However, if we seriously look at the Hot Coffee minigame, we can find that the content contained in it didn’t cross the line into what would generally be considered above an R rating-there’s thrusting and flopping around, but no graphic nudity beyond backsides. The ESRB retracted their original rating for the game and rerated it as AO (also adding “Nudity” to the content descriptors), forcing Rockstar Games to patch/re-release the game to make the content completely inaccessible. However, as I’ve dug more into this incident, I’ve found even more peculiar things about it that I’d like to share in this post.įor the few that may be unfamiliar, retail copies of San Andreas were recalled in (North America?) after modders unlocked a sex-based minigame that had been removed before the game’s release but was still in the game’s files. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is perhaps the most well-known example on this list, and this won’t be our first time talking about it on this blog.

Now, you may be asking to yourself, “What does this have to do with age ratings?” Well, the controversies I’m showcasing here all have something in common-they were easily avoidable if a few people would’ve either looked at or looked at the associated advice of an age rating.

I’ll be talking about five of these incidents in this post. However, some of these controversies can simply be summarized as “much ado about nothing.” When it came to these incidents, news outlets all of a sudden didn’t feel the need to fact-check, and the public went into a panic about something that didn’t actually exist. This is perhaps due to common stereotypes about gamers as antisocial, violent, and misogynistic.

Rather it be a mass shooter who so happened to like video games or someone making an exploitation film-esque apocalypse game, games have never been given the same liberty or benefit of the doubt that films, television series, and books often do. Every year seems to have at least a couple video game-related controversies.

Senran kagura reflexions esrb