Wednesday 1 October, 2008

Several new themes presented themselves today in my playing.

Ethnicity came up in a mission for Sweet today. CJ walked into his brother's house to find Sweet yelling at their sister for dating a Mexican. This is entirely unacceptable and is just blatant stereotyping; Sweet has never met his sister's boyfriend and has no desire to do so, however, he holds nothing buy spite for him simply because of his ethnicity. Sweet asked CJ to go keep an eye on her and make sure that the Mexican is treating her right, this involved me acquiring a low-rider and competing in some form of odd hydraulic/DDR type of minigame (which was mildly entertaining might I add) The resulting cinema brought CJ and the Mexican (I think his name was Carlos) face to face over the subject of his sister. Carlos, after politely asking CJ's sister to let them talk for a moment, explains to CJ that he should give him a chance because he loves CJ's sister and takes good care of her. CJ, perhaps for a wanting of making the city a better place or maybe just for his sister, decides to agree and drops any preconceived notions he had about Carlos. This says a lot about the potential for CJ's character. Obviously racism is a part of gang life, as we can see with Sweet, but CJ decided to make the morally responsible decision both for himself and his sister. There just may be hope for CJ as a moral agent yet...maybe.

Most of my notions of the previous thought were shattered when I did the next couple of missions for Ryder. All of which involved blatant theft on an increasing level of severity. The first was out of a weapon collector's house while he was sleeping. CJ broke in, stole several crates of weapons, and took off with Ryder. This is about as far as you can push the line of "for the greater good" even in a neighborhood as volatile as CJ's. Yes, perhaps this one person didn't need all of these weapons, but regardless of that fact, that doesn't make it right to steal them, especially not to facilitate further gang conflict. The second was from a train. Ryder and CJ got a tip off from Officer Tenpenny, the corrupt cop that seems to run the other corrupt cops. Turned out that the same tip was given to other gangs, further showing Tenpenny's out of control nature and ridiculous abuse of authority and power, forcing CJ and Ryder to kill well over a dozen rival gang members, and for what, more weapons to kill more people? To me, this action is completely unjustifiable; however, I have the slightest degree of leniency in this situation due to interference on Tenpenny's part.
The third and final mission I played today involved Cj and Ryder breaking into the local National Guard depot to steal weapons. Yes, I know, I was just as shocked. Not only is the very idea of this beyond stupid, but it is just blatant theft, not to mention that you're no longer stealing from an abandoned train or a private collector, you're stealing from the national guard who is there to protect the city of San Andreas should some terrible tragedy befall the city (i.e. terrorist attack, Russian attack, rabid bear attack, etc) Not only were CJ and Ryder morally wrong in every sense of the phrase in committing this crime, but they were endangering the entire city, not just their run down area. I know that I killed at least 20 National Guard soldiers, not to mention the ones that Ryder killed. What about their families, their lives? These three missions kind of made me lose a bit of hope in CJ's character, as it would seem that he is simply acting on an Ethical Egoist, or even amoral, level. These kinds of actions, behaviors, and decisions don’t really help anyone at all and serve no purpose but to further the degradation of CJ’s self and neighborhood.

Are the (hypothetical) families of the National guardsmen you killed in the game more "valuable" than the families of the gang members you killed in an earlier mission?

Its a different situation entirely.

When you join a gang, you're shedding your role as a productive member of society as gangs act outside the social norms of said society. In a gang, it is expected of you to kill rival gang members and that rival gang members are going to try to kill you, thus the knowledge that you're putting yourself and your family at risk should not come as a surprise. Also, these gang members attacked me. When I entered the scene I was already under fire; if I had not killed them, they would have killed me.

The national guardsmen, however, are still very much a part of that society. When I attacked them, it was in cold blood. They held no ill will towards me.

I suppose, to answer your question, yes, the families of the national guardsmen I killed were more important, or "valuable" as you put it, than the gang members that suffered the same fate.

I'm not sure you can say that part about how you willingless enter into a sort of contract by joining a gang. CJ was born into the gang, and when he returned he had no money and was semi-forced into helping out his old friends. At the very least his moral character trait of 'loyalty' overrode his immoral character trait of "Doesn't mind killing national guards".

I'm also not sure that saying stealing weapons from the national guard "don't really help anyone at all". In CJ and Smoke's minds the weapons were being put to good use to fight the 'evil' ballers, and weren't being used for much of anything when the guard had them.

It's probably also important to note that a GTA national guard probably doesn't -have- families. In GTA everyone's generally either stupid, corrupt, or on your side. Listening to the radio for any length of time does a pretty decent job of showing you the types of 'innocents' you're killing. The only authority figure with a face that we ever see is Tenpenny, who's main job is to show you that the cops all pretty much suck. You never see a moral cop who's trying to do the right thing and gets gunned down by CJ, Tommy Vercetti and crew for getting in their way. I also seem to recall Ryder ending up being one of the evil ones, so being a jerk in his missions might just be foreshadowing.

That being said the missions that made me feel bad were the ones where you have to kill people to get a rhymes for that bad rapper guy. They seemed a lot more 'pointless killing'-ish than the steal weapon ones.

Also, I'm being a little devil's advocate and bending things around a bit to make the guards bad, so chances are you're more right than I am in that mission at least. (This should totally count for one of my 3, by the way)