Right: is Hillary successfully sucking up to "values voters" -- or is she just losing liberal voters?

I am anti-censorship and share your sentiment. I'm not sure, however, that this won't play well with a fair slice of the electorate.

Hillary has a good ear for politics. She's recently flirted with the prospect of outflanking the GOP to the right on illegal immigration (which isn't hard, since the national GOP's current stance on that issue is a hard-left one). That is really savvy; she is zeroing in on the weakest point in the current Republican coalition.

Bashing the GTA games? Not so important. But a decent piece of "family values" political theater.

I must also concede that the GTA games are highly disturbing. I threw away my copy of GTA: Vice City after playing it for a couple of months and vowed never to touch them again. The games are extremely rich, detailed, clever, and well-made, which makes their chilling amorality even worse from this point of view.

Right! I would never want my kids playing GTA, but not because they might be able to make the gun-toting guy pictured above have sex with someone. If you were going to have a legitimate family values problem with GTA, you would have had it long before this software patch appeared.

As for whether this'll play well with the electorate -- specifically, with "values voters" in the south/midwest (or even in rural parts of northern states like PA or MI):

(1) I doubt it'll work; she has 10+ years of a bad image to overcome with those folks.

(2) But this is probably her best bet to TRY to woo those voters. It's the old Bill Clinton strategy of focusing on small, popular issues (a strategy W has emulated, such as with a small environmental program that doesn't really amount to anything but makes him sound progressive if you're not really paying attention).

Agree with Prof. Hurt: The carefully simulated, interactive hits and drive-by shootings -- a standard feature of the GTA games -- are much worse than whatever smut you can download off the Web to ice the cake.

As a gun owner, I was particularly disturbed to find that the gun store in downtown Vice City sells a vintage 6" .357 Colt Python, just like the one in my real-life gun case, which you are then encouraged to use to rob and assassinate people. For some reason that felt especially gross, and it was one of the things that convinced me the game had to go.

I agree that Sen. Clinton is simply trying to pick-up "family-value" (whatever that means) conservatives. I agree that it doesn’t seem very presidential (maybe it should?!).

However, the problem lies in the rating. If Rockstar (the games creator) intentionally put the sex stuff in the game, then the game should have the Adults Only rating. (this is in dispute -- Rockstar claims that people "added" this feature -- the hackers claim that they merely enabled it -- I believe the hackers side of the story)

A 17 year old going to a theater to see a R movie with a "soft-core" sex scene is not analogous. This is what one would expect.

A 17 year old going to a theater to see a R movie with a "hard-core" porno scene is analogous. This is not what one would expect.

The buyers were not getting what they expected. (I think) People (including many parents) can look beyond hyperbolized drugs/violence (Pulp Fiction/Indiana Jones), but not hyperbolized sex (Throbb’n Hood: Prince of Beaves).

Lastly (this has kinda jumped around -- I am not sure I am making my legal writing professor proud), if Rockstar created the sex feature but merely disabled it (which is what I believe), then I predict that the sex feature was disabled after the ESRB gave the game an Adults Only rating, which subsequently dropped the game to a Mature rating. If so, should/does Rockstar owe a duty to completely remove the feature or make it more difficult for hackers to enable?

im a lifelong "New Deal" Democrat and i cant stand Hillary Clinton. somedays i feel like the Clintons think that the Democratic Party is simply just a means to achieve their personal goals-becoming President. its very frustrating to watch this, the party needs to look outside of the beltway for a real leader. this latest incident is just another nail in her coffin as far as im concerned. i think the Dems are just floundering around right now the way the GOP was in the 60s & 70s before Reagan came along and put together his 'Conservative Coalition.' the Dems need a real, capital D Democrat that all of America can trust and respect-and thus win some of these "red states."

Never mind that consumers should be 17 to play Grand Theft Auto and that 17 year-olds can legally walk into a movie theater and watch real, live people simulate sex in an R-rated movie.

You can't "never mind" that. Children play these games -- I've seen it.

Unless you have kids, this issue really doesn't affect you in the least. It means, at worst, that GTA has to update its warning label. Big deal.

This is so annoying..At least in New Zealand, if you buy Grand Theft Auto IV for your kid because you personally don't feel it's any worse than what they are exposed to at school or on TV, you could potentially face three months in jail.

At least here in the U.S., no similar law has come close to passing Constitutional muster. And even in New Zealand, the law under which the Office of Film and Literature Classification has couched its opinion has never been enforced.

Ah, unenforced / unenforceable laws.

I find that, over the last couple of years, I've grown to realize that this kind of political backlash is inevitable against anything that becomes mainstream in the younger generation and threatens cultural change. What control the older generation has, it uses to lash out to preserve the status quo. Yes, even the same "baby boomer" generation that was so anti-establishment and revolutionary in the 60's and early 70's. My generation is starting to do the same, and the kids after us will probably have the same knee-jerk reactions against whatever comes next that changes THEIR children's and grand-children's world.

Well, gamers and game makers: Keep fighting the good fight. Time is on our side... the longer we can hold out and keep games free in the face of mounting opposition and stupid regulation determined to marginalize games as nothing but children's entertainment, the closer we get to victory.