Don't you just love controversy. There is nothing like controversy to stimulate the sales of any form of media. We love movies, music and games with more sex, violence, and cursing than it is possible to imagine in everyday life. That, of course, is the new generation. There are still the good old boys and girls that hate the controversy. They are puritans, at least by our lax standards. They annoy our youth and strangle our media. If it isn't proper it isn't worth watching, playing, or listening to. However, one media is attacked with much greater force by these denizens of purity, and that is video games.
Video games have been around in their proper form for over 30 years. Pong, while not the first game, was certainly the first accessible game for the home audience. This video game eventually evolved and spawned hundreds upon hundreds of other video games. Some of them masterpieces, while others were total failures. Eventually this evolution would lead to something no one expected at the time, gore. Mortal Kombat was released in arcades and the explosion of anti-game violence rolled in. Of course it failed, but it did convince some companies, such as Nintendo, who replaced the blood in the game with sweat, that the world was not ready for a video game with “real” violence.
Of course, there were other games that pushed the envelope before Mortal Kombat, and no one complained about those, at least not loudly enough. Leisure Suit Larry offered the player a chance to actually have sex with a woman if he played his cards right. There was a natural evolution of this media though, and it would eventually create a game that would blow everyone away with the amount of controversy it could stir up.
When Grand Theft Auto III was released on the Playstation 2 gaming audiences were blown away with the sheer size of the game. It was absolutely huge, spanning miles upon miles of the fictitious Liberty City. It was a crowing achievement for publisher Rockstar and for the video game business as a whole. Nothing like it had been created before. It was absolutely amazing to see something that was so incredibly big in scale and so free in form. However, the proud moment was not to be gamers, but politicians. They argued over the game's content. It contained sex, drugs, and violence on an unheard of level (something that films had contained for years by this point). To them, it was obviously bad for the youth of the country and had to be stopped. These efforts of course failed, as they had with Mortal Kombat before that; however, that would not stop politicians on their way to getting rid of violence in video games.
As time went on, more Grand Theft Auto games were released, and people complained as they always had. While they were not being as loud of the original protestors, they were being loud enough to keep the controversy alive, and that was all that mattered. They simply kept it going until they could strike. Their moment came with the release of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (the largest and most ambitious of the series at that point). As the game garnered fame with gamers and malice with politicians and hypocritical parents, there were programmers and hackers at work playing with the game's innards.
The game continued to sell, and at its peak was the most popular game in recent memory, and then controversy struck. A programmer found a secret “Hot Coffee” scene, deep within the games source code that allowed you to live out your pixilated sex fantasies in real time showing all the nasty details. This was the chance that worried parents and angry politicians had been waiting for since Mortal Kombat. They were finally able to give the gaming industry a black eye, and stop the evils that games perpetrated, since films were out of their reach. Politicians, such as Jack Thompson, attacked the games secret scene. They all gathered around the controversial game and demanded an Adult Only rating for the game. This cost Rockstar millions in reparations and legal fees. However, the loss went to those who argued against the game. The controversy against the game increased demand for the it ten-fold, making Grand Theft Auto San Andres one of the most sought after games in history.
Now controversy is being attached to the real successor to the original Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto IV. Mother Against Drunk Driving is asking the game be rated Adult Only for its overly realistic drunk driving sequences. However, they are too late to stop the games success. After only one week, Grand Theft Auto IV has become the best selling form of media ever, making over five hundred million dollars in its first week alone. This controversial series is now the most lucrative form of gaming that can be made, and it is thanks to not only its design, but thanks to those who so strongly fought against it.
Controversy is the fuel that makes anything desirable. It is what puts any form of media on the map. All of these organizations laboring against games with controversial content are merely propelling these games into the record books. These groups, these politicians, and these parents can throw as many lawsuits as they like that these games, but they are here to stay. Gaming is not just a kid's hobby anymore, it is an art form, and their censorship is only increasing its worth. Games are like masterpieces, the harder they make it to obtain, the more people want it. Controversy is what makes art. It is what makes media. It is what makes money.
