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SeppukuHC's Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas (PS2)
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| [October 6, 2008 05:28:01 AM]
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My final game session began with a mission called “Drive-Thru” in which the main characters go to eat at a fast food joint only to catch a rival gang's car on their way to your neighborhood to presumably kill some of your fellow gang members. You are then asked to follow the car and stop it before it reaches your neighborhood. Then problem is the means by which the car is stopped. In this mission the game actually presents a very crucial moral dilemma, essentially the tipping point before the game stops holding your hand and starts asking you to kill, steal, and commit a number of other acts. You see in order to stop the two gangsters from killing your own, you must drive up close to their car. While you keep within close proximity, the passengers in your car shoot at the rival Ballers vehicle and eventually kill them.
The dilemma is an excellent mirror of the common train problem. On one track is two men who wish harm upon your friends, on another are one, maybe two, if you're especially unlucky maybe four or five of your friends. Your switch is your proximity to their car. If you peruse them you are essentially choosing to end their lives. Which is an important statement. Choosing to end their lives. You are not killing them yourself. At no point in this mission do you handle a gun. At no point in this mission do you even need to make contact with their car and run them off the road. You are simply following them. Tailgating if you will, which at face value registers as nothing more than a nuisance far from an ethical violation. However this simple act carries with it the baggage of knowing that in doing so you will be leading to their death. You can say you have no control over what happens when you get there that your passengers decided to kill these men not you. But the fact remains, they told you they were going to shoot them when you got close enough. You know fully what will happen they will be killed.
On top of this is the fact that if you do not pursue them, your friends will most likely be killed. However there is still that chance that no one will be outside when they attempt their drive-by, or perhaps that they are just passing through as you often pass through their neighborhoods on your way to missions. They could just be there to write graffiti just as you go to their neighborhoods to do the same. There are a number of variables that are uncertain. It is simply assumed that they are here for a drive-by shooting. If you take it for what it is and believe they will kill your friends your decision is still not over. It is an often accepted rule that, one persons ends cannot be another's means. That you should not kill one to save another. So you must decide are you killing them by knowing they will be killed based on your actions? Then determine if they need to be killed or if this might be a misunderstanding, and last if you must kill them, who will benefit and how much? It is all very complicated.
To aid in your dilemma that occurs in the mind in a split second as you decide to hit X (the gas pedal) or not. The game does a number of things to try to make the decision for you. Whether thats the right one or not is up to you. First and foremost as with most morally questionable things in this and the following missions including three after this, “Sweet's Girl”, where you deliberately kill numerous people, you are faced with the issue of failure to complete will prevent progress. There is no morally acceptable option. You can say no, but you will not gain access to the rest of the city and you will not advance in any way. There is no moral way to climb the ladder in this game through honest means. It almost forces you to ignore morality. The other thing it does is dehumanize the murder victim. A text appears above their head the first time you meet them acknowledging them as your sworn enemy. It assures you that anyone in purple clothes wants you dead. With this the game is almost trying to give the player a false sense that its ok to kill these people because we said so.
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| [October 6, 2008 12:04:57 AM]
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As I proceeded through the rest of the introductory missions, I discovered as with the first three and the opening cut scene they all still present the player as a victim. Never does the player go on the attack or do any of the things he does out of greed or human desires. They present him as an honorable guy doing what he has to for his family and friends. They are careful to ease into crime. While the player has been shot at he has not stained his hands with blood, gotten revenge, or done anything that couldn't be justified. As a matter of fact most of what he has done thus far has been running for his life, further cementing this idea that the world is against you and methodically trying to absolve you from caring about any actions taken against entities in this world.
In the mission “Cleaning the Hood” the game tries to paint the main character as a moral warrior. Cleaning his neighborhood of drugs. It plays much more like a case of doing the wrong thing with the right intentions, which doesn't make it any less the wrong thing. The player goes out for some vigilante justice and assaults a number of drug dealers to unconsciousness with a baseball bat. While cleaning the world of drugs is a great cause, it would seem rather unethical to depict this as an effective way of achieving this goal. Considering while the game is careful to tell you that you are not killing these people you beat up, it fails to mention the potential brain damage and death that is likely to result from such beatings. Not to mention the prison involved. When I was arrested in the game after beating someone with a bat, I respawned outside of the police station seconds later. This taking a rather lax position to prison. A crime like this would involve charges like attempted manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon, and would put the player in jail for some ten or more years, with good reason too.
Lastly, in this game session I found myself torn on the subject of racism. Initially I assumed the way that blacks are portrayed in this game was racist. It assumed they were all gangbanging thugs or drug dealers and dressed them and wrote them in very negative stereotypes. Then something occurred to me that hadn't before. The main cast is a perfect model of NWA as they appeared on the Straight Outa Compton album and models their behavior after that of the characters in their songs. CJ is MC Ren, Ryder is a picture perfect Eazy E (replace San Andreas on his hat with Compton), and Sweet is Ice Cube. While this does not justify the game series history of racism controversy, especially in its jokes, I question how much of what many perceive as clear unethical racism are simply unrecognized parodies or in this case homages to admired recording artists.
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| [October 5, 2008 11:25:29 PM]
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I returned to San Andreas this week, a game I haven't played in almost four years. As the opening cut scene enfolds the player is robbed and subsequently framed then blackmailed by a corrupt police officer. By putting the police as the main villain and antagonist early on, the game presents a world where morals are much more lax than most others. It seems to desensitize the player early on to the ethical violations they will perform later in the title, by presenting them as a victim doing what they must to get by in a mixed up, unjust game world. It hopes the player will come into the experience assuming if justice is not present, if the police are immoral, then why should I care to be?
I find it worth noting however that this part of the script is not without its merit. It is important to acknowledge that as much as this is just a rip off of movies like Training Day and as much harm as it may do to the players moral compass within the game world, it does make a fantastic attempt at educating the player to the reality of police corruption in areas of poverty. The fact is that this was often the case in Los Angeles during this time period especially amongst the then infamous Rampart CRASH unit. As a person who very familiar with the injustice and mistreatment of corrupt police, I feel that this is an incredibly brave move risking the controversy that may result from taking a clear moral stand on this issue and including it in a product consumed by millions of people.
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