Power TRp
A Study of the Violence in Grand Theft Auto V
MacKenzie Bates
Introduction
$800 million in the first day. $1 billion in 3 days. 21 million units sold in one month.
Numbers don’t lie. Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) is the biggest entertainment launch in
history. The sales numbers dwarf that of every other form of entertainment including
movies. Millions of people around the globe are playing GTA V right now.
GTA V is an open world game that allows the player an incredibly large array of choices of
gameplay which include: stealing cars, driving, boating, jet-skiing, scuba- diving, ATV-ing,
hunting, playing sports (golf, darts, tennis, triathlons, etc.), practicing at shooting ranges,
completing flight school, flying helicopters, piloting planes, participating in races (sea, offroad races and street), managing property, investing in the in-game stock market,
parachuting, doing yoga, going to strip clubs, hiring prostitutes, trafficking arms by ground
and air, holding up stores, robbing banks, riding cable cars, towing cars, driving taxis,
customizing cars, getting your car washed, buying clothes, getting tattoos, getting
haircuts, taking photos & posting them on the in-game parody version of Instagram,
browsing the in-game internet (which includes a parody version of Facebook/Twitter),
watching in-game TV & movies, listening to one of 17 in-game radio stations which have
over 250 songs, and more. If that doesn’t seem fun playing alone, you can do all of these
things online with your friends across the world as well as making your own races,
planning heists & jobs and more.
How does the latest installment in the Grand Theft Auto series, a series littered with
controversy over violence, sex, racism, sexism, drunk-driving, marijuana-use, torture, etc.
reach such mainstream appeal and how is it affecting society? How is violence portrayed
in the game? What violence is required by the game’s story mode and what violence is
allowed in free-roam mode when the player chooses what to do? Is there a relationship
between the time spent playing the game and player’s perception of the game’s content?
In an open world game where the player can choose to do so much which doesn’t involve
violence, is the player the real problem? From this stems the question of how does one
accurately critique the violence in a game like GTA V where the play experience can be so
drastically different depending on what kind of player you are?
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1
The Appeal
So what is it that attracts millions to the Grand Theft Auto series? To answer this question
properly it is necessary to venture back to the start of the series.
Back in 1992, a small team of inexperienced English game developers occupied a
backroom of the BMG Interactive’s London headquarters. The team was a part of DMA
Design, a British video game developer whose first major breakthrough was 1991’s
Lemmings, a dynamic puzzle game about the animals of the same name.
Mike Dailly, a graphics engine programmer, was playing around with different ways to
create an isometric graphics engine. [Isometric graphics are often considered to be “2.5 D”,
its a way of using 2D assets to represent a 3D space.] Dailly had come across an engine
which had done this successfully from a side-view of the environment. Dailly looked at the
stacks of blocks on screen. They reminded him of building and then the idea came to him
what if he just painted a street background behind the environment and then it could also
be thought of as top-down. Other DMA programmers started to code things up for the
world. One coded up cars. From this arose the idea of Cops and Robbers, where the players
would be cops trying to catch bad guys. Instead of the generic title Cops and Robbers, the
team decided on Chase ’n’ Race.
As Chase ’n’ Race’s development progressed, one problem became clear. The game was not
fun. Some DMAers dismissed the game as Sims Driving Instructor. As cops, players had to
obey traffic signals, stay off sidewalks and avoid pedestrians, which made both driving fast
and having fun an impossibility.
Stuck staring at the screen an idea came to those at DMA. What if they flipped the game
on its head? The player would be the bad guy. From this idea grew Grand Theft Auto (GTA).
With its new direction the game evolved into the idea of having the player answer phone
calls to receive a mission then drive around to complete it and then repeat. The game
would grow to feature missions inspired by popular action films such as Reservoir Dogs, The
Getaway, French Connection, and the Bond Films.
During play testing, the game ran into another problem. Players didn’t want to complete
the missions. They just wanted to drive around. Thus the open-world sandbox of GTA was
created. The player had freedom to do anything that they wanted. They could be good and
drive the streets orderly. [Later GTA games featured “vigilante missions” where the player
could drive around as a cop or ambulance driver and help others.] Or the player could be
bad and drive around hitting pedestrians and gaining wanted stars. (The more stars the
player had the more intense the police intervention would become.)
At the time games like Tomb Raider utilized the graphics power of the Playstation, GTA
however focused heavily on gameplay over graphics. For this and other reasons, the game
was on the chopping block every week as the BMG executives tried to kill it at every
chance they got. Dave Jones, a DMA programmer, resisted. “Gameplay! Gameplay! Quotes and Information on this page: (Kushner p.23-45).
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Gameplay!” he said. “Graphically, it may not be at the cutting edge, but I believe this is
going to change the world.” And that it did.
GTA defied the “wizards-and-warriors” formula that dominated the game industry at the
time. As Dan Houser, the writer/co-writer of every single GTA except the first and the
current vice-president of Rockstar Games [the current developers of the GTA series], so
correctly described, “Here was a game that was commenting on the world. It was like
being in a gangster movie, rather than a game.”
From the start of development of Chase ’n’ Race to the release of GTA, four years had
passed. Though this all happened 15-20 years ago, the core of what makes GTA, GTA has
remained relatively unchanged. While recent releases like GTA V have incredible graphics,
the focus of the GTA franchise is still clearly on unparalleled gameplay opportunities.
The GTA series continues to push boundaries and liberate video games from the relegated
tag as a children's toy that it had back in the 1990s. While there certainly were more adult
games than GTA released years before its release, none had achieve such widespread
appeal as GTA did. Games like Doom, Halo, Battlefield, Call of Duty and countless others
owe a great deal to what GTA made acceptable in video games.
All of the GTA games take place in the United States, yet they have all been developed by
Englishmen in either England or Scotland. All of the GTA games are an English satire of
American society. Social commentary is a focal point of the GTA games. From the in-game
radio stations, ads and billboards to the games’ main characters and their stories, the GTA
series has continuous strived both to point out the absurdness of the cultural customs of
American society and to revel in Hollywood’s glamorous portrayal of that society.
Ironically, it is very much this which draws the GTA series such widespread appeal in
America. The missions and story of the GTA games has continued to be heavily influenced
by Hollywood action and gangster movies. People love to feel as if they are a part of their
favorite gangster film.
“The real fun shit is Top Gun! Beverly Hills Cop! Because it taps into the mainstream. And if you
can create art that communicates to everybody, it’s much better than creating art that
communicates to five people,” Sam Houser said to a new Rockstar hire. Sam reveled in the
details of director Michael Mann’s action sequences in Heat, such as the opening shot of
the armored car whizzing across the street. “I want to translate this kind of craftsmanship
into a video game,” he said. This conversation took place over 10 years ago. Amusingly, in
GTA V there is a story mission which nearly exactly matches this scene from Heat.
The experience of playing a GTA game is similar to that of a “power trip”. The player has an
incredible sense of control and freedom, as if they have been cast as the star Hollywood’s
next big gangster flick and thus according they have an absurd set of resources at hand to
tell whatever story they want. No other games give the player that feel as the GTA series
has.
Quotes and Information on this page: (Kushner p.23-45, 79).
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The Violence
Before discussing the violence of GTA V, it is necessary to take a look at violence in video
games in general. Tilo Hartmann & Peter Vorderer of VU University Amsterdam
performed an enlightening study on moral disengagement in violent video games in 2010.
Citing numerous sources Hartmann & Vorderer found that “users perceive video game
characters not as objects, but as social entities.” The three steps that they took to
determine that conclusion are quite insightful about how players perceive video games
and the characters in them. As such, I have included excerpts of their main points below.
“First, mediated cues easily trigger our automatic social perceptions, creating the sense that
another social entity is present.”
“Second, if the media stimulus is well designed and displays social cues appropriately, it takes
effort to recall that a character ‘‘is not real,’’ because automatic social perceptions suggest
otherwise. For similar reasons, media users may respond to displayed characters affectively,
even if it does not seem rational to do so (Morrison & Ziemke, 2005).”
“Third, even if users of a video game occasionally discount the perception of an ‘‘apparent
reality,’’ it seems unlikely that they are continuously motivated to do so. Constant
consideration that ‘‘this is not real’’ would distance the media user from the narrative and
could eventually lead to emotional detachment (Cupchik, 2002; Vorderer, 1993). If users
continuously reminded themselves that ‘‘this is just a game,’’ the game would hardly be
enjoyable (cf., Sheppes & Meiran, 2007, p. 1522).”
Continuing from here Hartmann & Vorderer began to examine why violence in video
games is enjoyable. They came up with two possible explanations.
- Offers of pleasurable gratifications:
An example of which is player’s perception that their effective harm-doing is a proof of
their own superiority. “Researchers have argued that virtual violence makes users feel
effective and powerful (Klimmt & Hartmann, 2006), and allows them to enact a male
gender role (Jansz, 2005; Kirsh, 2003).”
- Mood-regulation
Hartmann & Vorderer theorized that player enjoyment of violence in video games may
depend on “maximizing pleasurable gratifications and minimizing aversive costs.” The
study that Hartmann & Vorderer conducted focused on “how violent games may minimize
aversive costs by shaping their users’ moral processing. Such games may reduce negative
affect, particularly guilt, and promote overall enjoyment of virtual violence.”
While this study is one of the first to examine the idea of moral disengagement in video
games, further research needs to be conducted before any definite conclusions Quoted and Paraphrased on this page: (Hartmann and Vorderer p.94-96 & 98-99)
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can be drawn, the study did suggest “norm-violation” could be the reason why players’
enjoy the violence of GTA V.
“While players’ game enjoyment seems to decrease slightly if guilt and negative affect
increase, results of Study 2 suggest that enjoyment is greatest if the virtual violence is deviant
enough to induce excitement, but defensible enough to be considered just. Related research
supports the hypothesis that media users sometimes simply enjoy being bad (‘‘norm-violation
theory,’’ Raney, 2004; Tamborini, Stiff, & Zillmann, 1987), identify with bad guys (Konijn &
Hoorn, 2005), and enjoy observing wrongdoing (Raney et al., 2006). Players of violent games
may enjoy the thrill of socially unacceptable behavior as long as they have some reason (e.g.,
remembering that this is ‘‘just a game’’ or believing one’s intents are good) to free themselves
from guilt.” (Hartmann and Vorderer p.113).
GTA V seems like it could be the quintessential “norm-violation” game, but does it break
too many norms for the player to justify the wrongs they are enacting on screen?
It is now time to examine how violence is portrayed in GTA V.
GTA V opens with the player being thrown into a bank robbery in progress. The group
holding up the bank consist of Michael Townley, Trevor Philips and one of their friends.
The player takes the role of Michael and must force the employees into a back room and
then they progress to the vault. When exiting the vault, a bank police officer grabs
Michael. The player is all of a sudden asked to switch from controlling Michael to
controlling Trevor. The camera pans over and now we see from Trevor’s prospective.
Michael is held in the usual hostage grip such that only his head is visible. The game’s
progress freezes until the player shoots the cop (most likely in the face since that is the
most visible part of his body). When the player finally does it, Michael yells “Fuck! You
didn’t need to do that!” The group now is on to trying to escape from the bank and the
area surrounding it which consists of having to kill 35-40 police officers and having to
drive the getaway car during an intense chase scene when your driver is killed. While
trying to get to their helicopter, the third bank robber and Michael are both shot and
thought to be killed.
This opening scene starts GTA V out in an interesting place regarding violence. For one
thing, we barely know the players we are controlling and we have no idea why they are
holding up the bank. There is no notion of this whole act being made with “good”
intentions. The player must play through this scene in its entirety to flash forward 9 years
to the open-world of modern day Los Santo (Los Angeles) where they will have open world
choices. The player must take part in the violence to progress in the game. Some of the
game’s characters prefer if violence was avoided and thus disapprove of the players
actions. Lastly, the scene with cutscenes (pre-render videos used to tell the game’s story)
lasts about 10 minutes which makes the death/minute rate on screen incredibly high and
rivals that of scenes from films like the end shootout of The Wild Bunch, which is often 5
considered to be one of the most deadly scenes in a film. And this is just the first 10
minutes of gameplay for a game that can occupy players for hundreds of hours.
We now jump forward 9 years to modern day Los Santos, an incredibly massive and
realistic take on the Los Angeles County area. GTA V introduces the ability to control
three different main character each of which have unique backgrounds and interests.
Below are the backgrounds of three characters taken from GTA V’s official website:
Michael De Santa (a.k.a. Michael Townley) He's a veteran bank robber, and an expert with the kind of knowledge that only comes from years
as a successful career criminal. Now retired and living comfortably in an unofficial sort of witness
protection, Michael's not without his own problems though - he has a wife who can't stop
spending money and two spoiled kids he doesn't understand at all. Michael made it out and got
everything he wanted, and he's still miserable.
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Franklin Clinton A former street gangster now looking for real opportunities and serious money, Franklin works as
a repo man for an Armenian luxury car dealership that runs scams on ambitious young hotshots
with new money, selling them expensive cars they can’t afford. When they can’t make their
payments but want to keep their cars, it’s Franklin’s job to get them back.
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Trevor Philips Not interested in living by anyone else’s rules, Trevor's a habitual drug user and extremely volatile
individual that's prone to destructive outbursts and violent rampages. A former criminal
colleague of Michael's from long ago - the less that's said about him the better.
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The variety of main characters that the player controls in GTA V introduces interesting
possibilities for nonlinear interactive storytelling and also introduces intriguing and
conflicting viewpoints of violence from the characters’ prospective.
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The plots of games in the GTA series have largely been social rhetoric on The American
Dream. In GTA V, the Dream is examined in three different forms. Michael has achieve the
Dream yet is still miserable. Trevor despises the premise of the Dream and is very much a
psychopathic hipster. Franklin is trying to achieve the Dream, but the game frames his
achievement of this dream as impossible unless he is willing to get his hands dirty and be
the true red, white and blue American criminal. In the game Franklin’s boss at the
Armenian luxury car dealership, Simeon yells at Franklin for wanting to achieve the
Dream, “You tell me what you want and I'll explain to you very carefully why it cannot be.”
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The new addition of additional multiple playable characters allows GTA V to tell a more
meaningful story. Each character has areas they excel at; Franklin’s is driving. So often
during missions when Franklin could be the character committing violence he is instead
behind the wheel of the car, thus the additional characters allow for Franklin to avoid
violence as much as possible. Not to say that Franklin will shy away from violence, but it is Quoted on this page: (Grand Theft Auto V - Official)
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clear that he prefers to avoid it if possible and Franklin often expresses how insane he
believes Trevor is and how is occasionally disgusted by what Trevor does. Despite the
advancements, it is still the case that much like in GTA IV with Niko Bellic that violence
actions and criminal activity is the only way for Franklin to achieve the Dream.
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While it is useful to study GTA V’s story in this manner it does bring up the debates of
ludology vs. narratology. The narratological view is that games should be understood as
novel forms of narrative and can thus be studied using theories of narrative (Murray,
1997; Atkins, 2003). The ludological position is that games should be understood on their
own terms (Wikipedia).
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In the story mode of GTA V we can interpret the violence in a narratological approach
because the events of the story have been scripted by Rockstar and thus all players
experience one of a defined set of experiences. However, one of the big things that draws
players to GTA V is its open-world where players can do as they please. Thus to interpret
the meaning of this violence a more ludological approach is necessary.
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First it is necessary to understand what kinds of violence are available to the player in
free-roam. I have split the analysis into two categories: the violence the player can do to
others in-game and the violence the player can do to themselves [while this may sound
strange, there are thousands of YouTube videos showcasing things like “1000 Ways to Die
in Grand Theft Auto V”].
Violence between Player and Other Person In-game:
• Run car into another car fast enough and cause other driver to die or fly through windshield
(if your car is smaller though, you’ll fly through the windshield)
- Typically there’s a scream before death & the dead body compresses of the horn
- Things that the game’s main characters are programmed to say in this situation:
“What you don’t see me driving?”, “Blind piece of shit”, “For the love of all that’s holy”
• Run car into motorcycle at low speeds = other character is knocked off,
at high speeds = other character is launched into the air 30-40 feet
• Run over person with car which leaves blood splatters/tire marks on road
- Typically there’s a scream before death & the dead body compresses of the horn
- Things that the game’s main characters are programmed to say in this situation:
“Aww shit! Sorry! [semi-sincere]”, “Hey! Sorry”, “Forgive me! [insincere]”, “Move!”, “SORRY! Not
really!!”, “Get out of the fucking way!”, “How did you not see me?”, “Oh I’m so sorry [sarcastic]”
• Run over animal with car which leaves blood splatters/tire marks on road & usually a whimper or
cry before death
- Typically there’s a whimper or cry before death
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- Things that the game’s main characters are programmed to say in this situation:
“The apex predator in action”
• Shoot person with gun which results in blood plume, scream, blood staining on clothes, bullet
hole wound and pooling of blood near body. Continuous fire on body does not cause body to fall
apart as it does in some games.
- Cars however will change state due to damage, so this difference is either due to intentional
limitation of gore or unintentional development limitations
- Body does react differently to gun shots, will hold arm if arm shot, will limp if leg shot, will lay on
ground in feudal position holding legs if both shot
• Kill person with explosive which results in similar effects as shooting.
- Body manipulation still does not occur, which “more accepted” games such as
Call of Duty: World at War have had including limbs being blown off
• Light person on fire & will flop around screaming
- Body manipulation still does not occur, but there is burn damage noted by darkening of the
character’s skin in that area
• Use attack helicopter with machine gun & rocket launcher
• Stab with knife (special stab noise)
• Beat with night stick or baseball bat or golf club
• Drop shipping create on top of person
• Torture person (only available as part of a single mission in story mode)
- Waterboard, pull out teeth, hit with wrench or electric shock person
• NOTE: After the player gets out of hospital [possibly due to another character killing them],
the player has scars from injuries
Violence between Player and Themselves:
• Jump off building, from plane, from bridge, from helicopter
• Damage gas station causing it to explode
• Drown in lake or ocean
• Hit by car, bus, plane, helicopter, train (often times it is from jumping in front of one)
• Annoy your pet dog until he bites you to death
• Attacked by mountain lion, eaten by shark, or some other form of wildlife
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• Fly over a military no fly zone and get shot-down
• Abducted by aliens
• Annoy one of the two other main characters or a biker or “gangsta" gang
• Break the laws which cause the gain of wanted stars and when police arrive act aggressively so
that they become violent and kill you
As described, a rather imaginative range of violence is available in-game to the player. Yet
the violence possible in GTA V pales in comparison to violence shown in movies. The
majority of the violence possible in GTA V is also similar to violence possible in previous
GTA games and similar to violence in other games like Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Black
Ops 2. (Though it could be argued that the violence in these games is acceptable today
because the violence in previous GTA games pushed the boundaries.) So what is it today
that still causes reports about the violence in GTA V? There are 3 major causes: lack of
satisfactory parenting & treatment of mental illness, torturing a person is required as part
of a mission, and continued public inability to accept video games as just as much an adult
media as a children's toy and as much a form of art as movies, painting, etc.
Lack of Satisfactory Parenting & Treatment of Mental Illness:
All of the GTA games have been rated by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB)
as Mature (17 years and older). The games are not made for children and they are not
intended for children. They are games made by reasonable sane adults for other
reasonable sane adults. A 2010 report issued by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration (SAMHSA) stated that of all adults in America who had suffered
from a mental illness over a 12 month period only 37% got any professional medical help.
The report also revealed that in 2009 there were 4.4 million Americans with a "serious
mental health illness" who were walking around untreated (SAMHSA 1). Any form of
entertainment can be misinterpreted by those without a mental illness, so yes, those with
them are certainly capable of doing the same. In rare cases, this does lead to tragic
outcomes, but the lack of care of Americans to get those who need help treatment is just
as much as to blame as whatever it was that knocked over the unstable domino of logic. If
something is going to happen, it is going to happen eventually whether or not they have
played a video game or watched a movie.
For the large majority of Americans, entertainment like movies, TV shows, music, books
and videos are just that entertainment. Though no current research supports, I am fairly
confident that if none of those things existed there would be a lot more murders and
suicides due to boredom and lack of mental stimulus. It is the duty of parents to censor
and control what their children are consuming. Do not buy your child an M rated game
without at least playing it first; Most stores, like Best Buy and Gamestop, have demo
machines and they are more than wiling to let people use them to playtest a game before
purchasing it. And to America, as a whole watch out for your friends and family and get
them treatment if it is needed.
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Video games as an adult media and art form:
It will take time for Americans to get use to this. Just as it took time for film to be accepted
as a non-demonic medium that is a field of art. Video games may very well have a tougher
uphill battle to acceptance than film due to the additional layer of widespread distrust and
lack of technology expertise that comes with the medium.
The Torture [Warning spoilers in this section]:
It wouldn’t be a GTA game if it didn’t cause controversy in some way and the torture
required in a mission in GTA V has certainly gotten people talking.
In GTA V, the FIB [satire of FBI] and the IAA [satire of the CIA] are fighting over funding
from Congress. Their funding is being cut due to a lack of terrorist activity.
The IAA has a suspect who may have information that will help the FIB get more funding,
but if he talks to the IAA as they are “stepping up their questioning" the FIB will be in
trouble. So in a mission you as Michael, Trevor and Franklin have to go extract “Mr. K”.
Following you getting Mr. K to the “safely” of FIB, Trevor gets a call from an FIB agent to
come to a warehouse.
Once you arrive there you find Mr. K bound to a chair and the FIB agent informs you that
he has information regarding someone he claims to have ties to terrorism and that you are
to do whatever is necessary to get the information out of him. Mr. K is more than willing to
talk prior to his torture, but the FIB agent orders that you do it anyway. Trevor being a
psychotic lover of violence happily obliges.
Now the player must torture this man who would happily tell you anything without having
to be tortured. You must torture him for no reason. The player is give four ways to torture
Mr.K:
• Water-boarding
• Beating him with a wrench.
- Where Trevor is when the player presses the button depends where Mr. K is hit. They have
the same effect and damage. Mr. K's left = knee hit. Middle = “ball-breaker”. Right = ribs.
• Electrical shocks from a car battery
• Extracting a tooth using pliers.
- First tooth changes speech. Unknown if more pulls either further deteriorate his speech or
nothing at all.
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The player must put Mr. K through four rounds of torture. Unlike in real life, Mr. K can't be
pushed too far. If Mr. K’s heart stops due to the torturing (which will almost certainly
happen during a novice play through), the player must give him an adrenaline shot via
injection with needle.
“We gotta break him down to build him back up,” the FIB agents says.
To Mr. K’s pleas to stop Trevor responds in a sarcastic tone, “Nothing to complain about
here pal. This is totally legit.”
As Trevor goes to water-board Mr. K he says, “ALWAYS BY THE BOOK.” To which the FIB
agent replies, “That’s my guy.”
Midway through torture the FIB agent asks Mr. K if he is ready to talk and he responds, “I
have been waiting to talk ever since the day I got kidnapped six weeks ago.” Needless to
say Mr.K does “spill” information during the torturing, but it is quite obvious that he would
have given you the information and probably more if you hadn’t tortured him.
Once the FIB agent has collected enough information, you as Michael assassinate the
suspected terrorist. Following which the FIB agent tells you (Trevor) to kill Mr. K.
Instead of following his orders, you take Mr. K to the airport to let him escape. Trevor tells
him to spread his “message” as a “torture advocate.” On the way to the airport Trevor
teaches Mr. K the true meaning of torture.
“The media and the government would have us believe that torture is some necessary
thing. We need it to get information, to assert ourselves,” Trevor says. “Did we get any
information out of you?”
“I would have told you everything!” Mr. K replies.
“Exactly!” says Trevor. “Torture’s for the torturer. Or the guy giving the order to the
torturer. You torture for the good times! We should all admit that. It’s useless as a means
of getting information.”
The violence is certainly graphic, but isn’t on the level of Hostel or other films that the
media has labeled as “torture porn”. The violence is on-par with scenes from Zero Black
Thirty, a film that has been reported as being a very accurate depiction of the US search for
Osama Bin Laden and includes scenes of torture which feature water-boarding. Like
scenes of Hostel, this black humor mission entitled “By the Book” is social commentary on
the US government’s use of torture. The ability to torture via water-boarding certainly
makes this point clear.
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GTA V is a third-person shooter meaning that the player sees the game world from above
their character and can typically see the entire character’s body. This means that while the
player certainly feel engaged they do not have the first person experience as in other
games. This choice of camera angle provides a semi-detached feeling to all acts inside the
game and especially in this scene where the player is doing the FIB’s dirty work.
Understandably the mission probably isn’t very fun for most players. “By the Book” is
similar to missions in other video games:
In one cutscene of the first-person shooter Call of Duty: World at War, the player is a US
soldier held captive by the Japanese and must watch a fellow soldier’s eye be burned out
by a cigarette and his throat slit with a knife (though the the angle of the shot is from
behind, so we are looking at his back).
In a mission of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 during the mission “No Russian”, the player (a
US solider), in an act to try to gain the trust of the head of an Ultranationalist terrorist cell,
goes undercover and joins the terrorist leader in carrying out a massacre in a Russian
airport. This mission is intended to sell the reason why Russia would retaliate and attack
the U.S.. Unlike “By the Book”, “No Russian” was skippable (the player could choose not to
play it). “No Russian” while having an intriguing goal, fails at achieving its point like “By the
Book” did. For one thing, the terrorist leader is repeatedly right in front of you during the
mission, you have a machine gun and there is police intervention. Why can’t the soldier kill
the terrorist leader and his pal? It would likely look like the police killed him and if the U.S.
military can get you all buddy buddy with what the game makes out to be a modern-day
Hitler so quickly, why can’t they erase a few security tapes and hush up police reports
after you killed him? Also the ability to skip the mission makes it meaningless. If the game
designer wanted to make a point he should have stood strong and made it mandatory.
Instead understanding the mission’s message became not a requirement, which
essentially gave the player the impression that it wasn’t that important.
“By the Book” doesn’t suffer from similar plot holes. For one thing, Trevor loves violence.
He is fascinated by it, so him getting the chance to be asked by the government to commit
some is a dream come true for him. He’s usually running from them because of it. Once
“the fun” for Trevor is over and his job is complete, he lets the guy go. He has no personal
vendetta against and thus has no true reason to want to kill him as the FIB agent wants.
Trevor’s tone during the torture is often very clearly mocking of the FIB agent in a
sarcastic “Yes sir. Very well sir. Whatever you want sir.” way. Trevor after the torture
makes clear his true feelings on torture, which largely reflect the reality of what torture is
about. The mission also involves Michael killing someone the FIB just suspects of being
related to terrorism, which rumors have accused the FBI and CIA of doing. No video game
mission is going to perfectly depict a situation like this, but GTA V gets close and its
violence is used as social rhetoric with the hope of informing its millions of players about
what the United States’ use of torture is really about.
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The Rockstar Prospective
Many other studies of the violence in the GTA series have ignored the viewpoints of the
games’ creators. This seems like a large oversight when considering an artistic creation.
Below are three illuminating responses from Rockstar co-founders Sam and Dan Houser,
and Terry Donovan regarding violence in the GTA series.
- Even following Columbine, the GTA series continued to push boundaries. “Our [Rockstar
Games’] responsibility is to 99.9 percent of the population who aren’t planning to murder
anyone in the next two weeks,” said Donovan.
- Sam Houser has even insisted that cops are GTA fanboys. “I met the NYPD,” he went on, “and
they said, ‘We think your game’s all right.’ And I said, ‘What about the fact that you kill cops?’
and they said, ‘Well, you know what? There’s a lot of people out there trying to kill cops and
we’d rather they did it in your game than on the street.’”
- Following the release of GTA III, Rolling Stone came to the Rockstar offices to have an
interview with Sam and Dan Houser and Donovan. The cofounders dismissed any notion of
responsibility about and fire back at their critics. “If you realize Playstation owners aren’t all
ten,” Donovan said, “there isn’t some kind of social responsibility to have a redeeming social
value.”
“Why are we having this conversation?” Dan asked rhetorically. “It’s insane. We get dragged
into these stupid conversations about, ‘Are you brainwashing children?’ or whatever rubbish it
is that month. It’s like, ‘How can we as adults be having this conversation when we both know
that you’re talking crap?’ Its just not even complicated.
“If this was a movie or TV show and was the best in its field, you’d give it loads of awards and
put those awards shows on television,” Dan went on. “I genuinely don’t aspire to that, but I do
aspire to not being called an asshole for doing the same thing in a video game. So what you’re
really saying is, ‘It’s not the content, it’s the medium.’ You’ve proven that by your actions in
other areas. So what is it about the medium you don’t like? Because maybe we should
challenge those ideas. It’s not what you think it is to a lot people. To us, it’s [a] way of
experimenting with nonlinear interactive story lines.”
To ask games to be socially redeeming was missing the point. “What’s socially redeeming
about a fantasy world in which someone pats you on the back when you’ve done something
well?” Dan asked. “That’s just patronizing.” Sam shift in his seat, as if trying to contain his
outrage. They were not shallow shock jocks, they were hard-working artist and producers,
they felt and what was wrong with that?
“I tend to try avoid talking too much about the violence because that’s what it all gets boiled
down to at the end of the day,” Sam said. “But when you do something wrong in the game, the
police come and get you. … You don’t just run around on a rampage and just carry on, carry on,
carry on. You do commit crimes, and the police are on you. You commit more, and they’re on
you more, and commit more, the FBI will turn up, the SWAT will turn up, and then the army
turns up. If that doesn’t reinforce a moral code in a game, I don’t know what does.”
!
Quoted and Paraphrased on this page: (Kushner p.69, 76, 108-109).
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The “At-Risk” Youth Perspective
Ben DeVane & Kurt D. Squire performed an unique study on the meaning of race and
violence in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Despite is 2004 release, GTA: San Andreas and
GTA V share a great deal in common including the fictional location Los Santos and a very
similar portrayal of race (though race is less of a central focus in GTA V). DeVane and
Squire studied “at-risk” teenagers from the northern Midwest playing GTA: San Andreas
and drew conclusion regarding their experiences with violence and race in the game.
Below is an overview of three different types of players that emerged.
The Gamers: A culture of expertise.
The Gamers were an all-white group of sixteen- to eighteen-year olds who attended a suburban
alternative school known for its high rates of absenteeism. From working or lower middle-class
backgrounds, all of them had either been moved out of traditional public high schools for
disciplinary or academic reasons or opted out for social reasons. They were very dedicated game
players, with three out of four having completed the main storyline in the game (an estimated 150
to 200 hours of game play) and all of them having played at least three releases in the GTA series.
The Athletes: Game violence vs. “real” violence.
The Athletes were a group of thirteen to fifteen year-old African-American youths from working
class families who became friends because of their shared interest in basketball. All of the Athletes
were disaffiliated with school, expressing negative opinions about it and frustration with what
they perceived as unjust and too frequent disciplinary actions there. Their affinity for hip- hop
music and culture was immense, and that led in part to their interest in GTA. The Athletes played
the game differently than the Gamers: Three out of the four had played 75 hours or more of the
main storyline, but much of their time spent playing the game was in social settings with friends,
making it difficult to advance through the plot. When with friends, their play became more like
that of the Casuals (described below) as they enacted and performed a provocative masculinity.
The Casuals: Violence as performance play.
Most of them did not own the game so they engaged with it only on a limited basis in social
settings – at the homes of friends, family or neighbors. They had little interest in the intended
storyline and game activities but rather in performing in the game space for their friends.
According to their reports, most of their play in these situations consisted of engaging in
outrageous and socially disobedient acts – driving a tank down the interstate the wrong way, for
example, or “jumping” vehicles off in game services like hills or parking garages and trying to evade
police who came after them as a result of their reckless driving.
The study examined the play experiences of these different players in focus groups and
paid close attention to the the depiction of violence and race in GTA: San Andreas. Below is
a highlight of the results obtained from the study.
The Gamers brought experiences to the game that could not be easily meshed with the
possibilities available in the space, so their framework for interpreting the game was mediated
mainly by mass media. While the Gamers’ cultural model may have been shaped by mass media
discourses, their way of interpreting the semiotic space was also heavily accented by their gaming
disposition. Their sizable amount of experience doing side-missions, “easter egg” hunts and
explorations had convinced them that the game was, in large part, a satire of media
representations. As a narrative, they read GTA: San Andreas in terms of a tradition of a gangster
Quoted and Paraphrased on this page: (The Meaning of Race 1-33)
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genre in American media. As a game, they read their experiences in systemic terms, seeing ethnic
character and uniform dress of the various criminal factions in the game as a mechanic to advance
game play. Although nascent at best, there was some evidence that a gaming disposition, when
activated around a game with such deep social satire, opened space for these marginalized kids to
critique contemporary social structure.
Locally-situated play practices [those dependent upon the social identity that the player is
inhabiting], in particular, players’ relative expertise with GTA: San Andreas shape the available field
of meaning so that differing levels of expertise literally made a “different” GTA: San Andreas
available to different players. The Casuals had limited experience in the game world and thus held
simple theories about the game’s meaning. Again, their play consisted mostly of using cheat codes
and basic driving mechanics in the game’s starting area. In contrast, most of the Athletes had
engaged in over a hundred hours of game play and were thus able to relate the game’s
representation of racism to their own cultural models to produce a pretty accurate description of
the negative effects of racism in urban Los Angeles. The Gamers had each played hundreds of
hours of the game and utilized this extensive expertise in the game space to produce fairly
complex interpretations. As a result they were able to take obscure parts of the game storyline
and intertextually reframe these narratives in relation to the urban satire sub-genre of popular
film.
One quote from the study truly emphasized the Gamers understanding of the GTA games:
Interviewer: What do you think about how race is portrayed in the game?
Gamer 1: I was gonna bring that up too. Your main character just got out of jail, a black dude in LA
joining back up with a gang. All the gang members – the skinny guy and the fat guy – are smoking
bowls and passing shit. It’s so stereotypical. Obviously.
Gamer 2: Dude all the other GTAs are stereotypical of Italian Americans and stuff. I heard that Vice
City that one line that was really controversial: “Kill all the Haitians.” He was being like its genocide. It
wasn’t bullshit that they just threw in there. It was controversial between those two groups.
Whenever I played Vice City it was like being in the movie Scarface – the same movie, same city. They
are all the same ones in Scarface. You pretty much live in the same house - it’s all down to the detail.
When I played San Andreas, the first movie I thought of was “Menace II Society”. All their names are
all brought from those characters.
DeVane & Squire’s study brings one of the most important points regarding the
interpretation of the content of video games, in this case violence and race of GTA: San
Andreas. That the play experience is greatly influence by the players’ level of expertise and
familiarity with previous games in the series. As highlighted by this study, players who
dedicate the required amount of time to complete the game, develop an understanding of
the game’s satire and cultural references. As was discussed earlier the GTA games have
always been a flamboyant satire of American society with a love to pay tribute to
Hollywood’s biggest gangster flicks. Understanding and appreciating this point is central
to correctly interpreting the violence of the GTA series. The majority of news reporting
regarding violence in GTA V and the series in general have missed this point. Reviewers
and journalists are not use to the time and dedication required to properly understand a Quoted and Paraphrased on this page: (The Meaning of Race 1-33)
15
video game. As Erik Kain so correctly points out in his article “The Real Problem With
Video Game Reviews” on Forbes:
“Each game may as well be a season or two of a television series, and television bloggers tend to blog
on a per episode basis. Approaching a game in this fashion makes more sense for me, personally. For
me, it’s like an extended conversation or a book club. All the while, my understanding of each game
ferments and becomes more potent. Or so I like to think.
Games are not like films or music, and not simply because they’re more time consuming. The
antiquated review model for those other mediums may still serve them well, but for games it feels
hopelessly limiting. Every game requires, in a way, its own investigative report.
You can’t be a two-hour tourist with a video game. You need to go inhabit its space, meet the locals,
find the best secret haunts and learn the local customs.” (Forbes).
The reports that focus on GTA V being a game about hiring a prostitute and then killing
them or about driving around and running over people are written by “two-hour video
game tourists”. They are written by the Casuals. If teenagers, who the media considers
“at-risk”, can properly interpret and understand violence and race in the GTA games, why
can’t mainstream journalists and reporters do the same? As the Gamers exemplify, the
violence in the GTA games, if properly interpreted, is not a risk to society or morallycorrupting, but instead is part escapist enjoyment and part social commentary on the
current status-quo of American society.
!
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My Prospective
The violence made available to the player in GTA V while graphic is still within a
reasonable range for adults. Playing GTA V does not make you a bad person. It does not
make you morally corrupt. With 30+ hours of play and having completed the game’s main
story, the in-game stats report that I have 1800+ kills (and no I did not try to get that many
kills, it just happened) and I certainly do not feel like I am among history’s top mass
murders. I have no thoughts, plans or wants to go out and hurt anyone. If one dedicates
the required amount of time to the game to appreciate it, they will see its true meaning
and understand what it is trying to say about American society. A rational mentally-stable
person will be able to see GTA V’s realistic setting and graphics and know that the game is
just that, a game. All that has been shown up to this point largely matches this prospective.
Virtual Life ≠ Actual Life
Despite what news coverage may want society to think, a virtual life is in no way equal to
an actual life. Taking a virtual life is not anything like taking an actually life. A virtual life is
bits of code. A virtual life is a renewable resource. If in free roam I as Michael die in GTA V,
a minute later I see Michael walk out of a hospital with some minor scratches and I can
play him again. If in a story mission and I am killed, I restart from the last checkpoint (game
save point) and all the people I had killed after the checkpoint are back alive again too.
There is little sense of consequence death in GTA V. That is one thing news reports have
always seemed to get correct.
What they often miss is that this greatly affects how players go about playing the game.
You aren’t afraid to run straight into gun fire. You aren’t afraid of taking on SWAT teams.
The player rarely acts as if their life matters. All that matters is getting to the next
checkpoint, so when I die I don’t have to redo what I just did. That is what a life becomes in
a video game, just a chunk of data. A save point or a stat such as your K/D (kill/death ratio).
And a press of tiny brightly colored buttons and a pull of small plastic triggers on a game
control as you sit in front of you TV on your couch sipping some soda and enjoying some
snacks. How that interaction is similar to causing atrocities in real life is a wild stretch. Yes
the world of GTA V is incredibly realistic, but when I boot up my Xbox 360 and when I shut
it off I am making an acknowledged entrance/exit into/from a non-real virtual world.
There is a distinct contextual switch between real and virtual that cannot be overlooked.
The closest that video games ever get to death is games like Faster Than Light (FTL), which
is a real-time strategy (RTS) game set in outer space and features permadeath.
Permadeath is a gameplay mechanic typically found in RTS games where if a player dies
once they have to restart the game from the very beginning. While this certainly makes a
virtual life closer to that of an actual life, there is still the fact that if players have sufficient
technical knowledge they can backup their save files so if they do die they reload one of
the backed up files and have none of the penalties of death.
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Who’s responsible for the game and its actions?
If one were to attempt to find a partially-realistic parallel to virtual violence in real life
(though this is still a huge stretch) it would be that of violence caused by unmanned
drones.
Unmanned drones just as video games bring up the question of who is responsible for
whatever real life violence they may cause/influence.
With unmanned drones who is responsible: the factory workers who made the drone,
those who made its bombs/weaponry, those who programmed it, those in charge of its
construction, those who gave the drone instructions to carry out the attack or those who
ordered the attack?
Similar in video game who is responsible: the artist who made the player textures, the
artist who made the gun textures, the animator who animated the firing of the gun, the
animator who animated the player reaction to gun shots, the programmer who coded the
open world, the programmer who coded the player ability to fire a weapon, the producer
who managed the game’s progress, the game designer who came up with the idea for the
game or the executive who okayed the funding of the project?
The player textures could been used in a non-violent game where violence has ceased to
occur and the guns could be hung on shelves in a museum about the past. The code for the
open world and player movement and actions could be reused with different art assets.
Roughly similar code is used to create the open worlds of the teen-rated Lego video
games which feature “cartoon violence” and have never been accused of causing
massacres. So if the parts of a video game like GTA V which features realistic violence
could be reused in non-violent or child appropriate video games then it must be
combination of all these elements at once which causes problems so everyone on the team
must be at least equally responsible.
Though once past the first mission, the player could stop progressing through the story
mode and could use cheat codes easily found online to gain enough money in the game to
do completely non-violent things. They could obey traffic laws, manage businesses, play
golf, help strangers on the street, explore the open world with its wilderness and
underwater coves, etc. What if the player is the real problem? While not a highly accurate
life simulator like The Sims, GTA V still offers the player an expansive option of nonviolent activities. Beyond the first scene, the player is as violent as they want to be. The
player chooses the experience they want. The player subjects themselves to the violence.
So shouldn’t the player be held just as responsible for what they see as the game
developers? In real life we are faced with a similar question and most people choose to be
good and law-abiding, so one can’t argue that players don’t know how to make this
decision or that availability of these unlawful resources inhibit players’ ability to make an
uninfluenced decision.
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Turn on the TV and check the new movies coming out and you will see violence. You will
see people doing the exact same thing that you could be doing in real-life or that you could
choose to do in GTA V. Which path would you rather they choose?
!
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My Resources
- DMA Design. Grand Theft Auto. 1997. Video Game.
- Forbes. N.p., 8 July 2012. Web. 13 Dec. 2013. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/
2012/07/28/the-real-problem-with-video-game-reviews/2/>.
- Grand Theft Auto V - Official Website. Rockstar Games, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2013. <http://
www.rockstargames.com/V/>.
- Hartmann, Tilo, and Peter Vorderer. “It’s Okay to Shoot a Character: Moral
Disengagement in Violent Video Games.” Journal of Communication 60.1 (2010):
94-119. Print.
- Kushner, David. Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto. N.p.: Wiley, 2012. Print.
- The Meaning of Race and Violence in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
<http://gac.sagepub.com/content/3/3-4/264.abstract>.
- Rockstar Games. Grand Theft Auto III. 2001. Video Game.
- - - -. Grand Theft Auto IV. 2008. Video Game.
- - - -. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. 2004. Video Game.
- - - -. Grand Theft Auto V. 2013. Video Game.
- Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. “Results from the 2009
National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Mental Health Findings.” National
Survey on Drug Use and Health: 1. Print.
- Wikipedia. Wikipedia, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Game_studies>.
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