July 20, 2005, 16:15 Culture

Clinton fell in love with a scumbag

Semyon Kvasha The scandal surrounding the game GTA: San Andreas continues. Hilary Clinton, who showed the game to her husband for expert purposes, demands a ban on the murder of prostitutes and brutal sex.

The computer game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, one of the best and certainly the most meaningful games of our time, very beautifully drawn, realistic, with the best soundtrack since the first “Quake” with Nine inch nails music and the most “literary” plot, it seems. must become a scapegoat.

The whole problem, let us remind you, is in the additional code, a “cheat” for the game called Hot Coffee, by downloading which from a completely unrelated source, not related to the producers and distributors of the game, you can add scenes of real pornography into it - of course, in the same style 3- d animations like the rest of the game.

Where this “cheat” came from is now being clarified.

At first, Rockstar Games' PR people completely disowned it, but now one of the game's creators, programmer Patrick Wildenborg, is almost ready to admit that overly explicit scenes were included in the original script, but then they were cut out, although not completely cleaned up, and a small addition to the program only activated the lost code.

Various critics demand an immediate increase in its rating, transfer to the category of products “for adults only”, relocation to the shelves of pornography and, accordingly, a radical drop in sales. More serious organizations, such as the Parents Television Council, a public organization that monitors obscenity in the media, demand an immediate ban and withdrawal of the game.

Two senators also spoke in favor of the ban: Lieberman and the wife of the former president, one of the most likely future candidates for the top post in the US administration , Hillary Clinton .

It turned out quite funny with Lieberman.

As always happens when a porn scandal breaks out on the Internet, it becomes very difficult to find the original link. Lieberman also did not find Hot Coffee and wrote an open letter to Rockstar Games. “I'm terribly intrigued. I can't find this link. Send it to me please! I really need her for my work - you see, I have a duty to protect the American people from people like you,” as quoted by The Spoof.

Among the defenders of the GTA was Bill Clinton , saxophonist, writer and former US President. His wife slipped him a toy. “He has free time, he’s on the computer all the time, and I have no way to play this game and find Hot Coffee. Now I can interview him, and no one can blame me for demanding that something that I have not seen be banned,” said Madam Senator.

Clinton was delighted. “They're really sick... This is the greatest pleasure I've had since... well... the last two weeks for sure. This is just super,” Clinton was quoted as saying by The Spoof.

Really, just great. The game is a scumbag simulator. The scumbag - completely black, of course - hangs around a fictional criminal area, steals cars, takes part in mafia fights, beats up random passers-by and sometimes kills police officers. In the game there is, for example, the following episode: the hero seeks the services of a prostitute. This is not shown in detail on the screen, but at the end of the transaction you can pay her money, or you can kill her, saving several tens of dollars.

Some critics, such as the incredibly thorough and consistent Mike Elgan of Personal Tech Pipeline, ask a reasonable question: what, before the game was completely normal, decent and good enough for children, but after they inserted a short sex scene into it, it is quite normal for a film rated R, let's say, they immediately began to ban it?

However, Elgan and his ilk do not go too far with their conclusions. They say:

“What good can a computer game about a scumbag, in which the player associates himself with a sociopathic scoundrel, teach your child?”

The only problem is that this question has already been asked more than once - then, however, it was about literary works and films (“Pulp Fiction” or “Doberman” are good examples).

There is a ready answer to this question: art can deal with scum and continue to be art.

Then we can ask whether we are ready to consider computer games art (and why, in fact, not?), and then we can further ask ourselves whether we should protect children from this art, and if so, how to do it.

True, there are still specifics. In entire states in the United States, schoolchildren study creationism at school - the concept according to which the entire world, living and inanimate, was created in six days about five thousand years ago. And the fossilized remains of dinosaurs in Georgia are explained by the fact that dinosaurs lived on earth before Adam and Eve, when the planet was inhabited by angels.

It is especially difficult to have a public discussion about art, scum, pornography and the role of parents in education and censorship of information reaching their children under such conditions.