"Grand Theft Auto IV" isn't out yet, but it's already stirring controversy.
Granted, this is Jack Thompson's - everyone's favorite frivolous lawyer - crackpot variety of controversy. Unfortunately, there is a respectably large and overly vocal subset of American society that thinks Thompson is worth listening to.
In this case, it appears Rockstar Games is actually trying to push Thompson's buttons. There isn't any explicit sex in "Grand Theft Auto IV," but it pretty much runs straight up to the line without actually crossing it. A video posted on ign.com goes into much more explicit detail. The video involves two scenes in a strip club, not to mention the prerequisite and likely patented GTA Prostitution refund - which is, of course, merely the act of paying a prostitute and then running her over with a car and taking your money off her corpse.
The real issue is the trend of excess for the sake of excess in the video game industry. It's not just Rockstar's particular brand of excess - though I personally could have gone my whole life without watching a computer-animated 300 pound prostitute bounce up and down on the hero of "GTA IV" - it goes way beyond that.
"Army of Two" is a perfect example of this trend. This is a game that could have been - and very well may have been - written by a homophobic 12-year-old. "GTA IV" is at least funny. "Army of Two" is just disturbing. It's a glorification of murder for hire, and it's clear the game was written with the phrase "push the envelope" in mind, which would be fine with me if the game at least didn't suck.
That's the key difference between those two games - "Grand Theft Auto IV" will actually be pretty good, and if players don't want to see the 300 pound prostitute, they don't have to. You can't avoid the bad game play in "Army of Two." Ironically, what you can avoid is a Thompson-style reaction. For of course, in the great hypocrisy of American society, "Army of Two" is just fine, because there isn't any sex in it, just a metric ton of violence.
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The flipside of that coin is Bioware's "Mass Effect," which is probably the least socially objectionable game available except for the fact that the character can engage in a short, noninteractive sex scene that is more comical than prurient. We're talking about the kind of sex that would barely raise an eyebrow in a PG movie. Of course, "Mass Effect" probably could have been made without it, and that wouldn't detract from the story even one iota, though it might have detracted from the sales a bit.
These excesses aren't going to go away anytime soon for one important reason: They sell games. More importantly, from an economic standpoint, they sell video game consoles and high-end gaming PC's. Incidentally, these excesses do at least have one benefit to the world beyond the economic - they keep the Thompsons distracted and out of a position to do any real damage. That's something, right?
