On the side of a bus kiosk in South Florida, there is a poster.
On the poster is a drawing of a man. The man is sneering, but he’s not doing anything remotely pornographic or violent. He’s not doing anything, really. There are some words on the poster, too. They’re not obscene. Nor do they incite violence.
The poster is an ad for Grand Theft Auto IV.
And anti-game Miami attorney Jack Thompson wants it torn down.
Thompson, a long time critic of the Grand Theft Auto series, apparently took note of Monday’s GamePolitics report detailing the Chicago Transit Authority’s removal of GTA IV ads from its buses and facilities. In an e-mail sent today to Miami Mayor Carlos Alvarez, Thompson, who took the picture that accompanies this article, writes:
I was shocked today to see a six-foot-high advertisement for Grand Theft Auto IV, a hyperviolent video game… on the side of a Metro Miami-Dade bus stop located… near Children’s Hospital. In fact, the advertisement was adjacent to a kids’ park…
The Grand Theft Auto games have been obsessively played by a number of teens who have then copycatted the outrageous, sociopathic violence in the games and killed innocent people…
The ESRB descriptor on GTA IV indicates this game contains “Strong Sexual Content.” The sale of this game to any minor will constitute a criminal act violative of… Florida’s “Sexual Material Harmful to Minors Law”…
There are also several paragraphs of Thompson’s standard I’ve been on 60 Minutes with Ed Bradley… GTA is cop killer game… etc, etc, etc…
GP: It will be interesting to see how the mayor reacts. And how the game industry will respond to any potential order to remove the ads. From here, any such action by the mayor’s office or the quasi-governmental transit company would seem to be a First Amendment violation.
While the game biz has passively rolled over and accepted past removals of GTA ads from transit vehicles in Boston, Portland and now Chicago, it’s about time they made a stand on this issue.
Allowing attention-hungry critics or mayors or transit agencies to force the removal of an ad with no offensive content is not only a free speech violation, but it demonizes GTA IV and, by extension, demonizes the millions of gamers who will be playing the game when it launches next week.
As we have pointed out, the 1st US Circuit Court ruled in Change the Climate vs. Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority that bus company censorship of ads based on viewpoint is unconstitutional.
