Introducing R. R. White

Here you are, I'm introducing my new guest poster here at The Legal Arcade. His name is Richard White, and we've been talking via email for a while about our new partnership for the blog. He's finally agreed to send me a few essays, and you'll understand his position on gaming pretty well after reading just a word or two. Anyway, his first essay for this site is on suggestions for a potential Grand Theft Auto V, so I'll just let you read his email to me.

On 3/19/08, Richard White wrote:
Here's the first of my essays for your site. I do hope your readers enjoy.
Grand Theft Auto IV is nearing its release next month, a day which will live in infamy for my sort. Surely, Rockstar Games will have had enough with controversy and they'll tone this game down from the previous editions, but that's likely only a vain hope. Here I've prepared an essay for some suggestions for a more family safe Grand Theft Auto V, given that I will likely never see the day that series is successfully kept away from children.

Suggestions

• Content labels for every separate mission would be a real help to parents. Everyone knows about the grandma-beating that the freer parts of the game allow you to do, but the really bad stuff happens in missions, like forays into adult stores. This would allow parents to struggle through these missions for the children and explain through lies the storyline development in said mission.
• Despite having its own controversy, I found Bully a very safe alternative to Grand Theft Auto. Some weapons like the spud cannon and super slingshot should make the series transition to keep the streets of Liberty City clean from blood. Also, kissing should give your player a health bonus instead of being with a prostitute.
• Humor in Grand Theft Auto should be restricted to obscure references to films only adults would even want to see. For instance, Niko should make a little dance with his potatoes on forks as Charles Chaplin did. Whoever the main character will be in Grand Theft Auto V could be Woody Allen. This is obviously eccentric, but it really would remove one major reason for kids to play the game.
• Jail time cannot be immediately over after major crimes. Getting "busted" should force you to sit the PS3 down and do something else until the next day, when your character will receive a lethal injection.
• Get rid of the Adults Only rating. No game with that rating can every truly be released, so why not call it Mature and change the current Mature rating to something else? That way the rating system can be opened back up before game companies ban the release of the new Mature-rated games.

Well, that's really enough for now. Tell your readers to email their sarcastic, malinformed comments and questions to me at my legalarcade.com email. That way they won't clutter up my real inbox but I can still check in every now and then to change some minds.

R. R. White

Clearly, he'll provide a very different point of view to this site. Several of these seem almost silly they're so off, but I can really agree with his suggestion for the Adults Only rating. Right now, Adults Only is a lame duck rating that can never actually exist in America, so it needs to be shuffled around somehow. As you read there at the end, email any comments you have to rwhite@legalarcade.com so he can learn a thing or two. I gave him that special email so that you can send whatever sort of email to him you want and it won't obstruct his normal email address. I'm really excited about having him as a new guest poster, and I'll be sure to post the rest of his essays as time goes on.