How Much Wang Is Too Much?
There's a Seinfeld episode where Jerry's dating a woman who walks around his apartment naked all the time, and he works out that there's good naked and bad naked. Turns out it's mostly bad naked. That's more or less what a room full of South Korean regulators spent six weeks arguing about with Grand Theft Auto VI, and the GTA 6 nudity that had them stuck was mostly bad naked, a bunch of random guys walking around Leonida with everything out.
6 weeks for a panel of six guys probably all named Wang, split 3-3 on how much wang is too much wang.
It got close. Korea's Game Content Rating Board got the application September 1, and at the first review on September 10 the vote tied 3-3 between Adults Only and refusing classification outright, which in Korea basically means the game doesn't get released there. And it wasn't the guns or the cocaine. The members said the violence, crime and drugs weren't much different from GTA 5. It was frequent male genitalia in the background with no sexual context, and one member said they'd never seen it show up this often without context in anything they'd rated. Remember, they spent 6 weeks making this decision. 6 weeks for a panel of six guys probably all named Wang, split 3-3 on how much wang is too much wang. All of this is from the meeting minutes Inven Global got hold of, and I couldn't believe a government wrote it all down.
So they punted. The board didn't even get a playable build until September 28 because of security concerns, the October 2 review got postponed again for "sufficient gameplay examination," and the October 8 meeting was canceled because not enough members showed up to vote. That gameplay examination is my favorite part of the whole saga. The researcher assigned to it couldn't find the nudity on that giant map and had to ask the publisher for maps multiple times before tracking down the spot, and once there, there was nothing sexual to do, you could only hit one of the guys, and then the police showed up and arrested your character. Somebody in Korea got paid to drive around a fake Florida hunting for a penis and got cuffed for it, imagine spending dozens of hours driving around Vice City looking for dicks as a job. You sign up to be a researcher and this is your life, dick hunting in a video game.
One member pointed out that Korean society tends to be "somewhat more lenient toward male exposure" and asked whether gamers would even read it as sexual, which might be the most honest sentence ever said in a regulatory meeting. Another said if it were just a nude resort you could argue it wasn't obscene. By October 16, ten other rating bodies had already given it an adult rating, Saudi Arabia and the UAE included, both at 21 and up, and when the Saudis approve some dong in the background, you're running low on reasons to be the holdout. The legal-minded members kept saying a refusal blocks a release, so they'd need an actual statute to point at and not their own internal handbook, and nobody wanted Korea to be the one country on the list saying no.
October 16 was the third review, all nine members came, and GTA 6 passed Adults Only 8-1, with one holdout voting refusal to the very end. Descriptors are Sensuality, Violence, Crime, Drugs and Language. The researchers also looked for the stuff from the leaked overseas footage, characters completely stripped or a camera you could swing around to look at genitals, and none of it turned up in the build they played. Whether Rockstar cut it after the board asked about changes or it was never in the launch build, the minutes don't say. Jason and Lucia's sex scenes are cutscene-only and top out at breasts, and one member said it looked like Rockstar "intentionally covered genital exposure in explicitly sexual scenes, while allowing exposure in background settings." The two leads keep it tasteful in bed while some stranger in the background has it all hanging out, and that's the version the board signed off on.
The publisher had asked for the result to stay private until release day, and instead the whole world now knows a committee needed three reviews and one no-show meeting to settle how often a dong is allowed in the background. GTA 6 comes out November 19 and wherever that researcher ended up is the first place I'm driving. Two days before that, Gettin' That Ass: The Valley, the Nerds of Porn San Andreas parody, starts streaming November 17, article coming soon, so my week is two GTAs with a Spank Bank visit in the middle. DYG has been covering government-related news more than we ever thought we would. If you weren’t aware, we’ve been closely monitoring the next potential press secretary ever since Nikki Benz put her name into the fold. But even that has had less drama than this, so you can understand why South Korea’s Wang Policy has piqued our interest.