Wednesday 25 January, 2012

For my third and final go around with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas: I decided to return to doing the main story missions. The first mission that I tried to tackle was the mission, Drive-By. In this mission you are given the task of driving your fellow gang members through a certain section of the city killing members of a rival gang. It took me a couple tries to complete this mission as I was having difficulty evading the police at the end of the mission. Having finally figured out that it is easiest to just run over the enemies to kill them, rather than waiting for my friends to shoot them, the mission was a breeze.
But while I was running over all these gang members I was thinking to myself is this the best way to go about this? I wasn’t thinking in the sense of is this the easiest way possible, but is this the cleanest, most guilt free way in which to complete the mission. My answer to that was no. Rather than having a very small role in the killings of The Ballas, I chose to have a very active role. By having this active role I killed the majority of the men, rather than killing none.
After coming to this conclusion I started to think of the role of violence in the game. I think that it’s safe to say that the more violent of an approach you take to completing the main missions, the more of a chance you have of completing them, in a short and easy way. In the example of the Drive-By mission the first couple of tries I did the mission without killing anyone, and I failed the mission every time. But when I did the mission with the approach of running every enemy over in sight, the mission was fairly easy.
I would challenge anyone to complete this game without killing a single person. I think it’s reasonable to say that that task would be impossible. The creators made the game with the intention that it was going to be violent and the game reflects that. Some of the first missions require violence, thus exposing the player right away to what the game is all about. Even while driving vehicles I found it difficult to not at least kill one civilian, albeit it was not intentional. This is a result of the cars being hard to handle, and civilians always seemingly walking in front of your car.
Overall I really enjoyed this game and found it very entertaining. Although the game is filled with racism, violence, and blatant stereotyping, I still enjoyed it and knew what to expect from this type of game. I have realized that the game is full of choices, much of them hindering on what you think is ethical or not. I will definitely be re-visiting this game in the future and look forward to what the crazy world of Grand Theft Auto will throw my way.

"Although the game is filled with racism, violence, and blatant stereotyping, I still enjoyed it and knew what to expect from this type of game"

Do you think it's wrong to enjoy something like that? Is enjoying this game different from, say, enjoying a movie with racial stereotypes?