography book. In the original Japanese game, this was actually accessible. The content was actually just an item called “pornography”, which didn’t actually show anything. In the US game, Nintendo of America felt this was still too much. They felt even referring to pornography crossed the line. As opposed to considering EA innocent above, I will say here that yes, the only plausible explanation really is that Nintendo of America felt that the game was too crude with a pornography book accessible. The pornography book was not deleted, as deleting the item outright would risk damaging a lot of code. If they did that, they would need to remove the reference to the item in the location where it is obtained. The easiest way to do that would be to remove the room altogether. Well, why bother even deleting all that when access to the room can be prohibited altogether? They simply added a single block closing off access to the room with the pornography book, and since it could never be reached, it pretty much did not exist. Case closed, except eventually some hackers edited the code and found everything in it, including the book. The secret was out. Out, but only in the gaming community. This never made any headlines, and no one ever bothered to sue the makers of that game.
There are other examples of hidden data that isn’t so amazing to the hackers. Locked up game modes that were locked away simply because the programmers decided that the mode was not fun or was otherwise below the quality they wanted. When these are found, generally the things are laughed at by the hackers. However, at no time has a hacker said “they should not have put that in the game because it sucked”. Rather, they say “I can see why they didn’t put that in the game”. By the logic of the case against Rockstar, the content was in there; however a reviewer or hacker will never actually see it that way. The content is inaccessible unless hacked in an unauthorized manner. What if the remnants of the feature are broken and have to be fixed by the hacker, not just “unlocked”, in order to work again? What if there is nothing but a small bit in there and the hacker goes wild taking that to a level inspired by that code scrap? What if the hackers just use the existing game play “engine” in order to make their own unique content full of nudity that was in no way at all in the original game? What if what if what if? At what level does it stop being the responsibility of the programmer and start being the responsibility of the hacker? Here is what I see as the least arbitrary method for determining blame. If, when the game is used in an authorized fashion, the content can be unlocked, even by a glitch the programmers could not or did not repair, you have a case. If the content can’t be accessed when the game is used in authorized means, then the programmers should not be blamed for anything. My argument here is simple. If the content is not accessible in the game except via means which are unauthorized and directly modify the game’s code, then whatever you get from that is the fault of the hackers.
Allow me to paint this picture. Imagine that a company has sworn that no data they gather about their clients will be released to the public. They do not. They have the data securely locked up on their servers to the best of their ability. The only thing they can do to make it more secure is deleting the data. They only keep it because it helps them better manage individual clients if they can pull up old records of them should they be contacted by them again. However, a hacker (the bad malicious kind) decides to subvert their systems. However the hacker manages to do it, the hacker hacks into the system and then downloads all this private data. This data is then published online, sold, etc. Not a pretty picture. Who is to blame? Should the company be sued because had they deleted the data, the hackers would not be able to get it? Or, should the hacker be blamed because the data really was inaccessible unless the system was subverted or altered by someone? I myself believe the latter to be the case. You may not see it that way after all. This may be in line with your thinking, but I felt it important to really show exactly what such lines of thinking lead to. Now, to point out how well this analogy does work, I will say that yes, keeping that old code in a game does serve a purpose to that company. That purpose is saving a lot of money time and energy in the project by preventing the need to seriously recode major portions of the game in order to allow full deletion of the data.
What I have done here is point out the problems I see in your arguments. In the case of Killer 7, I have pointed out that movies have in fact done the same thing in media rated for 17-. You may however feel that movies have gone out of control too. In that case, I have nothing else to say. If you feel that way, then yes I suppose BOTH should be rated for 18+ if said content is HARMFUL sexual content. So long as there is consistency, I offer no other objections regarding Killer 7.
In the case of The Sims 2, I have pointed out that there is no evidence at all to support the notion that EA actually did anything wrong, much less that they thought what they were doing was wrong. The artistic explanation for the filter’s presence is very plausible.
In the case of the older case of GTA: SA, I have basically pointed out the nature of dummying code, and that by suing the game makers for what hackers may do, you enter a slippery slope of where culpability lies until you end up at the ridiculous. Basically, I make an argument of the absurd. I also make the analogy of other programs unrelated to video games but with similar potential for existing data to be hacked in such a way as to be illegally made available to the public.
I can only conclude by saying I hope this letter finds you well and that I am open to any new evidence you may have. I am always willing to eat crow. I may enjoy video games but I do acknowledge when game makers have made legitimate mistakes, and I am also capable of changing my opinions to fit the evidence, as logic demands, not visa versa. Thank you for your time.
The following is the text from the alleged e-mail as I read it at the site http://www.vgcats.com/jack.php . If any of this text, or the e-mail itself, is in error or is simply a forgery, then I apologize for asking about it.
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At this point I included the entire e-mail that vgcats peoples got, so that's why I didn't quote my entire e-mail because this post is long enough already.
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I fear that my e-mail may be deleted or viewed with disdain, no thanks to my “peers” contacting you in somewhat rude context.
I am contacting you neither to hurl childish insults nor to “defend the honor” of my hobby. I want to know what sort of evidence you have to show that the ESRB is being criminally negligent. I also would like to see what evidence you present regarding the lewd content in The Sims 2 as well as Killer 7.
I only ask because I have recently read the text of a well publicized e-mail which, if the contents are true, shows a lack of understanding or proper research of the material. The first specific question I have is: how much of The Sims 2 and/or Killer 7 have you yourself either played or watched another play? I feel that either playing it yourself or watching another adult play the game (the latter being used in the case that you yourself are unable to actually play it) is the best way to accurately gather all the right facts for the case. As this is not an expensive thing to do and is the most accurate way to gather the information, I can only say that it would be expected of you to go about this as opposed to simply reading a review from a web site.
The site IGN refers to the sexual content of the game Killer 7 as “full blown sex scenes”. From what I have seen of said content, this description may be a bit premature. The scenes depict two fully clothed people. One is sitting in a chair and the other is “straddling” (excuse my description as this is the most polite way to describe it) the first and is moaning as though she enjoys it. No nudity is involved, though it is very clear what is happening in the scene. This may or may not be appropriate, but such scenes happen often enough in movies rated “R” or “PG-13” that it would seem to be a double standard. However, the only real point here is that IGN is not the most accurate source of information you could have obtained. IGN is, in fact, more of an entertainment service than accurate unbiased news. They advertise the very games they review more often than not, as well as being ones to say more what they think the viewer wants to hear than anything else.
Regarding The Sims 2, you have stated in another quote from a press release that: "Sims 2, the latest version of the Sims video game franchise ... contains, according to video game news sites, full frontal nudity, including nipples, penises, labia, and pubic hair." You have specifically indicated your source of information here as well. Your source was “video game news sites”. Which sites? How reputable is their data? Once again, I must ask if it would not have been much more productive and accurate to play the game yourself and test out the code (which is easily obtainable online as you yourself claim) to ascertain exactly how much detail is shown. The reality is, The Sims 2 does not show such detail. In fact, they only modeled the most basic outline of the human form. For adult females, this includes the basic shape of breasts. To say that the detail is akin to that of a Barbie doll with its clothes off is an understatement.
It is claimed that you responded to this information yourself by saying “"The sex and the nudity are in the game. That's the point. The blur is an admission that even the 'Ken and Barbie' features should not be displayed. The blur can be disarmed. This is no different than what is in San Andreas, although worse." This may or may not be an accurate response. However, I will respond to this anyway. The problem with this argument is that you are drawing from the blurring that this proves the makers of the game thought it was crude content, and thus if they included a way to see it, that is evidence they were skirting their perception of what was decent intentionally. However, this is a basic misunderstanding of two things. First of all, to actually detail out what a human looks like naked takes a lot more effort than just a basic shape underneath the clothes. A programmer on a tight schedule can barely afford to use up time on a feature that eventually is scrapped. They will not even consider doing extra work for something they know right from the start can never be included in the final product. It would be an unproductive waste of time in an industry where unpaid overtime hours are the norm. The second misconception is that the blur means that, even if they did not have time to detail the anatomy, they still felt it wasn’t proper to show it. The blur only means they added a blur. You must provide evidence that it is an admission of anything else. To do that, you must rule out equally valid explanations. For example, this may very well have been an artistic decision. The game is designed to be a “life simulator”. As such, realism is expected, even with a comedic twist. As such, they may have felt that when a character goes nude, seeing an incomplete model (it may not have been seen as even Barbie doll quality, but rather just a poorly rendered CG model) may have killed the look of the game. Instead, they went for a blur filter. Until you can rule out this explanation, which is VERY plausible, you have no evidence of anything such as that.
Now then, the last issue is an old case. This is just about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and the Hot Coffee scandal. You may recall that in this case, Rockstar was sued because they had some content on the disk that, although it was not accessible, it could be made so by modifying the game’s code. The issue here is this. To what extent is a company responsible for potential lewd content that must be actively hacked in order to unlock? The game was in fact not used in an authorized fashion when it was modified. This didn’t matter in the end though. It was still on the disk, even if in a broken form. However, I must point out another aspect of programming. Some code actively depends on existing code. Removal of code, as a result of this and just as a result of it taking time anyway, will take up as much time as inserting it to begin with. On a very tight schedule, the decision often has to be made that the content just has to be “dummied out”. “Dummying” involves simply making the content inaccessible. For all intents and purposes, it really is gone. It takes work to get any old code that may not have been deleted to come out. Some of it is already fairly deleted already so whatever may be recovered is “garbage”. This is a very old practice. I will cite some famous, in the gaming community at least, examples of this. In a first person shooter game for the Nintendo 64 video game console titled “Perfect Dark”, they were actually coding using a previous title’s code, a game called “Goldeneye: 007”. As a result, a lot of stuff from the old game was in that code. They deleted a lot of stuff because they simply had to in making the new game. However, a lot of the old content, including copyrighted material, made it into the game only as dummied, unused, or outright ruined data. Using game modifying devices like the “Game Shark”, various hackers managed to unlock this hidden data. Included were such things as copyrighted James Bond gadgets, copyrighted names from the Goldeneye movie, and other such things. Not once did the creators of James Bond decide to sue the maker of Perfect Dark for this “legacy” code that, while locked away so none would ever see it without hacking, still included copyrighted material that the game makers no longer had legal permission to use. It may be ignorance on their part, or it may be they agree that the programmers really did reasonably remove the content and it was really effectively added in by the hackers.
In the same game, the programmers actually wanted to add a camera feature. Using this feature, one could take a picture of themselves and “skin” it onto a head in the game. Basically, you could actually be you in the game while shooting people. If you are currently appalled at the idea of someone effectively “shooting” at people they knew well enough to get a snapshot of, then you see why the programmers decided to dummy the feature out. They decided that, while they didn’t actually think it would do any real harm, they didn’t want the media making a big deal out of it. (In the end, that same feature exists in ALL computer games. All one need do is mod a game enough to replace all the “textures” of the models with images they may have taken on a digital camera, and the only way for a programmer to stop that is by not making a game at all.) However, most of the remnants of this feature were still in the code. Not enough though. Despite most hackers’ attempts, it is unusable. This has happened in other cases, but eventually a hacker is clever enough to “fix” the outright broken feature into a workable form very likely to resemble what the programmers originally had in mind.
That data remained because it was much more time efficient and it did not affect the final product. The thinking was very direct. If the data is inaccessible, the data, for all intents and purposes, does not exist. This is actually a pretty skeptical attitude in general, and logical.
Another example of this is an even older game. In the game “Final Fantasy 2” for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (do not confuse with the game Final Fantasy 2 included in Final Fantasy Origins or Final Fantasy Dawn of Souls for the Playstation or the Gameboy Advance, respectively), there is a lot more “dummied” content. Japan too can be “lazy” in this regard. Among the dummied content, there was a pornography book. In the original Japanese game, this was actually accessible. The content was actually just an item called “pornography”, which didn’t actually show anything. In the US game, Nintendo of America felt this was still too much. They felt even referring to pornography crossed the line. As opposed to considering EA innocent above, I will say here that yes, the only plausible explanation really is that Nintendo of America felt that the game was too crude with a pornography book accessible. The pornography book was not deleted, as deleting the item outright would risk damaging a lot of code. If they did that, they would need to remove the reference to the item in the location where it is obtained. The easiest way to do that would be to remove the room altogether. Well, why bother even deleting all that when access to the room can be prohibited altogether? They simply added a single block closing off access to the room with the pornography book, and since it could never be reached, it pretty much did not exist. Case closed, except eventually some hackers edited the code and found everything in it, including the book. The secret was out. Out, but only in the gaming community. This never made any headlines, and no one ever bothered to sue the makers of that game.
There are other examples of hidden data that isn’t so amazing to the hackers. Locked up game modes that were locked away simply because the programmers decided that the mode was not fun or was otherwise below the quality they wanted. When these are found, generally the things are laughed at by the hackers. However, at no time has a hacker said “they should not have put that in the game because it sucked”. Rather, they say “I can see why they didn’t put that in the game”. By the logic of the case against Rockstar, the content was in there; however a reviewer or hacker will never actually see it that way. The content is inaccessible unless hacked in an unauthorized manner. What if the remnants of the feature are broken and have to be fixed by the hacker, not just “unlocked”, in order to work again? What if there is nothing but a small bit in there and the hacker goes wild taking that to a level inspired by that code scrap? What if the hackers just use the existing game play “engine” in order to make their own unique content full of nudity that was in no way at all in the original game? What if what if what if? At what level does it stop being the responsibility of the programmer and start being the responsibility of the hacker? Here is what I see as the least arbitrary method for determining blame. If, when the game is used in an authorized fashion, the content can be unlocked, even by a glitch the programmers could not or did not repair, you have a case. If the content can’t be accessed when the game is used in authorized means, then the programmers should not be blamed for anything. My argument here is simple. If the content is not accessible in the game except via means which are unauthorized and directly modify the game’s code, then whatever you get from that is the fault of the hackers.
Allow me to paint this picture. Imagine that a company has sworn that no data they gather about their clients will be released to the public. They do not. They have the data securely locked up on their servers to the best of their ability. The only thing they can do to make it more secure is deleting the data. They only keep it because it helps them better manage individual clients if they can pull up old records of them should they be contacted by them again. However, a hacker (the bad malicious kind) decides to subvert their systems. However the hacker manages to do it, the hacker hacks into the system and then downloads all this private data. This data is then published online, sold, etc. Not a pretty picture. Who is to blame? Should the company be sued because had they deleted the data, the hackers would not be able to get it? Or, should the hacker be blamed because the data really was inaccessible unless the system was subverted or altered by someone? I myself believe the latter to be the case. You may not see it that way after all. This may be in line with your thinking, but I felt it important to really show exactly what such lines of thinking lead to. Now, to point out how well this analogy does work, I will say that yes, keeping that old code in a game does serve a purpose to that company. That purpose is saving a lot of money time and energy in the project by preventing the need to seriously recode major portions of the game in order to allow full deletion of the data.
What I have done here is point out the problems I see in your arguments. In the case of Killer 7, I have pointed out that movies have in fact done the same thing in media rated for 17-. You may however feel that movies have gone out of control too. In that case, I have nothing else to say. If you feel that way, then yes I suppose BOTH should be rated for 18+ if said content is HARMFUL sexual content. So long as there is consistency, I offer no other objections regarding Killer 7.
In the case of The Sims 2, I have pointed out that there is no evidence at all to support the notion that EA actually did anything wrong, much less that they thought what they were doing was wrong. The artistic explanation for the filter’s presence is very plausible.
In the case of the older case of GTA: SA, I have basically pointed out the nature of dummying code, and that by suing the game makers for what hackers may do, you enter a slippery slope of where culpability lies until you end up at the ridiculous. Basically, I make an argument of the absurd. I also make the analogy of other programs unrelated to video games but with similar potential for existing data to be hacked in such a way as to be illegally made available to the public.
I can only conclude by saying I hope this letter finds you well and that I am open to any new evidence you may have. I am always willing to eat crow. I may enjoy video games but I do acknowledge when game makers have made legitimate mistakes, and I am also capable of changing my opinions to fit the evidence, as logic demands, not visa versa. Thank you for your time.
The following is the text from the alleged e-mail as I read it at the site http://www.vgcats.com/jack.php . If any of this text, or the e-mail itself, is in error or is simply a forgery, then I apologize for asking about it.
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At this point I included the entire e-mail that vgcats peoples got, so that's why I didn't quote my entire e-mail because this post is long enough already.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)