GTA 6 Gets A Nudity Pass That Indies Don't For One Weird Reason
This isn't a moral or ethical issue — boringly, it's about regulation
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The trickle of Grand Theft Auto 6 information continues; as I write this, I just got a press release from Rockstar about the game's radio stations. (Actually, that's a pretty big deal.) This campaign has had several lifecycles: first, the trailers and delays, then the long leak era, and more recently, the official blowout.
This began with a half-hour gameplay demo on Netflix and moved on to multiple big previews in the games press. Now, Rockstar's well-established PR playbook has entered its "arty fashion magazines" phase. The extremely cool-seeming Love magazine just ran a cover story on GTA 6, mixing the usual hype — every NPC is a distinct individual, apparently; I'm sure I've heard that one before — with some genuinely thoughtful quotes about how the new game evolves GTA's satirization, or reflection, of the American dream.
Fair play to Rockstar for supporting print media. But in the competition to stay relevant on the most important video game release of the decade (maybe ever), the barrel has no bottom. Perhaps in response to the Love piece, perhaps taking up arms in the long-forgotten war between specialist and lifestyle media, IGN this week took the unusual step of publishing the full, unedited transcript of the gameplay demo with Rockstar's Rob Nelson that informed its coverage back in August. All 10,000 words of it.
But with a game this big (in all senses), that's fair game — and, it turns out, worth doing. Our collective appetite for new info on this game remains insatiable, and there were enough crumbs here to sustain us a little longer.
In fact, we have reached such an advanced stage of GTA 6 delirium that IGN's Rachel Weber was forced to run a follow-up story denying that she had seen the protagonist Jason's penis during a shower scene. This inspired leaker Cyberleek to break their recent silence by releasing a ton of naked-Jason footage. The video confirmed that, yes, in GTA 6, Jason's member is rendered.
It's all good fun, and follows last week's confirmation that the game will feature sex scenes. That, however, raised a more serious point. How come the biggest developer in the world gets to explore sex in its games, when others get censored? Last summer, swathes of indie games with adult themes — some pornographic, some serious, some both — were unilaterally delisted by Steam and itch.io under pressure from payment processors, who themselves were under pressure from conservative activist groups. Is a double standard in play?
Perhaps not. UK games commentator George Osborn posted an interesting thread on the topic, which I recommend you read, but the TL;DR is that the issue is that online stores like Steam and itch are not subject to age rating regulation the way games with physical releases (like GTA 6, even if it's just a code in a box) are. This might sound like more freedom and less censorship, but in reality, it's the opposite.
https://www.polygon.com/gta-6-cocaine-drugs-effects/
It means the platforms have no legal definitions or protections surrounding the games they sell, and often, no idea what the content of those games is actually like. That makes them much more vulnerable to external pressure of the sort we saw last year. An age-rated game is a game that has had its content verified according to what is legally permissible in that country. And if it's legal, nobody can be stopped from selling it.
It's weird to end a column about video game dicks with a call for more regulation, but this is the point. In the UK, where I live — and I think in the US, still, too — it is our legal right to look at a digital penis if we want to. Enshrining that right means platforms and indie developers submitting themselves to paperwork and red tape. But it's worth it. Free the dong!
Plus this: