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Saturday 17 April, 2010
Today I continued doing some of the missions in San Andreas. The first one I had to do as CJ was drive to get some tacos. While eating in the parking lot of the restaurant, a rival gang drives by and checks CJ and the others out, so the others tell me it’s a “drive-by” and I’m supposed to closely follow them so a gun fight can begin. I thought it was rather silly, especially when I drove by numerous police, firing guns and breaking traffic laws without being stopped. It is possible that the police are that corrupt to allow it to happen, or maybe the programmers just didn’t bother to program police activity in during missions. However I still found it ridiculous. After the rival gang’s car is on fire, I was supposed to get out and kill the members of the rival gang. I only had to kill one because their car blew up and killed the others. Again, I’m not sure if it was programmed like this. In order to kill the remaining gang member, I picked a gun dropped by one of the other members. I didn’t really know how to fire it – I learned a little bit later during a different mission – so I accidentally hit a whole bunch of innocent people on the street, plus the gang member. Succeeding in this gained me money and “respect” points.
This mission was disturbing to me. I violently killed someone (and innocent bystanders) from another gang simply because they looked at me. In truth, I think the entire concept of the game is absurd and it’s because of missions like this. While it’s easy to declare all senseless killings are wrong, I know there will be people who feel compassion for CJ because of his poor neighbor and murder of his mother. These people would probably say that he was sort of “forced” in gang life based on his situation. I’m not saying this isn’t true for real life gang members, but as someone playing this game, it’s hard to feel any sort of compassion for CJ. Sure, his story probably happens in real life, but how can I as someone playing a videogame really feel for him? For one thing, the graphics and violence are very cartoonish. In this sense, the game almost desensitizes me while playing it. It is not until after I’ve finished playing the game and think about what I just played do I realize the immorality of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
I also learned how to build muscle in the game and change clothes. The exercising in particular felt more like a palette cleanser. It was relatively simple to lift weights, run the tread mill, and cycle on the elliptical. It was a nice change of pace from all of the violence. However, I couldn’t work with the boxer until I gained more muscle. Once I was able to speak with him, it was back to the same old thing: beat him up. So, once I did, I learned some new fight moves that will “cause my damage to [my] enemies.” Once again, back to the cycle of violence.
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