Where Politics And Video Games Collide

@ Andrew Eisen

Vance admitted that was a question for someone far more technical than her. She handled it the best she could--and obviously used [and reused] some fallback statements to those questions.

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To those who wonder the same thing as Takahashi, here's a bit about how 3D modeling and gaming works, based on our current programing standards...

Be aware, I'm not a game or 3D programmer. Just a techie who has a basic barebones knowledge of how 3D Video works.

Layers:

[Object] The character
[3D Models] The "Shape" of the Characters - Including Floors/Walls
[Texturing] The "skin" of that Character
[Animation] The action of the Textured 3D Model
[Lighting] - A (complicated) filter of how light-sources act
[Shading] - This leads to the change in color, as well as our shadows
[Special Effects] - The blurs, the particles, the pretty glowing orbs

Under this basic model, you can sometimes combine Lighting and Shading to just overall "Shading". To fully delete the scenes in question, one would have to go as far deep as removing the [Texturing] of blood and guts, the [Animation], and the underly script that controls the [Object] doing this. Bare minimum.

This leaves a few holes and pits.

The pit is a model or FUNCTION() will sometimes be left "orphaned". The FUNCTION() is coded, but it has no script that wants to call it. Yet the FUNCTION() has to be reported to the ESRB or Removed--once removed ,the game has to be recompiled AGAIN. That's a lot of time and money.

The holes are what to do with the scenes that suddenly skip the death scenes. Is it still the same game and story you want to tell? Even if it is, how do you keep the video and gametime fluid? That requires more planning, coding, animation, texturing, lighting, shading, filtering and compiling all over again . Again--that's more time and money.

Rockstar obviously feels (based on their press releases) that the mood of the game would be seriously affected by removing the death scenes. This means they had to choose a way that would keep the story--and the scenes--with the least amount of work that will go into compliance. They did that by adding a [Special Effect] - a simple blur filter. Minimal compiling needed--all they did was add a filter that goes over textured and shaded animations. There's no fault in this, and it's Rockstar's right to try to do the best they can to tell a story--and sell a product with the most profit.