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Monday 18 January, 2010
On the final day of this assignment, I was planning to continue to play the main story of the game. After meeting up with my friend, my first mission was to tag over some graffiti. I found a few of the tags, but then I was unclear on where to go next. I didn't see any marker on the mini-map indicating where to go, and I also saw nothing in the main menu map. After running around for a few minutes, I started to get bored of looking around for it.
Apparently, my boredom leads to me getting in trouble. After running around for a while, I finally got into a car and started to drive around. While driving, I ran my car into a group of thugs. I then got out of the car and encountered the surviving members of the group, who were not happy about what I had just done. They attacked me, but I beat down and killed both of them.
It was at this point when I realized I was having more fun committing violence in the game than actually trying to further myself in the story. I find this weird because I am not a violent or angry person in real life. However, due to frustration over not knowing how to progress the story, I eventually took it out on the in-game characters and felt better.
I have played a lot of video games in my life, and I have definitely played a lot of violent games. GTA:SA was one of the first games to make me question and realize the harshness of my violent actions. It could be because of the realistic setting the game is in. It could also be that since it is so easy to play in a violent and reckless manner, I felt like killing random pedestrians for enjoyment.
Overall, my experience with GTA:SA was much more interesting than I thought it would be prior to starting the game. I went in with the goal to get as far as I could in the story, but instead, I gave up half-way into it and decided to enjoy myself by causing harm to the people inside of it. There are a multitude of ethical issues in the game, however, for every bad action I did inside the game, I remembered that it was just a video game and meant nothing for my real life.
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