Monday 8 March, 2010

During my second experience with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas I found myself taking on the role of a gangster and making choices more in that mindset. I specifically chose to buy green clothes, which is the gangs’ color, and I purposefully drove over and shot at people who wore purple (the color of the rival gang). I find it both fascinating and disturbing that I was basing my decisions not on what I myself find ethically right or wrong, but instead on what my character felt. I was doing this even though I knew that these actions would have no benefit to me within the game. This is what disturbed me because I was superimposing myself into the game thinking that it would benefit me in some way to murder rival gang members. I had the same sort of mindset when I first played the “No Russian” level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I shot at the civilians in the airport because I thought that I would fail the mission if I did not, and despite the fact that there was nothing telling me to shoot them I felt peer pressure from the characters in the game to act as they did. I find it interesting to think that I made the game more real than it actually is by acting in a way which would benefit CJ in real life, but not in the game itself.

I definitely agree with you. I started doing the same thing because of the rewards involved when doing these crimes. It made me feel really bad that I was going along with it until there would be another mission where it just became second nature for me to do whatever it was that was asked of me. I think this could be potentially unethical in that you are so rewarded and move up in the game when such realistic crimes are committed.