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Tuesday 21 September, 2010
So for the second time of playing San Andreas, I decided to basically play the same first 45 minutes of the game and view how it portrays the gang violence between the two rival gangs.
So you start out as CJ, a black male in about his 20’s. As you begin to move around, then you begin to notice how poor looking the neighborhood is. Graffiti on the walls of homes, broken down houses, etc. So you move CJ and make him get on a bicycle as you ride to head to his home. There he is attacked by a friend who thinks he is someone else. The scene uses some very strong language, as do the rest of the scenes following. So you take CJ and his friends to a cemetery and there they are attacked by a rival gang that is shooting at them. You hop on your bikes and make a mad dash threw the city to avoid them. Soon after, you and Ryder go to a pizza place and attempt to rob it but are chased away. Following that the next morning, you go into your rival gang’s territory and start spraying over their tags with your own, even running into two gang members and a police officer, both cases in which you sprayed the gang members and the cop and it drops them. Running around for a few more minutes and getting a few more tags was when I ended the game play.
Now, I am not from a poorer neighborhood so I don’t know if I can be the best judge of how things are, but you can tell that from looking around, just the overall feel of the game screams poorer conditions thus it can lead to gang violence, which to some extent is true. The game shows that these areas are populated by what can appear (making the assumption) lower income black families and generally, in poorer areas, crime is higher and gangs seem to thrive more. This much of the game is correct. Yet the game itself is still inaccurate. The game itself just seems to glorify gang violence and it makes it seem as if it is fun to go after other gang members. In the scene with the drive by, no one in the game was hurt, however in real life, someone would/could have been hit with one of those bullets and might possibly have been killed. Especially as you raced through the city to get away from the other gang and bullets were still flying. You could hear a few screams from people on the street but no one was killed. How wrong that is? It makes light of such a serious situation. Including the scene in which you spray the spray paint in your rivals and the police officers face, effectively dropping them and what can be assumed either dead or severely poisoned. Another part of the whole gang thing is not only innocent bystanders are getting hurt, but the other gang members and the police that are sworn to protect take a hit. This game makes light of the issue that human life is not sacred and that it is okay to run around with a gun shooting someone. Nothing about this game teaches a good value but it can place the idea of glorified gang violence is okay. By this game’s standards, it’s okay to kill a police officer, it’s okay to rob stores, it’s okay to fire wildly at another gang member, thus killing them, when in reality, all of these things are wrong and are looked down upon in this society. So for the second time playing this game, I was not amused nor did I enjoy playing it. Maybe my sense of human life and morals are too strong, but I just found this game distasteful to a very strong level.
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