Monday 6 October, 2008

As I proceeded through the rest of the introductory missions, I discovered as with the first three and the opening cut scene they all still present the player as a victim. Never does the player go on the attack or do any of the things he does out of greed or human desires. They present him as an honorable guy doing what he has to for his family and friends. They are careful to ease into crime. While the player has been shot at he has not stained his hands with blood, gotten revenge, or done anything that couldn't be justified. As a matter of fact most of what he has done thus far has been running for his life, further cementing this idea that the world is against you and methodically trying to absolve you from caring about any actions taken against entities in this world.

In the mission “Cleaning the Hood” the game tries to paint the main character as a moral warrior. Cleaning his neighborhood of drugs. It plays much more like a case of doing the wrong thing with the right intentions, which doesn't make it any less the wrong thing. The player goes out for some vigilante justice and assaults a number of drug dealers to unconsciousness with a baseball bat. While cleaning the world of drugs is a great cause, it would seem rather unethical to depict this as an effective way of achieving this goal. Considering while the game is careful to tell you that you are not killing these people you beat up, it fails to mention the potential brain damage and death that is likely to result from such beatings. Not to mention the prison involved. When I was arrested in the game after beating someone with a bat, I respawned outside of the police station seconds later. This taking a rather lax position to prison. A crime like this would involve charges like attempted manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon, and would put the player in jail for some ten or more years, with good reason too.

Lastly, in this game session I found myself torn on the subject of racism. Initially I assumed the way that blacks are portrayed in this game was racist. It assumed they were all gangbanging thugs or drug dealers and dressed them and wrote them in very negative stereotypes. Then something occurred to me that hadn't before. The main cast is a perfect model of NWA as they appeared on the Straight Outa Compton album and models their behavior after that of the characters in their songs. CJ is MC Ren, Ryder is a picture perfect Eazy E (replace San Andreas on his hat with Compton), and Sweet is Ice Cube. While this does not justify the game series history of racism controversy, especially in its jokes, I question how much of what many perceive as clear unethical racism are simply unrecognized parodies or in this case homages to admired recording artists.

I would have to agree with your statements in regards to the punishment factor in GTA. Players only get a slap on the wrist, it seems, if they get arrested. The problem is that game play wise it wouldn't be fun if the player had to start over from scratch if they get caught by police, also being incarcerated in prison is not a very appealing game play feature. So in future analysis of games maybe you could discuss various ways designers can fix this problem through an ethical lens.