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Thursday 26 January, 2012
Today is my last day playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. I figured with my last 30 minutes of the game I would just mess around in the open world and see what I could do. I loaded up my farthest save data with a fully upgraded Carl with all of the weapons and started out. At first I was just playing with what I could and couldn't do to gain stars. Shooting a pedestrian warrants one star and shooting a police officer warrants two. Stars are easy enough to get rid of however, just by running through back yards and staying away from my pursuers. No real consequences come from any actions as long as you can escape.
This makes me think a little. Is doing bad things in this game really ethically bad if there are no real consequences? Even if you get caught, all you get is a slap on the wrist and lose your guns. Little enough consequences that it doesn't stop you from doing the bad deed anyway. My question is, if they made the consequences more dire, such as losing the game and having to reload or losing progression in the story, would you be less likely to break the laws?
Thinking about this, I roamed around the world being 100 percent lawful. stopping at red lights, never taking my weapon out even if threatened, and never stealing cars, only using the ones I had in my garage. This made for interesting gameplay for about three whole minutes, at which point I took out my sniper rifle and picked off a cop that was driving down the street. My point being that the game loses a lot of the fun factor when you are forced to be moral. Is it wrong that I like to do this? I don't think so. Games are meant to be an expressive media and violence and anger are something that people express. I am not saying I would ever do something like this in real life but that's the point of the game, to be able to do whatever you want and express yourself in whatever way you see fit.
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