On GTA, for the Occasion...

So! So...

Rockstar has done it again, eh? Win the hearts of millions of gamers with the newest installment of their best selling, criminal, open-world game...

...And there was much rejoicing...

...As well as a lot of non-rejoicing (which, btw what does one call that? Grumbling? Eh close enough...)

To be perfectly clear, I haven't played a lick of GTAV yet, so this will be more about the franchise in it's entirety than a review about V itself. The only titles I have played were GTA: Vice City and GTAIV. Hm, where do I start? Well let's look at the public outcry against the game first.

Not too long ago I read an article one of my weaker-willed (aka Canadian) friends posted on Facebook. I would link it but, meh, lazy. Anyhoo people can probably find it with a quick web search. I think it was from the NYT, but I can't remember as I had a lotta shit going down at the time. Well, in said article, what should the topic be about but questioning the game's violent content... again.

This article had a slightly different twist on it though from the usual "WTF? VIOLENCE!!!" articles; it went about discussing the violence as analogous to violence in film. What's more, the author held a more sympathetic viewpoint for violence on the silver screen while seeming a bit more reserved where games like GTA were concerned. This mildly surprised me; after all in my youth I remember if you were an anti-violence in video games advocate, you were probably anti-violence across the board.

But here the article was, soberly admitting that it's long been held that violence and sex (and violent sex) as portrayed in films and literature, is nothing more than exercising our rights to free speech. So, it honestly asked, what about violence in video games?

The author didn't actually pronounce a judgement that went beyond a yay or nay, but just kinda ended up with a "we'll wait and see" conclusion. So I guess this article wasn't as extremist as I was first led to believe (but that was my Canadian Friend's doing as he introduced it with lots of sentiment and... oh, what do you call it? "gooeyness," when he shared it to FB).

Still, the author of the article did question the philosophy behind gratuitous violence, or violence for it's own sake, especially from the perspective of the game controller. To summarize, it was like, "Yeah maybe the passivity of the person partaking in book or movie violence is maybe less harmful than that of the activity of the person partaking in video gaming violence." But to be even more fair, the article made the (shocking to me at least) distinction between the violence in GTA that drives the narrative (such as it is #editorialslol) and the gratuitous violence that the player can engage in on their on volition.

Honestly, every time I've heard some layman stereotype GTA games, the phrase "killing hookers" always pops up. As far as I know, there's no mission EVER, in the two titles I've played, that sends you off to some street corner to pop a cap in their "been everywhere" asses. No, the killing of hookers is not the point of the game. Neither is the killing of cops nor anyone else. If you want to attack a game for it's sheer brutality and offense to human life then go off on a tirade against Manhunt or something. As far as I'm concerned, even the gratuitous violence in GTA is more just like a blithe troll in comparison to other titles out there, I'm sure.

Take Hitman for instance. Now in Hitman, the goal of the game is to kill your target (duh), which is always some very terrible person (child sex-trafficker, pornography kingpin, rapist, genocidal maniac just to suggest a few). As one game commentator put it, via my paraphrase, the Hitman franchise really makes you want to kill your targets out of an inflamed sense of justice. However, that being said, you can kill anyone you please as long as it doesn't hinder your mission. This could be done in either a pragmatic light (e.g. I need to get beyond that door and I'll need poor Janitor Joe's jumpsuit for that, so I'll just be taking his life now as well as his outfit. [double parenthetical: although you can also knock Joe unconscious in some instances, but it may fraught with difficulty]), or you can just kill a random, and as far as you know, innocent person or people, hide their corpse(s) and carry on with the objective.

All that being said, the game gives you leave to slaughter innocents in creative, borderline-psychopathic  ways. I myself discovered I wasn't nearly as cold as I formerly believed when I witnessed 47 bring a meat-cleaver swooping down upon the pate of a hapless young (and attractive... yes it matters) woman. Didn't help very much that she made an unpleasant gurgling noise while collapsing to the floor in a heap. Oh and speaking of noises, when the weapon made contact, an equally unpleasant sound, akin to that of sinking an axe into a thick piece of wood, occurred.

My point in all this is that it seems like people get totes bent out of shape whenever GTA is brought to the spotlight (which is basically whenever they release a new title; games go to snoozville faster than me watching sports... #moareditorialslol). It's as though life is okay and non-threatening and then a new GTA game is made. Moralists prick their ears up and go, "What? A new GTA? Oh yeah, I forgot about them. And all other violent games. Time to talk some ears off about it; maybe someone will listen this time!"

But once again, returning to the question posited to us by our newspaper article, what's the difference (if there is) between violence in game, in text, or on film? And once again, the question seems tricky, because you as an audience member in a theater or as a reader of a book are not pulling any triggers or swinging any meat cleavers. It gives us a sort of comfortable distance to recoil from the movie screen or the page and utter, "Well I never!" But the gamer, so it seems, only has to push a button, and life is wiped out, brutally or otherwise.

Personally, I wouldn't let it get me down. Ethics can get more complicated than they need to be, and by that token, they afford jerks and douche bags to ask you silly things like "If you were in a speeding train and couldn't stop..." or, "If you were Jack Bauer and it was either torture one man to death to save one million men...." The question I ask in return is, is it all that simple? I for one, have heard a few theses given about how Shakespearian (Shakespearian!) plays can allow the audience to take a sick delight in the killing and immorality of the characters vicariously. Well shit, if Shakespeare—the pinnacle of English story crafting—can't be trusted with our bastardous minds, then we certainly can't leave anything to chance! Throw out books! Throw out movies! Throw out those video games especially!

No, I think we can be simultaneously both active participants as well as a passive agents wherever narrative is being distributed by a medium. When I played Far Cry 3 and (Oh Spoilers again!) got to the intense [debatable] scene where you beat up your last surviving brother and torture him so as not to blow your cover, was I pressing those buttons because I wanted to hurt him and to cause him suffering? No. Actually at that point, I was pretty bored with the game and at least wanted to see how it ended before I had to return to college, but that's a stage you gotta go through, else you won't see the end. Yes, at that violent point in the game, I could safely say I was a part of the audience, though I was indeed pushing buttons. There are other times where I identify with the character however (for his or her ideals mesh with mine) and really do want to see this son of a bitch eat lead. That doesn't happen quite often however. And you might've guessed by now, when I play GTA (which I don't always do, but when I do #memesftwlol), I don't gratuitously slaughter people... anymore at least. And I've got my reasons. I do think it's wrong. I think it devalues the game's overall experience. I think it's much more of a challenge to traverse the streets of Liberty City—using the more traditionally 'legal' means, e.g. taxis and subways—than to steal the first car that comes down the road. I think it fits in with the narrative better. I think random chaos just makes for a crappy plot; yes, read ancient Greek myths and you'll agree!

Moreover I don't think we can accurately make the claim that we are either only passive or active in regards to a narrative. This is because I think we live in one ourselves. There is a super, overarching Narrative that is narrating the times we are participating in a sub-narrative of our own. This Narrative writes down and accounts back to us that time, in history, of when I, you, and anybody else that played through GTAIV, and felt "thus and such" at one part, and felt "this and that" in the other part of the game. Ultimately, our hearts carry the real, honest, and deep reaction to whatever is being shown to us via narrative. If GTA, or any other game makes you happy that people are dying, (regardless of entertaining you [that's different I'd argue]), and regardless of whether you'd imitate the same thing in reality, I'd say you have a bad heart. Contrariwise, if you are so strung out over the deaths and violence in GTA (or any other game) that you think it's just as bad as doing it in reality, then you too, have a sick heart.

And that's humanity for you; a bunch of people with sick hearts. Some are not as sick as others however and it's because there's a cure out there. Just sayin' that if the content of a game, book or film (hell or even song or painting or whatever) is making you sick, then at least do us all a favor and don't go there yourself. The world as we know it won't turn out like it is on GTA. And if it does? Well patiently bear through it, bucko, like a certain people had to bear through a certain holocaust, or like another certain people had to bear though certain atomic bombings. Sure hard to imagine civilization going to hell because of a video game when there are other, more important problems at large.