We haven't discussed the whole GTA: San Andreas Hot Coffee saga here on WCG, partly because the story was still unfolding, partly because all the usual game sites (not to mention the bungling normal news sites) were over-reporting on it. I did a couple interviews on the topic last week, including one the Atlanta Journal-Constitution didn't get quite right. Rather than blather on trying to make those quotes more precise, I thought I'd just post my main concerns in the aftermath. So, here they are, the official version.

(1) Based on Take Two's announcement of an astounding 6% drop in earnings as a result of the incident, and based on the ESRB's recommendation that developers and publishers do more to lock down unintended content in games, I fear that some publishers may shy away from providing endorsed modding tools. Counter-gaming grand-wizard Jack Thompson has already made litigious gestures toward a Sims 2 nudity mod. Of course, publishers and developers know full-well that content made with Sims character builder or NWN's Aurora are not automatically endorsed by virtue of the platform they were created on -- no more than racist doctrine produced in Word would be the responsibility of Microsoft. But I fear the publishers may fear that the public, and therefore the shareholders, who are still by and large gaming illiterate, will not understand this.

(2) We do need more kinds of games. Gonzalo wrote a charming article on this topic just yesterday over on Ludology. But it does bother me that we Americans continue to rally so strongly against any kind of representation of sex in media (no matter the type of media). I'm not endorsing or defaming the San Andreas content, I'm simply musing on the general trend. Surely we can do better than hardcore sex games, but it would be a shame for the topic to simply remain taboo. Update: more on this over at Game Girl Advance.

(3) Despite the ESRB's recent and ongoing efforts to claim that they are doing their job with game ratings, there is just not enough media literacy or rating literacy in the general public. And it's not enough just to claim that parents are unmotivated and therefore crappy at parenting. We need more resources like the indie GameFam, a blog specifically about helping parents understand games for kids. The posts there shed light on the many inconsistencies and subtleties in game ratings, things that you can't get from a letter on a box.

(4) I sincerely doubt that Hillary Clinton is genuinely concerned about family values or videogames; her obsession with this issue strikes me as a (rather transparent) political posture, probably the first of many in in the hopes of "centering" her for a possible, and terrifying, run for the White House in 2008.