Saturday 4 October, 2008

After my third (and probably final) time playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, I am more turned off from playing the game than in my initial experience. This was because this time playing, I explored the issues with women in the games.


Perhaps just because I am a woman, I was more than a little offended by the treatment of women in the game. The only appearance I saw of women in the game besides short appearances of girlfriends and voices screaming, were prostitutes. This suggests to me that not only are women portrayed in a negative light, but also that their only purpose is for sex.

During the game, the character has the ability to have sex with prostitutes, and then kill them to get out of paying them. This turned me off of the game because although maybe this makes a statement about how we view women in our society today, I don’t think it makes its point to any effective end. Most players just enjoy having sex with and killing the hookers (women) and I had a really hard time playing the game after this.

You should see Carlos' cousin(I think). She's the personification of "Crazy Bitch" -and- you sleep with her with no relationship, so she gets the "women are for sex" angle of annoyance in too. (Although even if she is offensive, is one of the funnier characters in the game)

I think it's interesting how the prostitutes are so insignificant gameplay-wise, but they get all the attention. They're more of an easter egg than a real part of the game. On the other hand, other than the crazy hispanic woman the one real female character, CJ's sister, is actually one of the more moral people in the game. As someone said in another post, she dates Carlos even though it's inter-gang/racial because he's a good person, and she encourages CJ to stop living the gang life and 'get a job' halfway through the game.

It's a bit hard to support this throughout the other games though. GTA women tend to either be vapid bimbos at least the majority of the time.

I think you arrived at one of the main problems of the GTA series, being that it does accurately or fairly reflect how life is or how it should be, or how people ought to act. You said that in a previous post that the game itself makes fun of its audience, but you also stated the sad fact that people do not see pass the game elements of the story. No one, well the average player, never notices how skewed the subject matter of the game is because they are to busy wreaking havoc. Yes our society has it problems, specifically with mistreatment of women and gang violence but does this game try to bring these problems out in a positive manner? Well the answer is most likely no. So in future analysis of games you should think of ways to solve moral issues in games like this.