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The ESRB And Jizz Eaters

At a nearby Microplay (Canadian game retailer chain), I asked the clerk if they were pulling San Andreas. He said to me that no Microplay stores are going to stop carrying it and that they already card people that want to buy the game, so the rating change doesn't make a single difference to them. Wow. A sensible reaction.

The other side of it is that they directly benefit from the other retailers' over-sensitivity. Where as some of sellers are writing off the millions of dollars of used GTA inventory, Microplay gains all the sales they lose. Seems like a good business decision to me.

But this got me thinking. What, really, is the difference between being carded for an M game and being carded for an AO game? The ESRB site says Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older and Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older.

The difference is 365 days (366 on a leap year). The difference between being able to buy an M-rated game and an AO-rated game is the difference between a 17 year old and an 18 year old. So, based on the US' equivalent movie ratings, a 17 year old can no longer buy Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas because of some animated polygonal sex (where no genitals are visible), but they can buy 1,001 Ways to Eat My Jizz, Part 3: Biscuits and Gravy Edition, which I would assume has a lot of cock. Non-rendered cock. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Yes, stores have the right to pull this off their shelves if they wish. Christ, Wal-Mark won't sell newspapers if they aren't giving them blow jobs, so they can certainly stop carrying whatever games they don't like (not that I like it. Corporate censorship (Telus in this case) is becoming more of a threat than government censorship.) That's their choice, and that choice should reamin like that; it shouldn't be forced on the retailers by clueless politicians and a lame duck ratings board. Rockstar acted quickly and has paid a steep price for what is a third party modification (you can't access the content without a circumvention device/hack.) Anything further directed at them is no longer about the issue; it is about gain. Personal or political gain.

To further prove that claim, there is now a civil suit alleging that Rockstar engaged in false, misleading and deceptive practices. They didn't. They were just stupid about leaving some legacy code on the disc (which isn't accessible!) What gets me about the lawsuit is the following (emphasis mine).

A woman upset that she bought the video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" for her 14-year-old grandson without knowing it contained hidden, sexually explicit scenes sued the manufacturer Wednesday on behalf of consumers nationwide.

Let me repeat that titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. She should be sued for negligence!

Rockstar has made mistakes, yes, but this is getting out of hand. The fact that a crappy inaccessible sex scene generates 34129 times the attention than, you know, grand fucking theft and murder says more about American culture than anything about the video game industry.

The additional consideration that this is worth a Federal investigation also speaks volumes about the nature of politics. What is it about games that makes them worse than the worst of sequential media? Is added interactivity, at the cost of a severely reduced level of reality in the representation, that much worse? Even if it's poor and badly designed? If interactivity is the big taboo here, then one could easily make the argument that porn movies are inherently interactive. You know what I'm talking about.

There's so much idiocy in this topic that it can not be contained in one post. In part two, the ESRB will fight to the death against regionality!

Umbrella

This morning I could not find my umbrella. I searched all the obvious places in vain. I thought about the last time it rained and where I took my umbrella. I remembered walking to a GO Station with the umbrella, but I did not go on that train. I remembered taking it with me to work. Did I leave it on a Streetcar? Did I just forget it at work? No, I remembered taking it with me after work. Where did I go?

Then it dawned on me. The umbrella was in the refrigerator. How obvious!

Apparently, I had taken it with me to the liquor store after work, when I went to buy Killer 7 (these two things are not related, though after playing the game, I can concede that they might be.) Upon purchase I threw the umbrella into the bag with the beer. Once I got home, I placed the whole bag into the refrigerator, umbrella and all. Then I forgot about it. duh.

While I was in Atlantic Canada, taking many pictures of the highway, my sister was in Poland taking many pictures of buildings. When I went to get my disposable camera film developed I dropped off her rolls of film too. They were supposed to digitize my photos, but as I found out at home, they had digitized her photos instead. Since I have them here with me, I present a sample of my hometown (with an extra cock photo as a bonus!).

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More Roadtrip Photos

I have uploaded the rest of my least crappy roadtrip photos to Flickr, save for the shots taken on the disposable film camera. As I do not have a scanner, those will not be going up anytime soon.

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Battlestar Galactica DVD

Scotty (James Doohan) was Canadian born? I did not know this. It always feel as though Canadians have a very strong presence in Sci-Fi TV. That maybe due to the fact that, to save money, many such niche series are filmed in Canada and, invariably, attract local talent. Like Battlestar Galatica, for example.

While Battlestar Galactica Season Two is in full-swing south of the border, here it sits. Space, in its full wisdom, will not be showing this season until 2006. This is not a popular idea. With the prevalent threat of spoilers, given the half-year delay, the only option is to turn to the internet. The creators have pleaded against such actions, but those of us that can't get the show anyway aren't affecting the ratings one way or another. So the option is tempting.

And if supporting the creators is what one wants to do, then the best way of doing this is by buying the DVDs. The DVDs for Season One. Which come out this Tuesday as a BestBuy UK-version exclusive, a full two months before the actual release. I don't know how much the two versions will differ and what features will or will not be there, but this is the first time that I remember seeing such an extended exclusive for a DVD release. Quite the deal that Best Buy managed there.

Mild Coffee

When Team America: World Police was released into theatres, it was released with a scene removed from the movie so that it wouldn't get the dreaded kiss of death, the NC-17 rating. It was a sex scene. A sex scene done with puppets.

That seen made its way to the internet (duh). It was pretty tame and not worthy of an R rating, let alone NC-17.

From this point on, let's talk hypothetical. Imagine if a bootlegger managed to get a copy of the movie with the scene still intact. The bootlegger burns it to disc, makes some fancy Engrish packaging, and sells it at some streetside stall. Some puritan with a stick up his/her ass buys it and raises a stink. The ratings boards hear about this bad, evil, corrupting scene and decide to revise their rating of the movie to NC-17. Nevermind the fact that every theatre goer will not see this scene unless they actively seek it out.

There are some faults in this analogy, but this is basically what is happening to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It has just been given a late AO (Adults Only) rating. After millions and millions of copies have been sold.

The main error in the above analogy is that with GTA, the content is right there in that disc that you might already have. In that disc that was sold to mature adults (but played, very much so, by immature children -- but that's another argument). However, that content is not accessible to your average (and above-average) gamer. It's just bits and bytes on a disc. To get to it, you have to willingly circumvent -- hack, if you will -- the game's internal structure. You can either hack the PC version, or use an Action Replay to "unlock" it on a console version.

What percentage of all GTA owners, especially console-version owners, have the means to do this? What percentage of gamers, in general, even have an Action Replay on hand? This is why this story annoys me -- the amount of attention it is getting is completely disproportionate.

Outrage for a scene that most people won't ever see. A scene that involves some polygonal people dry humping each other, in a game about gang warfare and crime and violence and murder. To quote myself from another place: I worry about your country when all Democrats can find to get holy about is a bit of inaccesible dry humping in a video game.

All this for a glorified puppet sex scene.

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On Meteos

In a visitor centre just outside of the Confederation Bridge, I purchased one of those cheapie disposable cameras to act as a backup to my digital -- when the battery inevitably died or the card ran out of space and I wasn't anywhere near my laptop. The camera was primarily used in Halifax, and mostly at the Halifax Citadel. A bunch of the photos didn't turn out so hot (mostly the ones I took indoors, in the Canadian Military Museum there. So much for my shots of a 19th century Gattling Gun and WW1-era machine guns.) The ones that did develop fine (this was probably the first batch of film I have developed since... ever), I attached to my fridge door.

The effect isn't as it was expected to be.

Now, everytime I go to get a drink or something to eat, I am constantly reminded of where I was and, more discontently, where I am. Then I want to get a drink drink.

It has also been taking me some time to acclimatize myself to being infront of a computer again. For the majority of last week (and the early weekend), you could find me on a futon/couch listening to music, watching DVDs or the Discovery/National Geographic/History channels and/or playing Meteos. A lot.

Meteos is good. Really good. My favourite domestically released game on the DS (seriously Nintendo, where the fuck is Jam With the Band/Band Brothers), and high on the list of all DS games released in the universe (it's neck and neck with Band Brothers).

Quite obviously, Meteos is often compared to its closest cousin Lumines. Apart from the shared developer, they are both seen as some sort of shining beacons for their respective portable systems, upholding the classic gaming legacy and, more specifically, the classic portable dropping block puzzle legacy that began with GameBoy Tetris. Lumines is a fine game -- one of the best for its system -- but I think I prefer Meteos.

Lumines has some quick play modes, but the main game is a long, arduous groove-fest. To play the primary game to its completion (and that means maxing out the score), you have devote a good chunk of time to playing it non-stop. Breaks, while possible with the PSP's sleep mode, interfere with the zen state you have to achieve to do well. You have to be one with the music to win in Lumines. You have to be, in essence, not very portable.

Meteos is the opposite to that. It works as a portable game, or even as a sudden craving while on the couch watching something boring on TV game. You can just pull it out, play with it for a while, satisfy the urge, and put it away. ...

And because you're always collecting in-game Meteos no matter what game mode you play, you never feel as though the unlockables are impossibly distant. You can get them on your own terms, playing through whatever mode you like (except for a couple unlocks). Which is quite unlike Lumines, which requires you to achieve one time feats in all the modes to unlock specific skins and characters. Some of those feats are quite hard to do.

With Meteos, it doesn't matter if you suck* -- you can still get at everything. The little rewards are what make Meteos the better game.

* not that I suck

Louisbourg photo

While at the Fortress of Louisbourg, I went through a slightly less traveled tunnel to the outside of the walls. There was a small brook and pond there, and the grass was very green. It contrasted well with the strong, stone walls of the fortress. It looked nice, so I took a photo. I posted it to Flickr.

Then I looked at public photos marked with the tag "Louisbourg", and lo and behold, someone else took the exact same shot from the exact same spot. The weather is nicer, but everything else is the same. Nice.

End of Trip

I'm back. I arrived back after 1am on Sunday, a week and six hours after I left. In those 174 hours, I travelled 5864km (give or take about 5km, not counting the ferry crossing), wrote 21 pages of a "travelogue" (rough, jumbled, hand-written text. I'm sure I could stretch it out to fifty pages if I was so inclined), and took about 300 photos (including 24 on a crappy disposable "backup" camera).

That's an average speed of 33.7km/h at all times through the week. Counting sleep and tourist-ish visits to cities and sites, that's pretty damned impressive. Here's the route I took:

In that time, I was on a computer for two minutes at a New Brunswick tourist information site (hence the lack of detail in the previous entry) and I briefly used my PSP while on the three hour Fundy crossing ferry ride. During all other times in the trip, I didn't once miss the computer or the wired world that I left behind. I feel a little... tied down, now that I'm back to it.

If anything, the trip has proven that my tolerance levels for such road-trips are quite high and, more than ever before, I am truly compelled to head to the west coast and to the northern territories. But I can't see that happening any time soon. Now is the winter summer of our discontent.

Vacation Day 2

Greetings from the banks of the Confederation Bridge, nearly 1800km worth of road away.

Vacation Itinerary

Today, Canada Day: do nothing, clean out the fridge, play BF2.

Tomorrow, Saturday: stock up on some things, buy some gear, rest.

Sunday: drive off, somewhere, for some amount of time, I don't know.

And that's about as deep as my plans go. All that I know is that I will be in the car a great deal, I will see parts of this country that I have not seen, and I will be far, far away from the internet -- very likely the longest time away in years. Of course, I can't rule out the possibility of finding some access along the way... but, yeah, the point of this is to get away from this god damned technology.

I will bring a DS with me though...

Adios.

Art/Game Debate

I'm on vacation now so I shouldn't care about this, but this World of Stewart article on "Are videogames art?" is so wrong that I can't help but be annoyed.

The main point is that interactivity is, by its nature, not artistic since you aren't seeing the work as "the artist intended." (?)

no two people will play a game in the same way, and therefore will not be basing their reactions on the same source material. Much of the essence of art lies precisely in its non-interactivity - the fact that the viewer is compelled to see the piece as its creator intended. But videogames are like handing out boxes of crayons at the entrance of a gallery. If you can control the art, then you're influencing it, when the point is that it's supposed to influence you.

Ignoring the age old debate on "intent" -- if I draw a stupid doodle, is it art? What if it ends up in a gallery 200 hundred years later? Is a 700 year old religious triptych art even though, back then, it had a very real functional use? -- the fact that something has to happen/exist in a predefined way for it to be art is complete bunk and ignores the last century of art altogether. Quick, somebody call Rhizome and tell them that, all along, they weren't supporting art! Interactive Art is obviously a lie!

The main fallacy in the argument is that an interactive system can vary per person and per "play" and that this is beyond the scope of the artist's design. The fault is that while it can be true when you look at the minutiae, it is completely false when you look at the whole system. The system is the canvas, and all the interactive (and otherwise) elements within it are the dabs of paint. The system that was designed doesn't change, only elements within it. You can't go off an join a monastery in Grand Theft Auto because it was never designed to let you do that. If that's not the artist's influence, then I don't know what is.

Art is the vision of an artist. It's a precise and defined work, whose meaning can be open to interpretation by the viewer, but whose content is always the same. In such a way, the different reactions of different people to the same piece of art tell us things about who we are, both individually and collectively. If a concept as broad as "art" can be said to have a single purpose, it's surely that.

Once again, in an interactive space, the system is the vision and the system -- with all its inherent rules and laws -- is the precise and defined work. Look at the avalanche, not the stones.

There are more points to argue, but that's the most asinine of them all. It's Canada Day and I'm on vacation and I don't want to bother with the rest.