Via the Carnival of Gamers, blogger Finster at Top of Cool offers a response to some defenders of vendor Rockstar Games, whose surreptitious inclusion of a graphic and interactive copulation sequence in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas brought rightful industry censure of Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive — and potentially discouraging federal interjection.
Critics of the Entertainment Software Review Board decision claim that American content standards betray a double-standard: violence is embraced, a hint of sex is verboten. Finster argues that media catering, as legally defined, to the prurient interest is destructive because it needlessly innervates the human sex impulse. This reasoning is vulnerable to the counter that the depiction of violence, especially the malevolent use of force, can and does affect or encourage those who tend towards sociopathy; but Finster contributes by invoking American football. Football and other contact sports demonstrate why a reasonable degree of violence is far more integral to daily life than amorous license.
Is it normal and socially acceptable for a lineman to push his opponent backward every play, then pile onto the ball carrier? Of course. A boxer to win on a knockout, first round? Certainly. Do football players and pugilists regularly engage in sexual activities with one another? Good heavens, no. An animal is acceptably handled, leashed, trained, physically punished, euthanized and slaughtered. Bestiality is a practice best left to deviants and humorous stories from, say, the early pagan Isle of Man.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' problem, like all retail products containing pornography, was with children. The game was initially rated by the Entertainment Software Review Board as "Mature": Content therein considered most appropriate for those seventeen years of age and older, parental judgment technically preserved by an industry-wide Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association policy to refuse sale to customers sixteen and younger. Following the accusation and private indictment, the ESRB changed the rating of San Andreas to "Adults Only": Content therein expressly not recommended for those under the age of eighteen and excluded from sale by retailers under IEMA. Why? Children tussle, children fight. It is a healthy exposition of competition and respect. Children naturally do not, and morally should not, make sexual correspondence.
Equating sex and violence is inapt. The latter is instinctively and institutionally a public act; the former a private one. Violence, too, is the desideratum of democratic law enforcement — restraining the unlawful and the murderous requires the adversarial implication or application of it. When United States District Judge Robert Lasnik ordered a 2003 injunction on a recently legislated Washington State ban on the sale of violent video games to minors, he resorted to the moral neutrality of force, warning that the ban "would restrict access to games which mirror mainstream movies or reflect heroic struggles against corrupt regimes." Literature entwines love and war but has rarely transposed the two. Passion has a place in culture, if one necessarily small.