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MohammedAnsari's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC)
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| [February 15, 2009 04:59:21 PM]
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The last time that I played GTA: San Andreas I decided to continue of where I had left of. I was very tempted to just play the game the way I wanted; by just going around getting as many stars as I could and fight the police. Yet I realized that I would not be able to write another post if I played the same thing. I continued after CJ makes it to his brother’s house. The second mission was for my character to get a haircut and then go to a pizza shop. While you are at the pizza shop you realize that your friend is trying to rob the place but completely messes up. It seemed like the game has it set up that your friend messes up the robbery so you get used to running away from trouble in the game. The one thing that I realized the game goes against is the Divine Command.
The Divine Command is what God has ordered us to do. Things such as we should not lie or steal, etc. It seems like everything that is said in the Divine Command is the opposite in the game. The player does have an option not to play the game and just do whatever they want. Yet if they did there would be no reason in playing this game. Specifically in this mission after the robbery went wrong the fist thing I did was to stop a guy in his car and throw him out. The person tried to put up a fight but I just got in and floored it. This action which I committed went against the Divine Command and was not even one of the worse actions that one can make in this game.
It seems that not even Utilitarianism is followed in this game because whatever you do is usually to benefit yourself. When I stole the car it did not benefit the person who owned the car initially. It benefitted my character and his friend from getting caught from an attempted robbery. I guess the more I played the game the more I realized that everything about this game was immoral and that I hope kids do not try to emulate what goes on in this game. I thought that it was a good game to play to take some stress out of ones life. I played the game for three days straight after work and school and thought that it was a great way to reduce stress. Yet I realized that it taught against the Divine Command and also was the opposite of Utilitarianism. I guess it was a good way to analyze the Divine Command and Utilitarianism with this game. It was easy to see how neither of them correlated.
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| [February 15, 2009 04:37:25 PM]
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I think that one of the funniest things about this game were the stereotypes that were thrown into the game knowingly or unknowingly. The main character in the game is a black man and has many qualities that one would commonly associate with a black person. The clothing for one seemed to make it clear what kind of character that we were playing and also what kind of characters we would interact with. The characters seemed to be wearing a lot of chains and jewelry and some of them also were shown wearing bandanas as well. I thought that it was wrong to try to make the main character and the lesser characters follow one race. Besides the game being semi-stereotypical I thought that the game gives the player the chance to be ethical at times. It seems that the game has a good story to it; the main character comes home after his mother has passed away. It shows that the main character Carl or “CJ” has some moral responsibility that he believes in. For CJ it seems that he believes that he must see his mother for one last time and then to help the gang that his family is a part of to become one again. The first mission that I played was where I was attacked by a rival gang and had to leave the scene or risk being killed. I thought this part of the game was rather hard.
The last gaming system I had was a Nintendo 64 so the game play for this was entirely different. I was not used to the game actually taking into account how fast I was going that I would not be able to make some turns. It took me about three turns to actually pass this first step of the game. After I had completed this part it made me think that even though there are many non-ethical things that you can do in this game the character has a lot of good characteristics about him. The developers did try to make the characters look like a “typical” gangster but to me it seemed that CJ was trying to live a better life but only came back because of his mothers passing. It seemed that CJ realized that even though his family is part of a gang that at the end of the day they are still his family.
I think that this shows how the game correlates with somewhat what we have discussed in class. CJ had the choice to come to his mother’s funeral and go back home to what he was doing (which was pretty much the same thing). Yet he realized that he must stay and make his family gang prominent again. Sounds very ethical doesn’t it?
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| [February 15, 2009 04:08:46 PM]
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There are hundreds of game’s that are produced every year and all have the same goal: that is to sell more than the rival company. So what can one game do to make it better than the others? Grand Theft Auto seems to have come up with a solution that accomplishes almost everything that a player would want to do. It pushes the envelope of gaming that has not been seen before. The pleasure that one gets while playing Grand Theft Auto is indescribable. The makers have seemed to find a way to make every gamers dream happen in this one game. We all have played games where we at times are bored out of our minds so we then turn to see the limits of the game. In Grand Theft Auto the limit of the game is endless. Grand Theft Auto wants to challenge you. You think that you can defeat the cops? Go ahead the challenge awaits you. The boredom level never sinks in while playing this game. In other games you can steal but there is no reinforcement that happens; this game is entirely different. There is an outcome for every act that you do and it is always not the same outcome every time that you play. By the time the gamer is done playing Grand Theft Auto they have realized that the game flow is of a different quality. The flow of the game is not interrupted and the game makes you want to try to win the next time. Game flow is broken down into eight different types in the book and after playing the game I think that Grand Theft Auto fits the description off all eight categories. Another huge plus for the game is that it can be played as a long-term game or just a short-term game; which makes it two-dimensional
In other games there is a certain stage that you reach where you realize that everything that you are doing is the same; such as in the Sims. In the Sims after a while you seem to realize that what you did ten minutes had no affect on what you are doing now. There really is no reward for working out, or reading the newspaper. You get skill points but what does the skill point help you with? In Grad Theft auto there is no rut that you can fall into. There is so much to do that it would take about four times as long to reach a rut in Grand Theft Auto than in The Sims. In Grand Theft Auto if you hijack a car at any sudden moment a cop might come after you and start shooting. If not a cop it could be a gang member that wants to let it be known that you have just entered his territory. The game has set in a lot of elements that will keep the gamer interested and alarmed so as not to get bored of the game. If one does seem to run away from the cops for an extended period of time there is a star system to let the player know how far up the wanted list they are. If the player picks up a hooker the objective changes and the player has a certain amount of time to drop of the hooker so that the player can make money to feed him or herself. The game also has certain fixed variables that are put into the game so players do not think that they can do anything that they want; this is also known as reinforcement.
The most tempting thing to do when a gamer plays the game is to go up to an innocent bystander and beat the crap out of them. But what happens when you the gamer are not strong enough to beat the bystander up? This is the reinforcement that is put into the game. It lets the player know that just because they want to beat the bystander up it will not always be that way. The good thing is that the more people that you fight with the stronger your character becomes. Yet it is not known how long it takes the player to achieve a higher skill level in fighting; it is set as a variable reinforcement. The player becomes stronger after a certain number of fights and this number is not always the same as the other time the gamer played the game.
This was the fist thing that I tried doing during the game. As soon as the game started I went up to a bystander and just started attacking him. I had heard that some bystanders take a while to fight back but to my surprise I was retaliated right away. It was fun how when I won my first fight they bystander lay there for a while and you have the choice of walking away or to continue to pound the bystander. The one thing that bothered me through out all this was how could one person get away with all this? What kind of justice is being shown here? The character that we play might get caught by the police but that is only if we commit crimes in front of the cops. For the first hour that I played I kept picking fights around small streets where I looked around to make sure there were no cops. If I was losing a fight I would just start running and hope the bystander would leave me alone. To me it was wrong that the person had the option to pick a fight and have the potential to get away from any punishment. I thought it would have been better if some of the bystanders called the cops and then the game would have had some justice thrown into it. All in all going around trying to win fights was really entertaining. It was defiantly more entertaining than I had expected it to be.
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