[Chefelf]

Suit seeks to ban sales of popular video game
Thursday, January 1, 2004 Posted: 9:24 AM EST (1424 GMT)

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (AP) -- A lawsuit by Haitian groups that asks for the top-selling video game "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" to be removed from store shelves will be decided in federal court.

Haitian civil rights groups filed the lawsuit because the game instructs players to "kill the Haitians" and awards points for each kill.

The suit was filed December 23 in state circuit court in Palm Beach County. Attorneys for Rockstar Games Inc. opted to move the case to federal court, and that motion was granted Tuesday. No hearing dates were immediately set.

New York-based Rockstar Games has agreed to remove the offensive line from future versions of the award-winning video that has sold 11 million copies.

But the Haitian organizations, led by the Haitian-American Coalition of Palm Beach County, have also asked for more than $15,000 in damages.

The lawsuit takes on heavyweights in the video game industry, including Rockstar Games, its parent company Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., Sony Computer Entertainment, the Microsoft Corp., and retailers Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

The manufacturer of the game, in which an ex-convict is hired to recover stolen drug money in the streets of Miami, has been harshly criticized for its portrayal of Haitians.

Earlier this month, about 100 Haitian-Americans demonstrated outside a Wal-Mart Supercenter in nearby Boynton Beach chanting, "Stop Vice City."

Attorneys for the Haitian organizations and the video game manufacturer did not return phone calls late Wednesday.

http://www.cnn.com/2...it.ap/index.htm

I know this suit is kind of old but I think the idea of banning the game is new.

Discuss.

[Heccubus]

The line they use was taken completely out of context. The "Haitians" in the game are part of a crime syndicate. I'm sure that having the words "Eliminate the members of the Haitian crime syndicate!" appear onscreen would take up far too much space, obscuring the gamer's view and possibly causing some sort of disease. It's not, however, like the point of that mission is to run around randomly killing any Haitian or Haitian-looking person you see. Just the criminals. So far, there have not been similar suits filed by Cubans, Asians, Italians, or African Americans, who are all represented in similar fashions in both 3 and Vice City.
And why did it take them so long to notice this? The game came out over a year ago. I guess they had trouble getting that far into the game or something.

[civilian_number_two]

I think the porn industry should sue for being coloured disfavourably in Vice City.

Also, maybe someone ought to have noticed by now that in the game, having sex with a prostitute is a way to heal damage sustained in the game. And after you've let them out of your car, you can kill them and take your money back, plus whatever money they had on them. I think this is potentially worse, influence-wise, than the mission to kill Haitians.

Add to which you routinely get into scrapes with the police and occasionally with the army.

Seriously, you can do so much bad shit in the game to so many different people that it's somewhat ridiculous to single out Haitians as victims.

[Chefelf]

I think they should sue Stephen Spielberg for that movie he made about killing the Jews. What is wrong with him anyway?

[Chefelf]

I can understand people being slightly offended but you have to remind yourself that it is just fiction. It's a story about criminals and a Hattian gang. And then some people get killed (as in any other movie or game).

[civilian_number_two]

This reminds my of the new movie "the passion of christ". People say it depicts jew's as evil and that the movie will cause people to "hate" jews.

Well, except that THE PASSION claims to be history (like BIRTH OF A NATION) while Vice City is obviously a parody of popular films and tv, mainly "Miami Vice," SCARFACE and the porn industry.

The complaint about THE PASSION was that as written it showed the Jewish people en masse asking for Jesus to be crucified. The separation of Christianity from Judaism came about decades after the death of Jesus, and until that happend, it was relatively uncontroversial to repeat Jesus's teachings. The idea that all of the Jews wanted Jesus to be crucified is the revisionist gospel of a people who wanted to show their separation from Judaism while they preached their religion to the Roman world. It's bogus history, and it was certainly indirectly responsible for centuries of anti-semitism in Europe.

Seeing as we know better, it's ridiculous to insist that the gospels are the literal truth, written by God, and sacrosanct. The production company compromised and in its trial scene there are some in the crowd who do not want Jesus to be crucified.

Trivia: The actor playing Jesus, John Caviezel, was struck by lightning twice during the filming. The assistant director was only struck by lightning once.

[Jordan]

They did ask for Christ to be crucified. The followers of christ did not have high places in society. The pharises were the powerful religous men of the time, they and their followers wanted Christ dead. Pontius Pilate did not even want to kill Christ, but in fear of a great riot he sentenced him to death.

But as any Christian would believe: The Jews did not kill christ, everyone in the world did. Christans believe that Christ needed to die in order to save people. Or in otherwords our sins killed him. So it was not made out to cause a great seperation as you would have. Christ's death/ressurection is the essence of chirstian faith and without it the faith would not even exist.

The idea that all of the Jews wanted Jesus to be crucified is the revisionist gospel of a people who wanted to show their separation from Judaism while they preached their religion to the Roman world

Even old testament books, written way before the gospels, stated that the messiah would be hated and rejected by his own people. There are many many many passages refering to it. Christ even talked about his death before it happened.


How this causes anti semitisim is beyond me. God chose jews to be his messanger race, christ was a jew, and the gospels were written by jews. The bible does not preach anti semitism. It's just another way to undermine the bible and pass it as hate literature.

[civilian_number_two]

They did ask for Christ to be crucified. The followers of christ did not have high places in society. The pharises were the powerful religous men of the time, they and their followers wanted Christ dead. Pontius Pilate did not even want to kill Christ, but in fear of a great riot he sentenced him to death.

....

How this causes anti semitisim is beyond me. God chose jews to be his messanger race, christ was a jew, and the gospels were written by jews. The bible does not preach anti semitism. It's just another way to undermine the bible and pass it as hate literature.

Yes, the characters representing the Jews in the Bible stories did ask for Jesus to be crucified. They were also under the sway of the Pharisees, the "powerful religious men of the time." Fact is, though, that the Pharisees were not a significant group in Jesus's day. They rose to prominence after the destruction of the temple, and from them we can draw a direct line to the current Rabbinic tradition. In Jesus's time it would have been temple high priests and such who held power. But who knows how much they disagreed with jesus? In Mark, the earliest gospel, there's not a lot of talk between Jesus and anybody. It's in Matthew he's preaching to crowds and by Luke he's arguing with Pharisees all the time, calling them white-washed tombs and such like. The Phariseees are important players in the gospels of Matthew and Luke because they were important players in the years in which those gospels were written.

Fact is, we'll probably never know why Jesus was crucified, or whether Pontius Pilate cared about it or not. What we do know is that Matthew upped the power of the Pharisees to equal their importance in his own time, some 40 years after the death of Jesus. We also know that the Gospels were written in Greek, and that therefore their primary audience was probably not Hebrews. A really significant point to make on this is that from time to time Matthew includes an exp​ression in Aramaic, followed by a Greek translation. He wouldn't have done this had he been writing for Jews.

....

How this adds up to modern anti-semitism I really can't say. But there's no denying a rejection of Judaism in faviour of Christianity. And by the fourth gospel John doesn't even make a distinction between Pharisee, Saducee, or Sanhedrin. He just says that pilate went out to ask "The Jews" what ought to be done with Jesus. There are elite secular Jews in John who accept jesus, so John seems to put the burden of guilt on the Jewish religious types, but he doesn't go so far as to distinguish them any further than that. in Acts, Paul and Peter they tell a story about having had a vision that denounced all of the Jewish dietary laws in favour of a more Roman-friendly diet. By the time of the Gideon Bible Society in the twentieth century, we have Christian Bibles that publish only the "New Testament" and the Psalms, as though to say it's acceptable to just ignore everything of the Jewish Bible except for the Psalms (that "Lord is my shepherd" one is so pretty). So maybe that had something to do with it too.

Anyway, people don't need a big excuse to kill people and steal their stuff. Anti-semitics often bring up Jesus in their rants, and there's no way you haven't heard Jews referred to as "Christ killers." So it's something Christians themselves are doing, not some slam against the Bible made up by people trying to make Christianity look bad.

[Wayne]

Personally, I don't see what the big deal with GTA is. In this country you see commercials asking you to join the army, you see people trying to recruit eigth graders for ROTC, you see 100,000 Iraqi civilians being killed in a war for oil, and people are blaming a video game for our nation's "violent youth?" This doesn't really have anything to do with hatians sueing Rockstar games, I'm just really pissed off by people blaming everybody's problems on fictional representations of those problems.

This post has been edited by Wayne: 17 February 2005 - 04:31 PM