Saturday 4 October, 2008

I've played most of the GTA games before, and I feel like I'm being a little biased towards it, so I just wanted to say at the start that a lot of this is a reaction to other people's responses to the game. It's a little extreme in places and ignores a lot of the fact that “The game IS pretty full of killing” and has a lot of stereotypes and immoral missions. I do feel that a lot of this is because it's a satire of the worst sides of our culture, and most of the game is a big parody, but sometimes the characters are big jerks no matter how you look at it. I feel I can refute that by saying even in the GTA world with GTA rules, the characters aren't 'great' people. I just feel they aren't incredibly immoral ones either. A lot of the complaints about their actions dissolve when you realize the world they live in is a bit different from the one we are in.

A lot of the other logs seem to think the game has absolutely no sense of morality whatsoever. I've only read the ones on the very first page, but some of the things I've seen say that “the player doesn't hold responsibility for neither himself/herself nor the people around him.”, that the enjoyment is because “People love not having rules and restrictions, and they enjoy playing in a world where there are barely any consequences for their actions, and you are actually rewarded for hyper violent behavior.”, and “Morality is in no way a part of San Andreas, but I think that that is the whole point of the game. San Andreas teaches you that killing is fun, and police brutality is exciting.” I find this view to grossly mis-characterize the game. The ethical framework held by the characters is just a highly unusual, distorted one, not a nonexistent one. One of the main values that is a theme throughout all the GTA games is loyalty.

Every one of the GTA games paints loyalty as one of the prime virtues a person can have. In GTA 3 the Italian crime family tries to have your character killed because he's an outsider in the end of the first act. You have to repay this betrayal by killing the head of the family. In Vice city you're betrayed both by your old boss and by your best friend. Vercetti is pretty obviously hurt by this, even though he has no problems killing hordes of gang members and civilians. He doesn't mention the bad things his boss did. He's upset about the fifteen years he spent in prison being ignored. In San Andreas CJ is betrayed by Smoke in much the same way. CJ spends the second half of San Andreas swallowing his pride and working for the 'bad guy' police because he's concerned for his brother. In GTA 4 I'm pretty sure Nico also gets involved in crime because his family is in trouble.

These are characters that don't blink twice when shooting someone, but they still live by a code of ethics. A major theme of the games is that the characters live in a corrupt world and acting immorally is the only way to thrive. You never see any 'good' people in any of the games and the best you can hope for is honorable 'bad' people. By our standards most of the characters are amoral at best, but in the world of GTA the amoral characters are generally discernible from the pure evil ones. It's a world of different morals, not nonexistent ones.

Yes the world of GTA has different morals, and we can't really use the ethics of the GTA universe to live in real life. However, loyalty aside there are many other moral issues that are presented in GTA, like killing a prostitute after having sex with her to get your money back, and running over civilians. The problem is not that the GTA universe is immoral, but how its immoral nature influences people in the real world.