Well, a law that would require video games with 'sexually explicit' content to be defined was struck down in Illinois, according to DailyTech: Judge Matthew F. Kennelly ruled yesterday that the SEVGL was unconstitutional, a decision that the State is currently appealing. Specifically, the court concluded that the SEVGL was not narrowly tailored and that the SEVGL’s brochure, labeling and signage provisions constituted “compelled speech” in violation of the First Amendment. Now, the idea isn't bad, but this would clump any game in with the likes of Leisure Suit Larry and Playboy: The Mansion that has 'sexually explicit' content. Yes, games like Oblivion would be clumped in with Leisure Suit Larry. I'm not opposed to this, but in it's current state, it's way too broad and would blacklist more games than it's meant to. Oh, yeah, don't we already have the ESRB for this kinda thing?
When I think sexually explicit games I don't think of ones like Oblivion where there's a patch to show off a few boobs. I think of games (the very, very few that there are) that actually involve sex on some heightened level. Singles and Leisure Suit Larry: Uncut and Uncensored are the only ones that come to mind.
Yeah, and I don't have a problem with the attempt to bring attention to the games like Playboy. I do think it's overdoing it, given that the ESRB ratings will tell exactly why the game got that particular rating. Parental Advisory stickers on the other hand, have just started to crack down on making use of them and added the reason for the sticker. Even movie ratings wouldn't give an exact reason as to why it got that rating until a few years ago. Yet, despite all this, video games are a scapegoat. If it wasn't video games, it would be something else. Never mind the facts.
The one thing that really differs about videogame ratings and movie ratings is videogame ratings are very generic and there are only a handful of reasonings floating around. We've all seen violence, or now intense violence (I'm still not sure what in a game warrents that exact rating, FarCry for instance got it), or suggestive themes etc. But movies have really descriptive ratings oftentimes with something like "Extreme depictions of very bad weather" for Twister or pronlonged sequences of a non-stop action violence and and brief stong language for instance. I'd like to see ESRB get a little more variety and description in with their ratings so people know what to expect. Way back I think there was almost a better system for the big three (language, sex, and violence) with graphical bars representing the sexual content, violence, and language levels of the game, I'm not sure what happened to that, it didn't seem to make it past the mid 90's.
The hidden code in the GTA san andreas was another game with sexually explicit content. There arent really that many. not enough to make a ruling on it
That's true but, like with Oblivion, these features aren't there from the get-go, you have to download some 3rd party patches for them to work, it's not in the origional game design really. (so console versions need-not apply I suppose).
