Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

gazillion copies, barring some unforseen disaster
befalling your company or the industry. Create
the normal game as you’ve no doubt planned
- double dongs, cheap jokes, dead pedestrians,
decent NPR parodies and the like. Then create
an AO-rated version, where you cram in some
silliness, some sauciness and extra heapings of
violence and raunch. It doesn’t have to be any
more than some additional content and slightly
different cover art with the requisite AO plas-
tered on the corner of the box.
Sell it from your website for $5 to $7 more
than the retail price and watch the orders roll
in. If it takes off, you can sell retailers who dare
to stock it a gaudy display box with a lock and
chain around it; something that makes every
12-year-old in the vicinity feel like a jerk for
being underage. You will be condemned for your
actions from all corners, but condemnation still
equals sales in the world of media and enter-
tainment.
In case you guys haven’t noticed, the
political hammer is going to drop on you no
matter what you do. You make games that allow
people to do some vile stuff, and you all live
well because of it. You are Willie Horton - Hillary
Clinton and Rick Santorum have combined to
form Bush the Elder and the ESA is too busy
playing Dukakis in a stupid tank to stand up for
you. Everyone’s too worried about the FTC and
congressional sessions to give thought to the
most important opportunity here.
Embracing the AO label, rescuing it from
the mire of tentacle rape and strip poker games
and turning it into an object of resistance and
boob jokes the likes of which this world has
never seen - this is the path of legends. It’s
fraught with danger, but your brand is so strong
that you’d have to pull a repeat of this Hot Cof-
fee screwup to not score big.
There are other incentives, like pushing
forward the industry by boldly drawing the line
between adult and child-safe content, helping
add insulation to future dealings with politicos
and press and creating a precedent for courts to
easily reference in regards to the artistic merits
of video games. Most exciting is the idea that
some day an adult game maker will make a
game for adults, with adult themes, for an adult
audience, and turn to the AO label - not out of
shame, but out of a desire to make our genera-
tions’ digital Ulysses or Tropic of Capricorn.
But these are less important for a company
in the long run than the pursuit of better sales,
and if they come to pass it will be as a side-
benefit of the creative destruction of capitalism
rather than Rockstar putting their nose in the
line of fire for the sake of artistic freedom.
As of early August, word came through that
EA is hosting a 1,000USD-per-plate fundraising
dinner for Senator Clinton, which Mr. Lowenstein
will be attending. Even if you guys have been
too busy stomping hookers to read classical
Italian political science revenge fantasies, the
IP-bots at EA clearly have a tremendous interest
in keeping the industry static. If this doesn’t
worry your merry little band of Scottish socio-
path simulator stimulators, then you deserve to
become just a footnote in history.
luv,
mike
Open Letter to Rockstar 109