Mod Community Tries to Adapt to a Post-Hot Coffee World

@Kyo

I'm sure you can make the argument. Unfortunately you can't make the argument based on anything other than opinion or suspicion, the value of which is exactly zero. And Rockstar -didn't- stand to benefit from it, as the FTC and SEC reaming they've been suffering has demonstrated.

As for Disney, those stories are 99% bull. There are no hidden lewd scenes in any disney movie inserted by animators, there's no subliminal spoken messages in Aladdin. There's precisely -one- place where adult content slipped into a disney movie: A tiny, blurred image of a topless woman was inserted into the background layer of -One- frame of The Rescuers during post-production (not by any of the animators but by someone assembling the reels). Disney found out about it and recalled about three million copies of the VHS Tape, and it was fixed in the DVD rerelease. Of course I'm guessing that most of the people here have never even heard -that- story, despite it being the only true one.

As for the modding community in general, the point is that the ESRB and ESA have made statements hostile to modding in general, suggesting that game developers should consider taking steps to make modding difficult or pursue legal action against modding communities. When the two biggest "official" bodies associated with gaming make comments like that, it's concerning for mod communities.

@Fandel
Not really. In either case it wasn't the intent of the game designers for that content to be accessible, and in both cases it takes an entire series of conscious choices (search out the mod, download it, install it) to get to the content. In addition, there's no nudity in the original Hot Coffee code. That WAS third-party content.

And I agree 100% with the idea of a "Third-Party Mods may alter rating" label. It's a good idea, although it's somewhat pathetic that it has to be mentioned at all. Most people seem to understand that when they install third-party mods to other things they buy (cell phones, cars, lawnmowers, etc) that it voids the warranty and may impact how they function...

As for various developers' response to modders, it varies. NWN is a good example of strong support for community content. Elder Scrolls USED to be but isn't any more (ask anyone who created mods for Morrowind and then found out how crippled the tools were for Oblivion so that BethSoft could safely sell certain types of objects in micropayments without competition). Then there was that priceless quote from Jeff Brown of EA who compared third-party mods to vandalizing works of art by scribbling moustaches over the lips of the people in them.

This is the main reason why I'm not with the whole ESA/Video game voters bandwagon. A lot of gamers here, and all over the Internet seem to blindly follow the ESA lock step, particularly when it comes to video game legislation.

Don't get me wrong. I'm on the same side a the ESA when it comes to the unconstitutionality of all the video game bills that have come up in both state, and federal governments. But what about other issued besides the issue of video game regulation?

I have a feeling that after the issue of video game regulation gets put on the back burner, that the ESA will start going after the people who created mods. With other issues like DRM, game property rights, and what-not. Gamers may find that they may have less in common with the ESA than they think.

Er, that "agreed" was to MaskedPixelante. Fandel's post wasn't there when I pushed the button. (

Lol, Chilling effect.


But really, this sucks.

@eXm

"So let’s follow their logic with, say, movies. I rip “Bambi” into my computer. In the middle I insert a little animated porn sequence that I made myself of Bambi and Thumper doing the nasty. I then put this on the internet. Because of this, Bambi should now be rated “X” and all dvds pulled and remanufactured with the new rating."

Well, actually, that's the wrong analogy. Because the mos that was used to enable Hot Coffee didn't put anything in the game. It simply unlocked programing code that was already tucked away in the game.

The more appropriate analogy would be if the producers of the Bambi movie were to hide a secret sex scene, then encrypt the data in the disk. Then you put the disk in your PC, and used a program to unlock the data in the game.

Hot Coffee wasn't inserted into GTA:SA. It only unlocked code that was already on the disk; that makes a huge difference.

Somehow I can't believe Hot Coffee is still an issue, but here goes...

What I believe should have been done, is that both parties should have equally been blamed. With Rockstar Games the blame to them goes for even putting the Hot Coffee content in there to begin with, even if it was unlocked. It was still there and the people at R* who put it in there should have known better and realized the financial, moral, and PR problems it would cause for their company and especially the game industry in general. Blame also goes to Patrick Wildenborg and anyone else who helped create the game mod to begin with because although Rockstar were the ones to create it, the consumers wouldn't have seen it if it wasn't for those modders themselves.

Believe it or not, but I seen that mod on GTAGarage.com just a few days before the whole mess started and I vividly remember seeing it say in the notes that Hot Coffee v2 added in nudity, which proves itself that the nudity was not R*'s fault. Also if you ask me there should have been some sort of age verification for the download of Hot Coffee so that the anti-game pundits can't sit there and say to the industry "You are trying to corrupt our children! You are evil!" But there wasn't no age verification was there? I've been downloading the "Nude Raider" patches for the Tomb Raider games since I was about 13 or 14 years old and there were no age verifications for that shit. Something should have been done in regards to age verification for this so it wouldn't be as much of a problem getting into the hands of the underage consumer.

All in all, I think both TT/R* as well as the modders who were involved should take blame as the game industry already has enough of a bad image due to school shooting being inspired by Doom or that Grand Theft Auto thingy. This just adding fuel to the fire that's already burning strong and allowed JT to come to the mainstream conciousness. Good work R* and thanks a lot Pat.

But what surprises me is the utter lack of research and knowledge on the part of parents and JT. What I find surprising about JT is that when he was talking about Hot Coffee he only referenced the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game, not the PC version where all shit hit the fan with the content, which in turn makes unknowledge parents think that the content is easily found through some cheat code or activated by player actions or whatever the hell they believe in the console versions they might have bought for their kids, when in fact they aren't. It's the PC version where the content can more easily be seen, but for some reason a lot of people don't realize that.

Also, while I'm all in support of the ESRB boss Patricia Vance's view, there is one point I don't like of hers:

“[T]he undeniable reality is that mods can also introduce content into a game that isn't in line with the rating assigned by ESRB, and of course that can be a concern. Parents rely on the ratings to inform them about what they can expect to find in a game. When mods change games in ways that parents didn’t and, in fact, couldn't anticipate, the risk is that those parents may lose a degree of trust of the ratings. Clearly, we all have an interest in making sure parents can trust the ratings.”

While it is a good point, I don't like it. What this says to me is that we, as a gaming community, should do is watch what mods we create because the unknowledge parents might not trust games, the games industry, or the rating system. It basically boils down to the question, should we water down, dumb down or change how the game community does things so that the non-gamers can understand and trust it, or should we keep continuing to do things the way we do already and keep creating great mods? I personally vie for the latter of the two. We see an industry and game mod community caving into pressures of being watched for potentially harmful, obscene, or questionable content and thus restricting themselves which I think is extremely unfair to those modders and prospective future game makers who want to expand their horizons. If the parents, politicians, and non-gaming media don't understand it then oh well, that is THEIR problem for not looking further into the things they don't understand and insult. Hell, I myself am willing to try to do research into things that I don't really understand to better understand them which makes me look in shame at people two or three times my age that can't do the fucking same.

I don't agree with Patricia's stance on that because it leaves it open for the non-gamers to continue to be stupid about the industry. I know she wants for parents to trust the ESRB rating system but the trust they have in it and be more educated, but I don't think that the gaming industry should do anything too big to adjust to the demands of the unknowledged and instead should do research about what the game community is about instead of feeling, saying or doing things in private or public about something they don't fully comprehend, in order not to restrict the creative freedoms of a growing entertainment medium.

I'm all in favor of educating the uneducated, but this shit crosses the line. Now modders are afraid to create anything because now it is in the public eye of what mods can do, no thanks to the fear-mongering media, vote-grabbing pols, and money grubbing lawyers using this as another stepping stone in whatever cause or agenda they have blasting the game industry. It just sickens me!

/rant

To use a movie anology, for Hot Coffee and not the general new content modding, would be something like South Park. It had to be cut multple times to fit into an R rating. If someone broke into the cutting room, coppied the cuts, and spliced them back into the movie and released that on the internet. Suddenly that release becomes NC-17.

With Hot Coffee, they submited it or pre-submission thought 'Well hell, this may prevent our M rating. We do not want AO, put it on the cutting room floor.' However, there is a problem.

In the fist case, the downloader may not know the contant has been sliced back in. In the second case, when you download something called HotCoffee_SexGame_Unlocker.exe you know damn well what your adding back into the game.

So acctualy, it is hard to make any fair comparison.

In a way, I can almost not blame Rockstar for their INITIAL reaction to the release of the Hot Coffee mod.

If you think about it, the image that anti-game zealots try to put out there of Rockstar as a corporation knowing all along this code was there and deliberately lying about it just wasn't true. On a corporate level, making such a decision would be suicide.

The far, far, FAR more likely scenario is that it was a couple of rogue programmers with a questionable sense of humor who developed the code to entertain themselves, and then were a bit sloppy in just making the code inaccessible on the final cut instead of removing it completely.

So the news of Hot Coffee breaks, and the actual suits at Rockstar and the media people have no idea that it really is in the game and absolutely no reason to assume that it is, so they assume it's the work of some outside agency (hackers and the like). Stating a falsehood in ignorance and lying really aren't the same thing.

And then either the programmers fess up, or Rockstar does a quick investigation. Either way, they find out it IS them, and by that time, everything's gone to hell because that's already been confirmed on the outside anyway.

Where Rockstar's mistake corporately was was twofold:

1. Not then apologizing to the outside sources, like the modding community.

2. Not then explaining the real story... and instead accepting judgments like that the company as a whole was marketing this material because it seems expedient to put the matter behind them and this seems like a short cut. It isn't.

# eXm Says:
October 29th, 2006 at 11:30 am

So let’s follow their logic with, say, movies. I rip “Bambi” into my computer. In the middle I insert a little animated porn sequence that I made myself of Bambi and Thumper doing the nasty. I then put this on the internet. Because of this, Bambi should now be rated “X” and all dvds pulled and remanufactured with the new rating.

Uh huh..

QFT (That stands for "Quoted for Truth" for anyone who was wondering)

@Boffo97

Actually, the real story is simply that it -was- part of the official development process and that it was decided later on to cut it. It's extremely common to leave unfinished or unutilized bits of code on the final master (It's all the sound files and half-finished cutscene/animation data that's allowing the KOTOR 2 Restoration Project to finish the "real" ending that Obsidian had to axe to ship the game to LucasArts' deadline, for example). To give another reason for the content being left on the disk, part of the animation from Hot Coffee is used in the final version of the game (the oral sex animation, specifically, and in the crack house you raid in one of the early missions if I remember correctly). It's easier to just keep the structure in its entirety than to try and delete the entire minigame -except- for the animations you still need, then finding someplace else to put the animation, then restructuring all the code that calls that animation so it references the new location.

@Kyouryuu

Yeah, I know it's sounded exaggerated, sorry. I was basing that off of the article and what it was saying about how modders are reacting to it. I don't think the anti-game haters are going to stop it at all, but I kind of feel sorry for these people the article mentions.

I myself don't think the mod community is going down and instead want it to go full force as it has been for many years. I have a few mods that I'm awaiting myself. ;)

@Kyo

"How do you know what the “real story” is?"

Because I've been paying attention. The FTC investigation has been concluded, and while they decided that not informing consumers that sexual animations and textures existed on the disk was "deceptive" they also concluded that the developers did not -intend- for the content to be accessible. Read the FTC documentation on the case, as well as Rockstar's response. Again, they had a reason to leave the code in, (assets from it were used in the game, specifically the oral sex animation in the crack house mission) and even if they didn't need that animation leaving partially finished or "cut for time" code and art assets on a disk is SOP for the game industry (note the unused models and textures in HL and HL2, the unused items in Fallout 1 and 2, character animations and dialog files for KOTOR 2). In short, I'm sticking with the account that is consistent with A) the FTC Investigation B) Rockstar's story, C) the nature of the mod and the game, and D) the way that games are made. Simplest explanation that fits all the facts and is consistent with the motivations of everyone involved. If you want to fantasize about hidden motives and conspiracies on Rockstar's part that are entirely against their own self-interest, I suppose you can, but it's not supported by the facts (in fact several of the facts make that explanation less plausible) and involves unnecessary and unsupported ad hoc hypotheses.

As for GTA's success, controversy doesn't guarantee success. Postal and Postal 2 are just as controversial if not more so. And yet Running With Scissors' games have been ripped by critics for the most part and sell only moderately well while the GTA games have won award after award and have received extremely positive reviews. It's not controversy that leads to their success, it's solid design and a mastery of open-ended gameplay. Even people only casually connected with games understand that: note the comments made by the writer in the SF Chronicle piece.

@ Brer

"Because I’ve been paying attention. The FTC investigation has been concluded, and while they decided that not informing consumers that sexual animations and textures existed on the disk was “deceptive” they also concluded that the developers did not -intend- for the content to be accessible."

So your telling me the crackhouse scene that has the crackwhore giving a bj to someone in the corner is not a sexual animation? Your telling me that on the BACK of the box that says "Mature Adult Situations" is NOT informing consumers that sexual animations and texture on the disks were not intended to be there? That this is all deceptive?

Is ANYONE out there really PAYING ATTENTION to the report or just reading it and picking parts they seem to like. Because in essence that is what is going on wiht the mod community and people that are against games as a whole. Picking what makes their argument stronger when the whole is a solid foundation of EVERYTHING that makes our gaming culture what it is.

Whether R* is full of crap and gave a crappy explaination with their pants down or the FTC investigation is just a bunch of idiots that cannot do the even basic of investigations even in analyzing the crap they are reporting to the public, I think we need t make up our OWN minds. Make out OWN mods, and let these people know that well..the FCC and FTC is taking away the sex from games...we feel we need it and we'll put it in if we want to. Or, I believe that the physics in this game is all f-ed up, we'll mod it and make it y'know...fun.

The worse thing for us as a gaming community is to become polarized with this issue that is modding and development. When the few of us that are here actually break through to the gaming industry will you be scared shitless to make any new and innovative story or game? The answer to these are the choices WE make now in protecting what little control we have left of our games.

~Brother Darqness

Those who cry fail over whats in todays games or films should maybe rethink how they want to see their kids to grow up, because I'd want my kids to be motivated into a good job, and not in some south London gang as young as 10 years old carrying a gun in fear of their lifes, mostly because they wasn't given the right up bringing or dont have nothing better to do.

I believe that kids today do know the difference between whats in a video game, tv or film, and what not to do in real life, and thats up to the perants as well to do their part.

Modding will never go away, as this is growing tend thats been around for at least 20 years, but in fact there are companies out there now designing games that do allow modding.

This is good, this allows the user to be creative and learn the skills that may become useful in their future career, instead of just playing a game with a limited life span.

Rockstar you could release/ or sell a kit that allows users to start their own projects, by doing this, those who make the mods will be responsible for their own actions.

If this happens, We could get mods registered with a body like the ESRB, and make sure those behind the mods following steps on creating good content, also get sure that right permissions was given from the software/ film company (Author) in question, but only if their project oversteps any copyright content.

Now the modding communities out there like GTAforums, MODDB should be actively supporting the above suggest ideas.

This would also stop mods like HC from happening again, because it would give the rating body like the (ESRB) more powers to act against those who create mods unfit for minors.

R* would profit for sure, Modding communities could make a profit, because you could set up a system to subscribe to download the mods, This way ensure that the right people are able to use them.

I personally think that modifying games only makes games much better in the future, And that stuff like the "hot coffee" should be moderated in a way where you have to Pay or have some way of age consent in order to get it. i hope that game modifiers will not be scared off by this sort of bull shit, Keep doing what you are doing. some of the best programmers got there start in game mods. so um yeah.