Gamasutra.com - Issues: Hot Coffee's Effects on the Mod Scene


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By Brenda Brathwaite
[Author's Bio]
Gamasutra
October 27, 2006

Issues: Hot Coffee's Effects on the Mod Scene

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Hot Coffee's Effects on the Mod Scene

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Looking back on the controversy, Patricia Vance, Executive Director of the ESRB, acknowledges the dual role that modders play. “It has always been clear that mods can add value to and extend the life of a game through the addition of new content, and even act as an incubator for new ideas and new game concepts that may serve as models for game publishers in the future.”

For Vance, however, the positives of modding may be outweighed by the negatives. “[T]he undeniable reality is that mods can also introduce content into a game that isn't in line with the rating assigned by ESRB, and of course that can be a concern. Parents rely on the ratings to inform them about what they can expect to find in a game. When mods change games in ways that parents didn’t and, in fact, couldn't anticipate, the risk is that those parents may lose a degree of trust of the ratings. Clearly, we all have an interest in making sure parents can trust the ratings.”

GTAGarage.com, the original resource for the "Hot Coffee" mod, has taken the necessary downloads offline voluntarily.

In order to protect the trust it has tried to build up with parents, following the Hot Coffee controversy, the ESRB put some of the onus on the people who develop and publish games. “We asked the industry as a whole to be more conscious of how mods might impact ratings, however whether that might be happening is more a question for publishers than for the ESRB,” Vance said. “That being said, it is obviously impossible for the ESRB to consider content that may at some point be introduced into a game by a third party. The most and best that ESRB can do when it comes to ensuring that its rating assignments are accurate is to obligate publishers to disclose all pertinent content they produced and will ship with the game, including, as of July 2005, content that may not be playable (i.e. ‘locked out’), but will exist in the code on the final game disc.”

For the ESRB, this disclosure policy ensures that their ratings are truly reflective of the publisher-created product as a whole. When it comes to mods, however, Vance noted that the “ESRB has no ability nor intention of holding publishers accountable for the actions of third parties who independently introduce newly created content into a game through their own modifications. We simply want them to be aware of the risks it presents in terms of consumer trust in our system, and when warranted, desirable or possible to try to do something about it.”

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