What's worse than full-frontal male nudity?

In case you hadn't heard, the Xbox 360 exclusive downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV, the Lost and Damned, is out now. But having neither GTA IV nor an Xbox 360 to play it on, I can't give it a proper review. But from what I hear, for the Microsoft points equivalent of twenty bucks you get a pretty sizable chunk of content that extends your GTA IV experience. (As if the GTA IV experience really needed extending...) And you might have also heard that the Lost and Damned earns it's M rating with not only violence but nudity. Male nudity. Full-frontal male nudity.

But Rockstar Games, the creators of both GTA IV and the Lost and Damned, are no strangers to mature content. They are, after all, the ones responsible for the game mechanic of "having sex with a hooker to regain health and beating her up to get your money back". But while I haven't experienced the Lost and Damned firsthand, the full-frontal male nudity doesn't feel like a tasteful plot device, it seems more like your five year old cousin at family reunions who will poke his own eye out if it means all your aunts and uncles will pay attention to him.

You see, as much as you or I know about video games, they're still a tiny portion of the larger audience's attention span. And really, the best way to get some free advertising is to create some controversy. Buying airtime on any of the major networks costs millions of dollars, but if you put something less than puritanical in your game, that's free advertising.

Ironically, the people denouncing whatever game has their feathers ruffled has the exact opposite intended effect. There was no reason to play, let alone buy, Night Trap on the Sega CD in 1992 but when the Congressional hearings on video game violence featured the game a year later, people wanted a copy for pure curiosity's sake. When Fox News featured Mass Effect on the "SE"Xbox for it's "full digital nudity" and "the ability for players to engage in full graphic sex", it generated weeks of endless debates and introduced the game to much wider audience than any advertising campaign ever could. And even the controversy over Rockstar Games' own Grand Theft Auto San Andreas hidden "Hot Coffee" minigame caused copies of the unpatched game to sell for outrageous prices on second hand markets.

So knowing that selling the Lost and Damned was going to be an uphill battle, what with its potential audience being a fraction of the entire video game audience and that being a small subset of an even larger audience, I think Rockstar threw a little penis into the DLC in hopes of garnering some mainstream attention in the way of controversy. I don't think there's anything wrong with that though. Rockstar has a history of generating top notch content, penis or not. So if a little controversy helps get the game into gamers' hands, I'm ok with it.

But as of this writing, the full monty hasn't generated any interest outside of the gaming media. But it's only been a few weeks since the release of the Lost and Damned and if history is any indication, it will take a while for the mainstream media to get wind of something like this. After all, it took two months for the Mass Effect controversy to start and over a year between the release and the ensuing controversy for Night Trap and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. So maybe in anywhere from two months to a year, this will all be topical again...

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