Comment by Chabsff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chabsff | Hacker News Reader

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It's worth pointing out that what you are fondly remembering from a consumer standpoint was an absolute nightmare from the publishers', and not just for pure greed, though that definitely plays a role.

Game consoles were (and still are to a some degree), by and large, toys. Toys that parents buy for their children with the expectation that they can be mostly left to their own devices with them. The ESRB/PEGI/etc. ratings system was put in place so that parents would be able to trust that they know what's in the toy without having to sit over the kids' shoulders every single minute they are playing. In a sense it's not unlike Mattel spending a lot of energy making sure their dolls and action figures don't pose any choking hazards.

Allowing modding breaks that system, and by extension the accompanying trust. This is a big deal for a toy manufacturer. It's also why Hot Coffee was such a mess despite the content not being normally accessible. Parents don't want to have to care about technicalities.

People like to think of this situation as a "think of the children"-type of hand-wringing, but it's actually more of a "think of the parents", who happen to be the ones with money.

Again, not discounting the greed and DRM aspects of this, and it definitely sucks pretty hard for adult users of the systems, but it's far from all there is to it.

I've never heard of a parent being concerned about console mods, of all things, and I (as a parent) don't really buy this angle. The original Xbox's weak parental controls could be bypassed by pressing X Y Left Trigger X, a tidbit that was quickly distributed throughout my middle school to let everyone launch M-rated Halo discs. Presumably if publishers were actually pressuring Microsoft to make a child-safe device, they'd have come up with a more advanced protection mechanism than that.

Modifiability/vulnerability would not affect my game console buying decision as a parent at all, provided the console had some form of cursory parental controls. I'd probably choose a console that didn't have such a simple bypass as the original Xbox, placed head to head with another console, but if my kid has to go online (!), learn about exploit development, and run some advanced tool to bypass parental controls, that's a valuable learning experience, and they were already on the Internet somehow, a much more dangerous place than an M-rated game anyway.

DRM and cheating are the drivers for game console secure boot. Cheating is getting even more important than DRM, really, IMO - it's one of the places where consoles have a huge edge over PC gaming.

Cheating is only a concern for a tiny minority of games (which, admittedly, are played by a not as tiny but still minority of gamers).

DRM (and similar locks) is a plague over general purpose computing, and therefore our liberal democracies themselves.

> Presumably if publishers were actually pressuring Microsoft to make a child-safe device, they'd have come up with a more advanced protection mechanism than that.

They did. For the next generation. They updated their model of "child safe".

Hot Coffee was in GTA: San Andreas, a game that a “Mature” rating in the US i.e. only for people of ages 17+. They cut Hot Coffee to get to Mature from Adults Only (18+). Kids shouldn’t have been anywhere near these games if parents cared about what they were looking at.

Getting GTA San Andreas from the pawn shop was the happiest moment in my pre-pubescent life, and it had nothing to do with the mature aspects of it.

At the risk of repeating myself. The issue with Hot Coffee was that it cast a huge shadow on the ESRB system itself.

German GTA: SA (and VC) was even more cut. No dismemberment, no blood, no money from corpses.

Austria imports...

I get the gore, but _no money from corpses_? Are depictions of pickpocketing illegal?

(I'm being hyperbolic here, but, it's still curious.)

There's much more detailed info what was disallowed in Vice City here (German): https://www.schnittberichte.com/schnittbericht.php?ID=3867

My memory is fuzzy but I think you couldn't be rewarded for killing people according to the BzKJ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Department_for_Media_H....

You'll note that the existence of a site dedicated to censorship in video games means this was a big thing in Germany. No longer the case as much.

Manhunt for example was forbidden to be advertised in any way (put on the "Index"), but you could sell it under the counter. Some depictions triggered rules that meant games (or videos, music) could not even present to their corresponding regulatory body, which is USK for games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterhaltungssoftware_Selbstko...) to be rated 18+.

I used to know much more about this topic, but it's 15 years in the past now... Needless to say there were a million ways to circumvent this including specialised shops, uncut patches and more.

Some more: For a brief time ragdolls in Counter Strike: Source were disallowed (defeated enemies lay down instead), blood could not be red in Halo (alien blood was okay), gibs were disabled in TF2 (corpses exploded into toys).

Germany had problems with gore whereas the US had problems with sexuality (Hot Coffee mode removal).

Maybe they could just set mods behind parental controls. The mod community is a good incubator for what you should maybe add to the game in the next release.

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