Week of July 24, 2005

The public debate about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas seems to have reignited a much wider one about online kids' exposure to pornography in general. But the GTA discussion itself has broadened too. I'll start with the latest on that:

Latest developments. The House of Representatives added its voice to those of Sens. Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman in calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether San Andreas's makers, Rockstar Games and its parent Take Two Interactive, had deceived the gaming industry's rating board by not revealing the presence of sexually explicit content in the game, the Associated Press reports. The House passed the resolution 355-21. Then, "fresh from the fallout" over GTA, "an anti-game crusader is pressuring Electronic Arts to take action against those who modify another game, 'The Sims 2,'" in a way that "unblurs" naked characters in that game, the San Jose Mercury News reports. "Jack Thompson, a Florida attorney who has tangled often with the makers of video games," says Sims 2 should be "next on the list to be re-rated as an 'adults only' game." EA responded that this was "nonsense," since even when the mod's in place, the "naked" characters look like store mannequins - they're not anatomically correct.

For perspective, the Wall Street Journal reports that mods and "Easter eggs" are nothing new, and most aren't nearly as risqué as the "Hot Coffee" mod (for GTA: San Andreas) that sparked all the controversy. [Mods are bits of code circulating the Net that gamers can download to modify games, Easter eggs are hidden content within games and DVDs that are "unlocked" by mods or found in a kind of treasure hunt done with a remote. Many parents have heard of a third game tweak or add-on called "cheats," which are codes gamers get on the Web to enhance a character's powers, go to the next level, etc.]

On the broader debate, NBC's Today show and Wireless Week pointed to a new study by the "liberal think tank" Third Way about porn and online kids. Finding that a third of kids 11-17 have their own cellphones today and half will in the next couple of years, the study says "wireless technology opens the door for more unsupervised access by minors to online pornography." It cites other studies showing that "the largest group of consumers of adult material on the Internet was 12-17 years old and that 57% of 9-to-19-year-olds with Internet access have accessed online porn." Looking at adult content on phones, the study said "pornography already constitutes half of the multimedia traffic carried by US wireless carriers outside of their own portals," and it cites Juniper Research figures showing that "pornography delivered via mobile devices is projected to increase by more than 50% this year and perhaps triple by 2009."

New legislation in the works. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D) of Arkansas announced she will introduce the "Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005," the Associated Press reports. The bill would include a 25% federal tax on Net pornography and "new requirements for adult Web sites to help prevent children from looking at them." The AP added that "money collected from the tax would be used for law enforcement and for protecting children from Internet-related crimes." At the state level, a law signed Monday by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich "to prohibit the sale and rental of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors is already being challenged in federal court," reports the Champaign-Urbana (Ill.) News-Gazette.