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thitpas's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC)
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| [October 1, 2010 03:03:39 PM]
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This is my final gamelog. I have played for over six hours now, and am decently far into the story. I've thought some more about what I wrote in my first gamelog, about the warrant system and the punishment representative to the level of crime committed. At the time, it seemed appropriate, but there is something missing. If you kill someone in the game, you might have a two star warrant system and have to outrun the cops for a little while. If you get away from them, that's the end of it. There's no investigation by detectives, no crime scene or DNA testing, you can just run away. If we consider this game as having an impact on its younger viewers, it really does a poor job of showing consequences for bad behavior.
I've also thought about the relationships between characters in the game. If thought about from a Kantian perspective, a lot of CJ's actions would be morally wrong. Kant said we ought to treat people as ends in themselves, not means to an end. CJ, on the other hand, treats everyone he meets as means to an end. He uses the characters as stepping stones to get what he wants. In fact, I believe that's the point of the game, to use people in order to rise up the food chain of the fictional west-coast city.
After playing this game for a while, there's no doubt in my mind that it encourages immoral behavior, at least according to Kant. Sure it's a video game and meant for fun, but most of its players are of the age where they still are learning about themselves and finding their identity, and it would be a shame if they found their identity in the actions of CJ, or any other character from Grand Theft Auto.
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| [September 30, 2010 03:57:21 PM]
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I've played my way through a good chunk of the game, far exceeding the 30 minute mandate, and I now would consider myself well-versed in the missions. I feel bad for CJ. The man is faced with lots of difficult decisions. Like whether or not to take part in a robbery, or whether to kill a pedestrian with a baseball bat or a shotgun. One aspect of the missions I found interesting was the concept of choice. It was like the discussion in class today about games like Fable. CJ has certain missions he must complete, but he can also chose to help or hurt certain characters. These little choices open or close doors to you later in the game. If you help someone, they may sometimes help you in a later mission, and if you hurt them, they may get in your way. This seems fair at first, but after playing enough missions, it seemed clear to me that the game was biased in favor of your negative choices. The more you stole and murdered, etc., the more rewards you got such as money, cars and status. In fact, the only real consequences that could be inferred is if you get shot to much in a gunfight, your character dies. But what does that really mean? You don't lose anything. And lots of times you can just re-do the mission. My point is that morality in this game seems inconsequential, because even if you make bad decisions, there is no real concrete punishment for your actions.
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| [September 29, 2010 11:54:23 AM]
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For my first gamelog, I decided to just have my run of the game world and not do any missions. I have played Grand Theft Auto games before, and I wanted to see how this world compared to the others. My background was in GTA IV, so the graphics and gameplay seemed a little sluggish and outdated. However, the same basic components were still there. I had my run of the town-stealing cars and running down pedestrians. I first wanted to experience the game without the missions, stripped down to the esentials of gameplay. Like the other grand theft auto games, there was a lot of freedom. I could go almost anywhere and do anything. I found that in this free play mode, morality issues are few and simple, and operate according to the morality rules of our country. If you do something illegal, the cops will be on your ass. It reminded me of a kantian idea from the book. Kant belived that people should be punihsed according to the severity of their crime. So a theif would have much less of a punishment than a murderer, and so on. This is applied in GTA as well with the five-star system. Often times when you break a law, you will get the attention of the police, and the more illegal actions you commit, the more attention, or stars, you receive, which increases the effort the police make to arrest you. That became part of the thrill of the game, to see how high I could get the star rating and really provoke the wrath of the cops. I will begin missions soon, and try to disover more nefarious deeds i can be part of.
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| [September 29, 2010 11:44:19 AM]
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