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Grand Theft Auto 5 Review - People Suck
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Poison Tree
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Grand Theft Auto V Review
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Grand Theft Discourse: Comment Culture and Petty Hatred
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GTA V may not be misogynist - but its 'supporters' are
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Why is Grand Theft Auto V So Conservative?
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Grand Theft Auto 5 Review - People Suck

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In GTA V, you play as a terrible person. Well, three terrible people really, the game’s major gameplay innovation from its predecessors being that you can play as three different protagonists. Driving through Los Santos and the rest of Blaine County - a representation of Los Angeles and the surrounding California countryside - is still the highlight of Grand Theft Auto V, and it does make you feel like you are really part of the criminal underworld of a morally bankrupt city. But it’s only worth playing if you are ok with being the bad guy. No, a really bad guy.

Now, you may say, that’s the hallmark of the crime genre Grand Theft Auto spawned, at least in videogames. But some of the events and missions of Grand Theft Auto V feel more malicious and, well, evil, than the comparatively light-hearted violence of most games, the recent Saints Row 4 being a perfect example. What’s missing in GTA V’s story is a sense that the characters have been painted into a corner by various machinations beyond their control, like Niko Bellic of GTA IV, or must commit their crimes to mete out justice, as Tommy Vercetti does in Vice City. The three main characters of GTAV do terrible things merely to get paid, and deserve no sympathy. There’s no drive in them even to be the best at what they do, the last American value we afford criminals, but rather they commit these crimes with no lifeline thrown to the audience to pull us along in supporting them. It is the difference between The Godfather Part 1 and Part 2, between Inglorious Basterds and Triumph of the Will, and between Just Cause 2 and JFK Reloaded. In the former examples, the audience can get behind the anti-heroes depicted for whatever reason and condone their admittedly awful actions, but in the latter group, the subject matter or the protagonist’s morals are skewed too far from the norm to be comfortably witnessed.

That’s what it’s like to play Grand Theft Auto V. The three men you take control of throughout the game aren’t even anti-heroes. They’re just scumbags.

That’s not to say the protagonists don’t end up charming you as you navigate them through their horrible lives. Franklin disrespects everything and everyone in his rundown neighborhood, but somehow forges a bond with a middle-aged white man, Michael, in his search for a way to become more than a crackhead. Michael is a retired stick-up man, grown sick of his Vinewood mansion, sniveling teenage kids, and cheating wife. When he mistakenly rips down a Mexican gangster’s house - it must be pointed out Michael meant to rip it down, he just didn’t know how much it would cost him - Michael enlists Franklin to help him back into the heist game to make money. Then there’s Trevor, who is busy expanding his meth lab empire in the hills outside Los Santos by stomping bikers in the face. Seriously, Trevor’s introductory scene begins with him screwing a scabby woman from behind, and then stomping her boyfriend in the face until he’s dead when the cuckolded man has the nerve to confront him. See? Charming!

The city of Los Santos is as much a character in GTA V as those guys, and it’s just as depressing a representation of humanity. The highways, avenues and streets of the urban landscape are artfully represented, evoking specific neighborhoods and locations in Los Angeles just as Liberty City does for New York. Advertisements and billboards for products like Pisswasser beer and LifeInvader, a parody of Facebook, are supposed to be funny, I suppose, but the radio jingles and faux talk radio spots come off as childish instead. Pedestrians take calls on their cell phones, and overhearing what they say to their lovers, their mothers and their agents creates an aural kaleidoscope of a culture obsessed with self-image and fame, none of it especially pleasant. Satire excels at pointing out our foibles, our faults, but that doesn’t mean it makes for great escapism.

You’ll drive thousands of miles in various vehicles traveling to mission locations, landmarks and shops. Cueing up your favorite radio station from the 17 available and taking in the scenery is the best part of Grand Theft Auto V. Driving is forgiving, and your inevitable crashes have a low chance of tossing you through the windshield or flipping over your car permanently. Not only can you nab the fastest or best-handling car on the road for a more pleasurable ride, but you also level up each character’s driving skill as you play. Franklin starts out as the most expert driver, and he has a special ability that slows down time for a short period to allow you to navigate around corners and between cars. Using the ability to win races and escape cops is very fun, and the RPG-lite mechanics of leveling provide some structure to the experience.

Check out Greg Tito’s editorial which goes into depth on the story and characterization of GTA V.

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Grand Theft Auto V | Review | The Gameological Society

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Grand Theft Auto V

Los Angeles is an ugly city. Not just downtown, with its scabbed-over theaters and the chain-restaurant misery of L.A. Live, but the whole sprawl. The cramped beach houses, the studio-and-Starbucks spread of Santa Monica, and the godforsaken Valley—ugliness abounds. That makes Grand Theft Auto V all the more miraculous. Los Santos, L.A.’s digital twin, is breathtaking. Cruising from downtown up the coast into the mountains at dusk, with a stolen muscle car blasting FlyLo FM, is an emotional rush. Rockstar North has bottled the evanescent thrill of a nighttime drive when you have no destination. Like the worst stereotype about L.A.’s citizens, though, Los Santos and its surrounding countryside is just a pretty face. Grand Theft Auto V is a masterpiece of craftsmanship but a disappointment all the same.

Every entry in the series since Grand Theft Auto III falls short as a story for the same reason: the profound disconnect between the player and the character. Grand Theft Auto IV’s Niko Bellic was the worst of the lot. In the game’s scripted dialogues, Niko was a haunted soldier desperate for a new life. During the main story missions, he was a vicious mercenary who would do anything for a buck. In the player’s hands, just another citizen of Liberty City, he was a compassionate, psychotic, entrepreneurial performance-artist property owner with needy friends.

The various aspects of the player’s identity didn’t bind together, so everything you did ultimately felt fun but meaningless. With not one but three characters under your purview in GTA5, you’d think the problem of feeling connected with the world where you’re wreaking havoc would be even more intense. It’s not, although the problem still stands. GTA5 is often frustrating because the player’s role feels insignificant. It doesn’t matter how many custom car shops you buy or which arbitrary character stat (driving skill, stamina, etc.) you build up—nothing you do changes the world or the protagonists, Franklin, Michael, and Trevor. When the next mission starts, they and the city are back in their fitted roles, even if you just crashed a stolen jet into a golf course. The feeling of disconnect is tangibly eased in Grand Theft Auto V, though, since all three leads are explicitly cast as monsters from the very start.

Grand Theft Auto V

Its gorgeous, intricate world may be the game’s premier achievement, but Trevor Phillips is a close second. Franklin, an ambitious but economically trapped repo man, is a mildly interesting bastard, as is Michael, the retired master thief and Tony Soprano proxy. But those two have nothing on Trevor. This meth-dealing, gun-running lunatic feels like the physical embodiment of the average GTA player’s in-game behavior. In five minutes, he’ll go from sexually violating a teddy bear to conning his way into a private military corporation’s storage facility to having a heart-to-heart with his best friend. Then he’ll murder an entire biker gang. Trevor’s an evil scumbag who’s as terrifying and funny as a five-star GTA rampage, exploding as many police helicopters and crashing as many cars as it takes to survive. He’s enthralling from the first second he comes on screen.

Trevor and his surrounding world aren’t just flashy marvels, they also feel just right. The characters move like butter. The cars drive with the fantasy speed and grace of an arcade classic like Ridge Racer. Even the golf and yoga have their own carefully crafted flow, and the game never hiccups transitioning between these activities.

Grand Theft Auto V

No game world feels as vast, intricate, and intentional as Los Santos, and no character in a game of this sort feels as reflective of the player as Trevor does. With these tools, Rockstar could finally tell the bold story that the studio has always threatened to tell. Not this time. Rockstar fumbles the ball across the board. The story missions—those tasks you have to complete to earn cash and open new activities in the world—are the same old busywork they’ve always been. Franklin follows foolhardy buddy Lamar on yet another ill-advised con, and by the end you have to shoot 50 gang members to move on. Likewise, when Michael plots a sweet jewel heist, you still have to spend half an hour boosting a van, ditching the cops, and driving it back to base.

Even the heist jobs, GTA5’s big variation on the old themes, feel overly familiar. You select a crew of muscle, drivers, and hackers, and you even can craft a significantly different plan for each theft, but the changes feel cosmetic. There are scattered moments when the missions heat up. One the three amigos’ early collaborations has you kidnapping a CIA witness in mid-air from a skyscraper. It’s exhilarating to bounce between Trevor piloting, Michael grabbing the target, and Franklin sniping agents from an adjacent building, but these moments—moments where the plan comes together—take up a small portion of play.

Grand Theft Auto V

The aftermath of that particular mission demonstrates the fattest worm in GTA5’s core. The crew delivers the poor witness from the CIA’s hands into the FBI’s. The crooked agents want him to ID a suspected terrorist. Michael is drafted into assassinating the suspect while Trevor tries to get the witness to talk, so play bounces between you sniping possible targets and torturing this poor sap. GTA5 gives you a choice, of course. You can waterboard him, electrocute him, even wrench out his teeth with pliers, all while monitoring his heart rate, keeping an adrenaline shot in reserve to bring him back for more abuse if need be.

The torture itself isn’t the problem. Everything you do in GTA’s missions is sadistic in one way or another. The problem is that Grand Theft Auto V drops the torture bomb for no reason whatsoever. At the end of this episode, Trevor actually frees the witness, driving him to the airport while delivering a sarcastic monologue about the benefits of torture. Trevor argues that the U.S. government doesn’t use torture to get vital information for national security. “Torture is just for the torturer,” he says. Rockstar tries to force its story to serve every purpose here. The torturing is supposed to be a fun game activity, but Trevor’s dialogue is supposed to both deliver a social message and heighten the drama. Then he turns around five minutes later and forces some guy to look at his dick. This thematic whiplash occurs throughout the game.

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V has missions with anti-smoking, anti-government, anti-PC, anti-social media, and anti-pharmaceutical messages, and all of them shift wildly in tone, opting to glorify anarchic self-indulgence and half-cocked moral superiority at the same time. One second it wants to be satire, the next simple parody. Pure pornography one second, high drama the next. These storytelling techniques can live side-by-side—just look at the Quentin Tarantino movies that Rockstar honcho Dan Houser so clearly adores—but just like the character identity divide, GTA5 lacks the courage to commit to anything and feels weightless as a result. It’s a waste of its astounding digital landscape.

Rockstar’s game could have been a grand story as well as an amazing toy. Had it committed to one of its myriad story ideas and simply advanced it beyond the first round of superficial commentary, GTA5 could have been something great. With all of its ambitions pulling in opposite directions, though, it ends up as more toy than tale.

Grand Theft Auto V
Developer: Rockstar North
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Reviewed on: PlayStation 3
Price: $60
Rating: M

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Poison Tree

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Poison Tree

A letter to Niko Bellic about Grand Theft Auto V

Dear Niko,

Last week, the latest installment of the Grand Theft Auto series was released. It made a billion dollars — the GDP of Mongolia — in 72 hours. I’d love to know how that makes you, the protagonist of the last full Grand Theft Auto game, feel. Threatened? Possibly a little relieved? To be honest, I’m not sure how it makes me feel. Last night I finished GTA V after playing it at least eight hours a day for four days straight, and this morning my sciatica is radioactive and my eyes feel as though they’ve had sea salt thrown into them.

When GTA IV came out in 2008, I was in a bad place, as you know. I was on the run from my country, my relationships, my work, and my responsibilities. I chose to live in a series of cities well-suited to making large sums of my money disappear into various nocturnal rat holes. Like you, Niko, I did things I’m not proud of and treated several people in ways I regret. During that time, which I’ve written about elsewhere, GTA IV was both salve and irritant. I became convinced the game had something to tell me about my compulsions and self-destructiveness. Correction: It told me something about those things. You and I spent dozens of hours together while I hiked back from a netherland of personal desperation. Niko, I can honestly say I loved — and love — you. I loved you, I think, because I knew who you were: the charming but scarily hair-trigger cousin of every translator I ever had while traveling in the former Soviet Union.

Goddamnit, I tried to treat you right. I hope you know that. While playing GTA IV, I wasn’t enacting any cops-and-robber fantasies. Instead, I played the game in ways that honored the version of you that your creators clearly intended. When you were with me, you didn’t go on nutcase rampages (at least in the games whose progress I saved). You didn’t randomly assassinate cops or plow over pedestrians if you could help it. The game claimed you were tortured and ambivalent, and, in my game, you were. That has to mean something.

A lot of things have changed for me since you and I met. I’m much happier, for one thing. I’m almost 40, incredibly. I’ve been with someone I adore for four and a half years. My relationship to video games, too, has shifted. Over the last few days, whenever I wasn’t playing GTA V, I was driving back and forth from a motion-capture soundstage in Los Angeles, where we were shooting scenes in a video game I’m writing. Several days of Sensurround enclosure by video games — I assure you, Niko, that this only sounds like fun.

These days, I appreciate games a lot more and play them a lot less. I also pay attention to different things. When I worked my way through the earlier Grand Theft Autos, I marveled at the freedom they allowed and the astonishing vastidity of their worlds. When I played GTA V, I mostly wondered how the traffic flowed so convincingly. The more technically mindful of video games I’ve become, the more conscious I am of their innumerable moving parts, the more miraculous and impressive they seem — and the more impossible it feels to vanish inside one.

Almost everyone I know who loves video games — myself included — is broken in some fundamental way. With their ceaseless activity and risk-reward compulsion loops, games also soothe broken people. This is not a criticism. Fanatical readers tend to be broken people. The type of person who goes to see four movies a week alone is a broken person. Any medium that allows someone to spend monastic amounts of time by him- or herself, wandering the gloaming of imagination and reality, is doomed to be adored by lost, lonely people. But let’s be honest: Spending the weekend in bed reading the collected works of Joan Didion is doing different things to your mind than spending the weekend on the couch racing cars around Los Santos. Again, not a criticism. The human mind contains enough room for both types of experience. Unfortunately, the mental activity generated by playing games is not much valued by non-gamers; in fact, play is hardly ever valued within American culture, unless it involves a $13 million signing bonus. Solitary play can feel especially shameful, and we gamers have internalized that vaguely masturbatory shame, even those of us who’ve decided that solitary play can be profoundly meaningful. Niko, I’ve thought about this a lot, and internalized residual shame is the best explanation I have to account for the cesspool of negativity that sits stagnating at the center of video-game culture, which right now seems worse than it’s ever been.

I don’t think playing video games makes people more violent. You of all people should know that. I do, however, believe playing video games turns people into bigger assholes than they would otherwise feel comfortable being. Games are founded upon competition and confrontation. It’s probably no coincidence, then, that a large and extremely vocal part of the video-game audience responds to arguments with which it disagrees by lashing out. One reviewer of GTA V, Carolyn Petit of GameSpot, said the game was “politically muddled and profoundly misogynistic,” which is very much a defensible position. Petit also made it clear she loved GTA V. Twenty thousand irate comments piled up beneath her review, many of them violent and hateful. Is this reasonable behavior? Sure, if you’ve come to regard anything that stands in perceived opposition to you as in dire need of eradication. What is that if not video-game logic in its purest, most distilled form?

I review books too. Do you know that? No reader has ever told me he hopes I get cancer in response to a negative book review, which I’ve had happen with games. I’ve never met a literary critic who distrusts publishers as much as game critics distrust game developers. I’ve never met a smart reader who sneers at books as reflexively as many smart gamers reflexively sneer at games. Many people involved in this medium hate so much of it and one another. We’re living with the emotional consequences of all this suspicion and rage. The games we’re playing are the fruit of a poison tree.

Rockstar, the developer of Grand Theft Auto, understands all this. It always has. By all evidence, it, too, hates gamers and gamer culture, even as that culture, and those gamers, have set the company afloat upon an endless river of dinero. The GTA games are flaming cataracts of contempt. The vision they peddle of men, women, minorities, American culture, and video games is apocalyptic, vicious, and often highly unpleasant. I’ve never really minded that, if only because watching talented people sweep out the dark corners of their imaginations is far more interesting than watching the handle of a moral puritan’s butter churn pump up and down. A lot of game critics are currently wringing their hands over GTA V’s portrayal of women and its employment of various racial stereotypes. I confess that when it came time to take the paparazzo photo of a starlet’s genitals, when I’d heard my 500th N-word, when I played the touch-a-stripper mini game, I, too, was feeling more than a little wearied by the familiarly “outrageous” elements of the game. But we’ve been doing, seeing, and hearing this stuff (and worse) in GTA games for more than a decade. Niko, wouldn’t you agree that the GTA games want and actively seek out the contempt of high-minded game critics? I’m not sure what anyone was expecting: GTA is basically the most elaborate asshole simulation system ever devised, a game based on hurting people and doing whatever you like. At the same time, though, I understand the basic sense of fatigue with which people are approaching it. Once upon a time, playing a GTA game was like sitting next to your offensive Republican uncle at Christmas dinner. He was definitely a dick but also smart and interesting, and his heart was fundamentally in the right place. These days Uncle GTA is a billionaire with an unchanged shtick, and he seems a hell of a lot more mean-spirited than before.

GTA V presents the player with a huge, open world — a kind of thalidomide Los Angeles — in which you drive, shoot, run, kill, fly, swim, and checkpoint. But you know what the game is like. I mean, you lived it. You don’t need me to tell you what the game is like. You do maybe need me to make a case as to how fundamentally weird this franchise is. GTA V is both the dictionary definition of a mainstream video game and an uncompromising experiment in player patience. The Call of Duty games have become money-printing machines by identifying precisely the exact shape, sound, and feel of a compulsive, fun core loop of gameplay, which they provide with relentless professionalism. Call of Duty is fine-tuned and timed so that it’s never not that fun core loop. The GTA games, conversely, despite their mayhem, can be highly tedious, with nothing in particular happening over long periods of time. One mission in GTA V involves driving your family to therapy. In another, you mop a floor. What other game allows you to screw up while mopping? What other game even has mopping? There is no game franchise — and certainly no franchise of its commercial ambition — that’s willing to be this mundane this often. In GTA, the fun core loops of gameplay aren’t laid at the gamer’s feet. You have to find and create them yourself. There’s much to admire about that, and you’ll be glad to know, Niko, that making your way around the world of GTA V is as anarchic and enjoyable as ever.

The story of GTA V involves three characters, among whom you can swap throughout the game: Michael, an aging stick-up heister from the American Midwest; Trevor, an oddly compelling meth-cooking psychopath; and Franklin, an ambitious repo man slowly working his way up in the world. In other words, GTA V has tried to mash Heat, Breaking Bad, and Boyz n the Hood into a single story, which works about as well as you’d think. Michael and Franklin — the sensitive, reluctant, but ultimately ruthless criminals — are the embodiment of every GTA game’s narrative ambition: real characters, struggling with real problems. Trevor — the funny but ultimately terrifying lunatic — is the embodiment of what the game actually is: an experience uncomfortably pinned between grand narrative ambition and open-world incontinent madness.

I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Niko, but the job of a video-game writer often boils down to figuring out ways to fictionally justify the fictionally unjustifiable. Please understand that I’ve come to accept that a “good story,” at least in the traditional sense of that phrase, is impossible within the frame most games give themselves. In open-world games, especially, story is a result of design — a way to get the player out and about and interacting with the world. Rockstar has never been very successful at accounting for why its open-world antiheroes are doing whatever they happen to be doing, but making dramatic plausibility the measure of an open-world video game is a sure path to bewilderment. Even so, many aspects of GTA V’s story seem perilously undercooked. The manner in which Michael and Franklin first meet, for instance, makes considerably less than no sense, and Trevor’s intentions toward Michael seem to change from scene to scene. My friend Mitch flew down from San Francisco to play through the game with me, and when we hit the 30-hour mark, Mitch turned to me and asked a very simple question: “What the hell is this game about?” I didn’t know. I still don’t know. The game has more themes, motifs, characters, and events than it knows what to do with, but what GTA V mainly seems to be about is one damn thing after another.

Rockstar tried to play your story relatively straight, Niko, just as it did with John Marston, the hero of Red Dead Redemption, which increasingly seems like Rockstar’s best game to date. I suspect the creative leads at Rockstar came to realize that a game designed around speed, theft, and murder doesn’t lend itself so well to seriousness. One of the reasons Red Dead feels so comparatively meditative, I think, is that you ride around on a horse. So it wouldn’t surprise me if you looked upon certain parts of GTA V as a tonal betrayal of your legacy, such as when Franklin discovers he can communicate telepathically with a dog, or the running gag in which Trevor is compelled into a homicidal rage whenever people notice his Canadian accent, or the recurring encounters with a smooth-talking marijuana-legalization enthusiast, or the mission that commences with this on-scene text: NEUTRALIZE 20 HIPSTERS.

GTA is a game that demands you do meaningless, inexplicably stupid things to progress. I found meaning in your story, Niko, but that was in spite of the game that surrounded it. By my lights, the most effective part of GTA V was its indelibly disturbing interactive torture sequence, which nearly made me physically ill. Now, I’m an anti-torture absolutist, so it’s nice to see a video game use torture in a way that underscores the victim’s pitiful helplessness, plainly acknowledges the barbarity of any human being willing to torture, and results in information that is strongly insinuated to be completely worthless.

I’m a little worried this sounds ambivalent, Niko. Look, I have a full Xbox Live friends list, 100 people strong, and last night 25 percent of them were playing GTA V — something I’ve never seen before. The texts and messages started flying: So, what do you think? How far are you? Very few of my friends had good words to say about GTA V, even as the game’s Metacritic score holds firm at a mind-boggling 97. Then I got a text message from a game-dev friend who happens to be one of the smartest, most aesthetically sophisticated people I’ve ever met in games. He wasn’t enjoying the game, and he seemed puzzled by that. We texted for a while. Then he sent this: “I guess I’m mourning the admittance that I’m no longer the target audience of my own work.”

One of GTA V’s characters admits at the end of the game, “I’m getting too old for this nonsense.” And you know what? I felt the same thing numerous times while playing GTA V, even though I continue to admire the hell out of much of what it accomplishes. So if I sound ambivalent, Niko, I think it’s because I’m part of a generation of gamers who just realized we’re no longer the intended audience of modern gaming’s most iconic franchise. Three steps past that realization, of course, is anticipation of one’s private, desperate hurtle into galactic heat death. I’m left wondering when I, or any of us, express a wish for GTA to grow up, what are we actually saying? What would it even mean for something like GTA to “grow up”? Our most satirically daring, adult-themed game is also our most defiantly puerile game. Maybe the biggest sin of the GTA games is the cheerful, spiteful way they rub our faces in what video games make us willing to do, in what video games are.

Playing GTA used to feel like sneaking out behind school for a quick, illicit smoke. The smoke still tastes good, Niko; the nicotine still nicely javelins into your system. But when you look up, you have to wonder what you’re actually doing here. Everyone is so young, way younger than you, with the notable exception of the guy handing out the cigarettes, and he’s smiling like he just made a billion dollars.

Your friend always,

Tom

Tom Bissell is the author of , , , , and . His book , co-written with Greg Sestero, will be published October 1.
Previously from Tom Bissell:

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Grand Theft Auto V Review

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Where do you begin talking about Grand Theft Auto V? Do you start with the vast, varied, beautiful open world? Do you start with the innovative structure that gives you three independent protagonists you can switch between on the fly? Maybe you talk about the assortment of side activities you can engage in, or the tremendous number of ways in which you can go about making your own fun. Or perhaps you dive right into the games story problems, or its serious issues with women. GTA V is a complicated and fascinating game, one that fumbles here and there and has an unnecessary strain of misogynistic nastiness running through it. But it also does amazing things no other open-world game has attempted before, using multiple perspectives to put you in the thick of cinematic heist sequences and other exhilarating, multi-layered missions like no open-world game before.

Those perspectives come courtesy of Michael, Franklin, and Trevor. Michaels a former criminal whos dissatisfied with his current life of privilege and relaxation. His marriage is on the rocks and he struggles to connect with his shallow daughter Tracey, who dreams of making it big in reality TV, and with his lazy, entitled son Jimmy, who spends most of his time spouting hate-filled trash talk while playing video games online. Franklins a talented young driver and repo man who doesnt seem to have too many opportunities to move up in the world, until he has a chance meeting with Michael. Michael finds Franklin easier to connect with than his own children, and he promptly takes him under his wing and ushers him into a life of big-time crime.

And then theres Trevor, a former friend and business associate of Michaels who is now a methamphetamine entrepreneur living in a desert town north of Los Santos. Trevors a truly horrible, terrifying, psychotic human being--and a terrific character. He possesses a chilling combination of intelligence and insanity, and hes so monstrously violent and frightening at times that he almost makes the other two protagonists seem well-adjusted by comparison. Exceptional voice acting and animation help make Trevor a character you will never, ever forget, even though you might want to.

When circumstances reunite the long-estranged Trevor and Michael, the tensions between them complicate the entire group dynamic; Michael, Trevor and Franklin may work together, but they dont always get along. Their dialogue is sharp and snappy and its usually a joy to watch them interacting with each other, but unfortunately, the characters sometimes behave in ways that dont feel consistent. For instance, Franklin takes the moral high ground in an argument with a paparazzo, then casts his reservations aside to help him take degrading photos of a female celebrity. And when Trevor shows up in Michaels life after an extended absence, the speed with which the two start working together again is at odds with their deep-seated reservations about each other.

Trevor is all about the selfies.

Perhaps most troubling is a mission in which youre instructed to torture a man. Trevor states that torture doesnt work, and the person ordering the torture is an arrogant and corrupt government official, suggesting that the scene is meant to be a critical commentary on the United States use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods. But the fact that Trevor (and you, if you want to progress through the story) tortures the man regardless, and that he does end up spilling more information as a result, sends a very different message. These moments of hypocrisy and inconsistency diminish the otherwise strong characters; it feels like they are leaping into situations not because it's what they would actually want to do, but because the mission design demands that they must.

Thankfully, the missions are frequently incredible, which makes it a bit easier to overlook the occasional contradictions in character behavior, if not the mixed political messages. The high points of the game are the heists, big jobs planned by Michael and the gang. These jobs usually give you a few different options for how you want to approach a situation, and your choice completely changes how the heist plays out. On one job, for instance, one option has you posing as a janitor to infiltrate a building and plant bombs, then triggering the bombs and entering the building with your crew disguised as firefighters. The other, more direct option involves parachuting onto the building and busting in, armed to the teeth.

These are elaborate, multi-stage sequences that involve prep work. You might need to acquire equipment ahead of time, find a good place to hide a getaway car, and make other arrangements before youre ready to pull off the job. You also need to select supporting members for your crew, as some jobs may require a hacker, an additional getaway driver, or another gunman. More skilled crew members typically take a bigger cut, but if you hire cheap, inexperienced people, they may end up failing at their tasks and compromising the operation. Of course, not every step of this process is thrilling, but these early steps make you feel more invested in the job when it does go down, and they evoke the feeling of films like Heat in which the slow buildup to the crimes makes the payoff in the action-packed scenes more intense.

Apparently law enforcement officials frown on this kind of behavior.

These missions and many others have you switching between characters. You might rappel down a building as Michael, provide sniper cover for him as Franklin, and fly a getaway helicopter as Trevor, all on one mission. In another exciting mission, you take out a planes engines from a great distance as Michael, then pursue the doomed, burning aircraft over land as Trevor. Its exhilarating, swapping between these roles and these perspectives, and its part of what makes GTA V the current pinnacle of open-world mission design. Even putting the three-protagonist structure aside, the mission design is frequently surprising and sometimes stupendous. You don scuba gear to infiltrate a heavily guarded laboratory via the ocean, recklessly fly a small aircraft into the bay of a large cargo plane, and get thrust into all sorts of other memorable situations.

Even when not on missions, you can switch between the three protagonists, and the transition is handled via a stylish satellite view sequence that zooms out from one characters location and then zooms in on anothers, building up anticipation as you wonder what the character youre swapping to might be doing at this particular moment. Sometimes you find them in relatively ordinary situations; you might happen upon Michael relaxing at home in front of the TV screen, indulging his love of classic movies. At other times, the circumstances you find them in are more dramatic. Trevor might be on the beach in his underwear, surrounded by dead bodies, with no explanation offered for how they got there. Each character has his own contacts and his own missions, and because the characters have such different vibes, the freedom to switch between them at will makes the game feel more multifaceted than it would otherwise. Theres a terrific contrast between the urban lives of Michael and Franklin and Trevors existence in a poor, secluded town in the desert.

The three-protagonist structure also means that you can be engaged in street races in Los Santos one minute, and hunting elk in the forest the next. In fact, the number of activities available to you throughout GTA Vs world is almost staggering. You can play golf or tennis or darts, or participate in races on streets, offroad or on the water. You can take in movies, buy businesses, and play the stock market, which is designed to respond to player transactions, creating an opportunity for collusion and insider trading. You also stumble upon random occurrences in the world from time to time, creating a sense that this is a place with a life of its own. You might go into a salon for a haircut, only to find that the place is being robbed. You might rescue a woman from a burning car wreck who then becomes a potential getaway driver for you on future heists.

It's good to get out of the city every once in a while.

And of course, theres no end to the ways that you can make your own unstructured fun. Maybe you want to use a truck to block lanes of traffic, pour gasoline from a gerry can all around the stopped cars, ignite the fuel and watch the spectacular explosion that occurs. Or perhaps you prefer to see if you can fly under bridges in a jumbo jet. Maybe you want to parachute onto the roof of the tallest building in Los Santos, or climb to the peak of Mount Chiliad. Or you can blow up a gas station and then run into the hills, where you might be safe from the cops but find yourself being pounced on by a bobcat. Whatever kind of freeform mayhem you cause, youre sure to get the authorities on your case from time to time. Police pursuits here can be tense on city streets, where you might try to find secluded back alleys to hide in until the cops give up the chase. They can also be silly at times; you might shake off some police pursuers just by driving offroad up a hill in plain sight of the cops.

Whether youre evading the police in a rickety junker or a road-hugging sports car, the handling in GTA V is great, and the fact that vehicles feel so different from each other means theres a real reason to store the cars you like in the garages at your characters homes or in ones you can purchase in the city. Driving is so much fun that youll likely enjoy crossing even great distances in the games large world, taking in everything from the artwork on buildings along Vespucci Beach to the setting sun reflecting on the Alamo Sea. Should you tire of commuting across Los Santos, however, you can call a cab and warp to your destination.

When shooting breaks out, as it often does in the lives of these criminals, you have a terrific variety of weapons at your disposal that you can customize with suppressors, scopes, flashlights and other doodads. By default, your aim snaps to enemies. This makes picking them off quite easy, but gunplay is a lot of fun despite the ease of aiming, because youre regularly fending off so many attackers and you still need to make good use of cover to stay alive. If youre looking for more challenging shooting, you can switch to an aim assist option or to free aim at any time.

Not every vehicle is designed to be driven offroad.

Theres so much more to say about GTA V. In series tradition, it has an eclectic assortment of radio stations featuring great songs from numerous genres and eras. In a break with series tradition, it also has an excellent ambient score of its own that lends missions more cinematic flavor. On a less positive note, its deeply frustrating that, while its central and supporting male characters are flawed and complex characters, with a few extremely minor exceptions (such as the aforementioned optional getaway driver), GTA V has little room for women except to portray them as strippers, prostitutes, long-suffering wives, humorless girlfriends and goofy, new-age feminists were meant to laugh at.

Characters constantly spout lines that glorify male sexuality while demeaning women, and the billboards and radio stations of the world reinforce this misogyny, with ads that equate manhood with sleek sports cars while encouraging women to purchase a fragrance that will make them smell like a bitch. Yes, these are exaggerations of misogynistic undercurrents in our own society, but not satirical ones. With nothing in the narrative to underscore how insane and wrong this is, all the game does is reinforce and celebrate sexism. The beauty of cruising in the sun-kissed Los Santos hills while listening to Higher Love by Steve Winwood turns sour really quick when a voice comes on the radio that talks about using a woman as a urinal.

So Los Santos is a place of contrasts, of luxury and poverty, tranquility and violence, beauty and ugliness. GTA V is an imperfect yet astounding game that has great characters and an innovative and exciting narrative structure, even if the story it uses that structure to tell is hobbled at times by inconsistent character behavior, muddled political messages and rampant misogyny. It also raises the bar for open-world mission design in a big way and has one of the most beautiful, lively, diverse and stimulating worlds ever seen in a game. Your time in Los Santos may leave you with a few psychological scars, but you shouldnt let that stop you from visiting.

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You're not getting it. - Howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com

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gta5 sexism misogyny satire

If you dismiss feminist game criticism by claiming that the critic fails to recognize satire/irony/parody, then YOU are the one not getting it. Why any attempt to silence criticism by using the satire defense is doomed to fail.

GTA 5A professional game reviewer – a woman by the name of Carolyn Petit – listed the rampant misogyny in the game as a negative, implying that the offensive writing detracted from the otherwise perfect score for the game (as it damn well should). By the thousands sexism apologists started posting aggressive comments trying to silence her. Here is a nice opinionated write up.

And as always one of the most pervasive reasonings for dismissing any negative reaction to the misogyny in the game was, that the misogyny is intentional and actually there to subvert misogyny, a parody of sexist games, a satire on american culture, a game in which the hateful content is used ironically to confront us with the more problematic aspects of masculinity or simply used intentionally to be funny.

They are – in text and subtext – effectively saying, that the reviewer is not getting it. That the reviewer is falsely accusing the game of misogyny, because she is too blind, biased, sensitive, stuck up, incompetent, unprofessional, attention seeking, too radical, too female… …too much a feminist to see that the game is actually a statement against sexism.

This happens all the time. If the sexism denying gaming public is confronted with feminist criticism, they either claim to not see it, or when they can’t but recognize that the misogyny is there, they say it’s ironic. For them feminists need to get shut down for either “blowing things out of proportion” and “being over-sensitive” or for “failing to see that the admittedly over-the-top sexism is actually satire”. To them there are games with either not enough misogyny to be problematic or with way too much misogyny to be problematic.
This legendary sweet spot of juuuust the right amount of misogyny in a game, which a feminist critic can then point to without being personally attacked, does not actually exists.

sexism in video games donkey kong gta5

“Sexual assault in Donkey Kong? You are over-thinking things. Duke Nukem Forever is misogynistic? It’s so over the top, nobody can take that seriously, except stuck up feminists.” – very convenient.

If you are one of those people who think they “get the satire” and therefore have a superior understanding on sexism issues, than the feminists critics who “don’t get it” and state so publicly… you are making a fool of yourself. Hard. And if you also do that in a demeaning, silencing, aggressive way – as if there is any other way– you are fooling yourself even harder.

The MarkBefore I tear this stuff apart, I’d like to clarify some terminology first. When I refer to target group or target audience, I’m referring to the group of people who are supposed to enjoy the so called satire, supposed to buy it, laugh at it and get it. When I refer to the mark, I’m referring to the group of people and their ideologies, which are the subject of the satire, the ones to laugh at.

DissonanceThis is actually fairly easy to spot. When you use childish cartoon visuals to illustrate a subject that your mark takes very seriously. When you use super low production value to present a subject that your mark values a lot. When a protagonist rolls his eyes and explicitly calls out the mark’s bullshit. When you show something that the mark enjoys in a very unsettling and disgusting way. When you create a totally silly world, but plant a character representing the mark, who takes everything totally serious. When you show something similar to the mark, but it is obviously fake or a bad copy.

Every dissonance listed here works vice versa as well and there are probably a lot more ways to create dissonance. Making something extremely sexist is not creating a dissonance, it’s just creating something extremely sexist. Also just trying to be funny, tongue in cheek, joking whatever does not cut it. You need to disrupt expectations, not exceed them.

These are not parodies of ads exploiting the female body to sell video games. These ARE ads exploiting the female body to sell video games.

These are not parodies of ads exploiting the female body to sell video games. These are ads exploiting the female body to sell video games.

It’s also incredibly vital to understand the medium you are working with. Many tropes who otherwise would be super dissonant and off, can be classic tropes of the respective medium and expected to be there.

Take porn for example. The writing, bad dialogue, horrible acting, non-existent set design, exaggerated sex… all are super silly, dumb, laughable… but they are expected in porn. They do not clash with what porn is. There is no way you can lower production value low enough or write dialog dense enough to turn a porn film into a parody of porn.

In the same way, you cannot raise a body count high enough to turn a shooting game into a parody of shooter games or make a fighting game brutal enough to turn it into a parody of fighting games. Violence is expected in those types of games and therefore cannot be used to separate a game as satire.

Which brings us to…

HyperboleThis is where it gets interesting, because this is what most defenses are based on. When sexism in video games crosses the necessary threshold to become undeniably obvious to the gaming public, apologists everywhere are quick to call it satire, because it’s so over the top, that it no longer can be taken seriously.

When it comes to sexism, racism, homophobia and any other bigotry or ideology, there are no statements, that are too hyperbolic. There is no limit to hateful rhetoric, you cannot shatter a ceiling here. Death threats, rape threats, threats of ETERNAL torment in hell, there is no way to turn that into satire, just by trying to be more extreme. Also no amount of humor or light hearted attitude diffuses the ideology behind the offensive jokes for a proponent. Humorous bigotry is still bigotry.

The things is, hyperbole as satire only clicks, if the creator of the hyperbole and the target audience both agree, that the mark is deserving of ridicule and both understand why. This needs trust. You can have this trust between peers, who know each other and know how to process it when one makes hyperbolic statements, which clash with shared values. Or you can be a media source, which is established to be a satirical source, so that every member of the audience knows how to read it.

Otherwise you are just making hyperbolic statements about something, which most proponents of that something are already doing all the fucking time. Pushing the envelope on hateful messaging is not satire.

Punch Up!No matter if creators use dissonance and/or hyperbole in order to make fun of something, the direction they are punching in tells us if it is satire or just mean spirited humor.

When joking about any form of oppression out there, you need to make the oppressor the punchline, NOT the oppressed. When joking about any form of inequality, you need to make privileged people the butt of your joke, NOT the marginalized and disenfranchised.

Racist jokes are racists, homophobic jokes are homophobic, misogynistic jokes are misogynistic. Trying to be funny while punching down on people, does not absolve anyone from being a bigot.

In order to be punching up you either need to be part of the oppressed group yourself or you need to explicitly aim for the oppressors with the jokes you make and leave the oppressed group alone.

Like GTA5, there actually is satire in Duke Nukem Forever. But this satire has women as its mark and is therefore still misoygnistic. Like this swipe at the Olson twins here. Two sisters presented as incestuous sex objects, which later literally get raped to death by alines, while Duke Nukem cracks a joke about it. This is not how you punch up.

Like GTA5, there actually is satire in Duke Nukem Forever. But this satire has women as its mark and is therefore still misoygnistic. Like this swipe at the Olson twins here. Two sisters presented as incestuous sex objects, which later literally get raped to death by aliens, while Duke Nukem cracks a joke about it. This is not how you punch up.

NOPE!This is where everything falls apart. EVERYTHING. If you ever have used claims of satire to defend a game against feminist criticism you shot your own foot.

You know what kind of game a game would be, when the sexist content in it would be used ironically to in fact punch up against gender inequality? It would be a feminist game per definition. You know what any game creator who would make a game like that would be? A feminist. You know who the target audience for that game would be? Other feminist.

You know who is really annoyed by all that feminist complaining? You know who would threaten feminist critics with rape, violence and death? You know who would call concerned women bitches, over-sensitive, on their period, stuck up, ugly, fake, incompetent or ask for a sandwich? You know who would use “feminist” as a derogatory term? Misogynists.

If you feel the need to defend games against feminism – either if you genuinely feel, that feminism is a problem or if you are just annoyed by it – how can you buy, play, enjoy and defend a game, that you say is feminist satire? How can you buy, play, enjoy and defend a game, that is feminist satire, if you genuinely feel, that feminism is a problem or if you are annoyed by it? See how you are biting your own ass here, GTA apologists?

Considering the huge amounts of people who feel like they need to defend GTA5 against feminists, the huge amount of misogynistic vile spilled allover message boards and comment sections and considering the huge amounts of people who actually enjoy the available misogynistic ingame activities of GTA5… …Rockstar either really really sucks at making satire or they genuinely think misogyny makes for a worthwhile gaming experience and proper advertising method.

And considering the fact, that Rockstar has yet to come out and publicly apologize for sucking at making satire, publicly acknowledge the damage they have done to feminists causes and yet to publicly ask everyone who is defending the game against feminism to kindly shut the fuck up… … It’s probably the latter.

oroboros

GTA5 is misogynisticThe fact that the game is viewed as in conflict with feminism – by feminist critics and clueless GTA defenders alike – makes it misogynistic by definition. And the fact that Rockstar isn’t doing anything to resolve that conflict shows that a truly misogynistic game is not clashing with their intended messaging.

If male game creators make and market a game with misogynistic content, and then let male gamers silence women who are concerned by the misogynistic content, then any argument trying to claim satire dies a quick but horrible death. Even worse if the creators engage in the silencing themselves.

Any supposed dissonance would have been too subtle to resonate. Any hyperbole became a shield against criticism, instead of being a catalyst for debate. Sexist content would have encouraged more sexist behavior.

Any supposed satire would have vanished into meaninglessness or never has been there in the first place. Satire is not just humor, it’s humorous criticism. There is no satire, no irony, no parody, when criticism is silenced.

Guys, we need to stop denying sexism when it’s ordinary and we need to stop denying sexism when it’s over the top. We need to stop being part of the problem. We need to let people talk. Otherwise we will continue to not get it.

Updates:
Gamespot has posted a nice reply video to the situation as well, also digging into the concept of satire and how that doesn’t apply to GTA5:

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Grand Theft Discourse: Comment Culture and Petty Hatred

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“Still harping on the same subject, you will exclaim—How can I avoid it, when most of the struggle of an eventful life has been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft, emphasis mine.

When contemplating the locks behind which lay the internet id’s sewage, it always helps to remember what often causes them to swing open and let slip the furious, malodorous torrent of utterly degraded commentary: women who speak their minds.

Adding to the litany of women caught by the deluge of threats and bigotry, GameSpot editor and critic Carolyn Petit has been attacked by online commenters because she gave Grand Theft Auto V a near perfect review. A 9/10 was her verdict; however, some particularly and lamentably vocal fans wanted her to bless the game with a 10/10. Yes: for want of a lone point she has been called everything from a “bitch” to a “tranny” to “a shitty trap” to demanding that GameSpot “never, ever, let a woman review games like this!” to a “mentally ill freak”—the term “self-mutilating” came up far too many times to count.

Some of the more “reasonable” commentary bemoaned such extremes but, of course, sought to reassure us that not all gamers are like this and that, after all, these people are mere individuals (hovering somewhere between the ages of twelve and fifteen) who are solely responsible for their own vulgarity.

To this, I ask what I have always asked: How many individuals does it take before it becomes a social problem?

Time and again we see these cresting tidal waves of hateful spew, in which we can only see the screaming oblivion to which these people would consign democratic discourse. The comments Ms. Petit received display a singular lack of humanity that we must take upon ourselves to heal. To look at the hatred directed at women who speak their minds is to see the wracking death of discourse and, indeed, the source-code of patriarchy itself. Ms. Petit’s crime was to mention— offhandedly, no less, in an eight minute review that was mostly focused on non-political issues—the fact that GTA V relegates its women characters to outmoded and dehumanising archetypes. For this, she was put in the YouTube stocks.

For giving the game a 9/10 instead of a 10/10, it bears repeating.

There is much to be said here—I could go on a lengthy jeremiad about why reviewing games through scores is a terrible idea, but that is rather orthogonal to our present problem; the men, and minority of women, who complained would’ve done so simply because Petit broached sexism as an issue, score or no. The number merely provides a convenient and readily intelligible standard for the belligerents to bear. The problem remains what it always has been, and it is neatly captured by the implications of this lone comment: “no one gave a shit about how women were portrayed in video games 2 years ago but now because more women play its suddenly a problem. Terrible review and not objective at all, this person should not be in th position to state ‘her’ opinions as facts,” says a young man passing off his opinions as facts (poor grammar in the original).

Carolyn Petit at work.

Time and again comments like this emerge, revealing a deep dis-ease with the presence of women (and to varying extents, LGBT people) in the gaming community. Note how the transmisogyny all but forces an incredible cognitive dissonance here: for what is a game review but a professional opinion? An opinion can be well-argued and empirically supported (problems that none of these commenters appear to be suffering from, I might well add), but it is still an opinion; reviews are solicited, consumed, and sought-after precisely because they consist of pointed opinions. Yet when, suddenly, an opinion about misogyny is offered, there enters an off-key chorus of people suddenly whinging about “facts.” To be clear, that women are often relegated to the clichéd archetypes they inhabit in GTA V is indeed a fact and Ms. Petit was right to broach the matter as she critiqued the game. But the fact that casting it as an “opinion” should be seen as damning, in a medium whose very essence is opinion, says everything one needs to know about the effect of prejudice upon one’s rational faculties. If the term “double standard” means anything, it must mean this.

The dismissal of Ms. Petit’s review as “feelings” further betrays the ill esteem in which women’s words are often held. Shocking in a community that prizes and venerates men whose careers consist entirely of angrily venting their spleens about this or that issue in gaming—the Angry Video Game Nerd is not just an archetype, after all; he’s a real person beloved by his fans and well remunerated for his work. Emotion is deeply dyed in the wool of gaming; yet a woman’s opinion, however delicately expressed, however professional and measured her tone, becomes unforgivably “emotional” in its content and relegated to the level of “feelings,” despite how indispensable emotions are to our reasoning.

This does not just apply to women as such, but anyone outside the putative white cis malestream of gaming. Take one commenter who argued “You just dont put an african american to review a game about KKK, he will get his feelings involved”—once again emotions are illegitimate if their content is oriented against prejudice, and once again white men are the putatively “neutral” and sobreminded critics who can see “objectively.” Meanwhile, Yahtzee is cheered on for his sweary, stentorian insults, leaving fans breathless about what creative testicular metaphor he’ll use for lambasting next week’s game. For whom, then, is emotion reserved?

Woman’s place is on the internet. (Artwork from Eclipse Phase by Tariq Hassan used under Creative Commons).

For all the pretensions about neutrality and objectivity, these would-be-critics ignore the ways that the exclusion of women or any intelligent opinions by or about women is not, in any way, a neutral act. It expresses a value, which merits a curiously absent moral defence. Most hide behind simple misogyny (‘women don’t belong here’) or inconsistent reasoning (‘talking about gender is subjective, talking about graphics isn’t’). But our aim is to repair the intellectual and analytic chasm left by this omission. To quote Catharine MacKinnon, we are “suggesting that not only must women be included in an analysis from which they have been omitted, not only that any analysis that leaves women out is distorted and partial, but also that it is necessary to recast the vision of the totality to be explained.”

I should end this with an immodest suggestion: it is long past time that we seriously re-evaluate ‘comment culture’ on the Internet and review a full range of options, up to, and including the severe moderation, abrogation, or even elimination of comments on most online properties. This is neither a unique idea, nor is it untested. Popular Science has just announced, to both fanfare and consternation, that (with only a few exceptions) comments will disappear from their online articles.

This is a courageous move by Popular Science, going firmly against the grain by asseverating that no, not all opinions are equally valid merely because they can be expressed. For far too long, we’ve indulged this malformed, pseudo-democratic impulse; far from emancipating anyone or granting voice to the voiceless, it has merely encouraged bullying, prejudice, and anti-intellectual vandalism on a hitherto unknown scale. Popular Science also grasps the serious harm that can be perpetrated by the proliferation of wrongheaded opinion and prejudice. It is as if the spectre of 19th Century yellow journalism has been reanimated– sans even the briefest glimmerings of wit– in the online world of commentary today, and with equally damaging consequences in the world of ideas.

In the words of Pop Sci online content editor Suzanne LeBarr:

“A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.”

This profaning of intellectual discourse has profoundly deleterious consequences for us; it degrades us and this culture of hateful, uninspired commentary merely serves to police the boundaries of discourse in such a way as to stifle the blossoming of new ideas, or the reinforcement of long-understood truths (like the existence of sexism). The problem that LeBarr bravely pointed to is no less true of the ill-informed pseudo-debates that transpire beneath any article about the humanities or social sciences, and it is equally true of reviews such as Ms. Petit’s that suffer from a war on expertise wielded by women.

Our comment culture needs to be made more productive; the ability to talk back online can be a cornerstone of democratic dialogue, and it has often served that purpose. But it works best when we usher away those whose vulgarity and prejudice works to scatter away reason into the night and to silence oft unheard voices. Moderation must become a civic imperative, not an afterthought that overburdens a lone underpaid staffer or volunteer. This odious culture in the world of gaming is part of the reason that more women, more people of colour, more LGBT folks, more people who are open about their disabilities, do not speak in its primary forums.

Whither their free speech? Whither free speech and democratic discourse when such large sections of the population are prohibited from speech unless they submit themselves to bigoted auto-da-fes? Why should we permit this? “The personal abuse, verging on persecution, is actually prohibited in GameSpot’s Terms of Use document, and yet it runs rampant across the site,” admits the site’s Johnny Chiodini in this amusing, and refreshingly frank mockery and analysis of the commentary Ms. Petit received, “And I don’t want to contribute to it anymore. …I don’t like the way our community currently treats the concept of the comment box.”

That GameSpot is standing by its editor is surely an encouraging sign, but clearly more must be done, and it must be proactive.

Online commenting is here to stay, and that, in the long run, is more than likely a good thing. But civic participation requires a modicum of responsibility, something woefully lacking in the spirit of people who would flag a woman’s considered opinion as “terrorism” on YouTube. Such a gesture is also more than a little ironic, considering this monster with a thousand faces—as transfeminist Autumn Nicole Bradley perspicaciously names it—is often behind actual threats and online attacks.

We can and must do better than this.

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GTA V may not be misogynist - but its 'supporters' are

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GTA V may not be misogynist - but its 'supporters' are

The launch of a Grand Theft Auto game is inevitably attended by controversy. Ever since the very first game was propelled into the public consciousness thanks to a cynically orchestrated PR campaign to generate tabloid outrage (endlessly punchable PR 'guru' Max Clifford specifically targeted politicians and newspapers who would be outraged by the game in order to generate free publicity), the series' masters have seemingly felt that a GTA outing needed to be accompanied by a moral panic if it was to retain its commercial crown. Tabloid newspapers and rolling news channels, desperately reliant on manufactured controversy to justify their execrable existences, have been only too happy to oblige; dumb politicians and even dumber lawyers have always been on tap to throw fuel on the fire.

"GTA may be cheapened by the controversy, but it's such an extraordinary artistic and entertainment achievement that it can easily weather a little cheapening"

It's to the enormous credit of the immensely talented creative team that works on GTA that the series manages to stand head and shoulders above the mire of its PR campaigns. If GTA was just a game about controversy - a high-budget Postal, throwing as much offensiveness in the box as possible in the hope that someone, somewhere will be angry enough to try and ban it - then it would have run out of steam years ago. Controversy never lasts as a selling tactic. The teenagers who found you controversial grow up to be adults who think you're cute and nostalgic. Madonna used to be able to draw shock and condemnation; now she's just a bit embarrassing to everyone involved. Marilyn Manson was the Antichrist for a good few years, the terror of middle America - better years, one feels, than his present incarnation as an obese middle-aged goth with 'fuck' written on his face. Eminem had mothers clutching their pearls across the English-speaking world; now your dad quite likes that one song he did with the girl with the nice voice, and thinks the one about the letter from his fan is funny.

GTA has escaped that fate, so far - not because its controversy is so intense that it defies the slow fading into cute nostalgia that attends every 'shocking' form of entertainment, but because it's consistently a fantastic game. It may not be to your specific tastes (the series and I parted ways at GTA IV, and I'm not sure we'll ever be on the same wavelength again), but it's impossible to deny the sheer scale and intensity of the creativity and artistry which goes into crafting the game's dark version of America, its dreams and its nightmares. GTA may be cheapened by the controversy, but it's such an extraordinary artistic and entertainment achievement that it can easily weather a little cheapening.

When you read a story about how GTA V - barely out the door - is already inspiring copy-cat violent crimes, you are perfectly justified in rolling your eyes. It's utterly daft stuff, and quite possibly manufactured daftness at that. The launch has, however, been attended by another controversy - one which Rockstar had no hand in creating, and probably doesn't want anything to do with. You see, GTA isn't very nice to its female characters, from the infamous 'sleep with a prostitute then run her over to get your money back' escapades of GTA 3 (which was actually emergent player behaviour, if you think about it, so it's you that's a depraved homicidal pervert, not Rockstar's designers) onwards. One reviewer of GTA V dared to mention that the game's casual misogyny could be a bit uncomfortable. Worse still, this reviewer dared to mention being uncomfortable with the misogyny while also being a woman herself.

"GTA V is worthy of a nuanced discussion about its treatment of women - but the response to any attempt at that so far has been unequivocally misogynist"

I don't know if I think GTA V is misogynist, because I haven't played it. I know people, both male and female, who have played it and find the misogyny a bit distressing. I know people who have played it and say the misogyny fits in the game, because it's also relentlessly misandrist and treats all humans, regardless of gender, in a pretty terrible manner. It fits with the 'dark mirror of society' that GTA builds as its world, say some. It singles out women in a fairly sexist manner even within that context, say others.

This is a really interesting discussion. It's an important one, too. Nobody having this discussion in a serious way is saying 'BAN GTA' or 'ALL GAMERS HATE WOMEN' or whatever. It's much more complex than that - it starts from the absolutely basic standpoint that a reviewer's task is to express their feelings about a game (not to write an 'objective review', an oxymoron in which the pronunciation stress should be on the syllables 'mor' and 'on'), continues through a comparison of the different feelings which GTA V evoked in different reviewers from different standpoints and backgrounds, and should lead us into a nuanced discussion around notions of misogyny, misandry, satire and social reflection. This could and should be a great conversation to have, none of which means 'GTA is bad' and all of which means 'GTA is interesting and we should talk about it'.

Except, no. Instead, the author of the review and most others participating in the discussion have endured near-constant abuse from the howling morons whom game site operators inexplicably allow to spew their hate-filled moronic dribblings all over the bottom of every article and image (then they call this cesspit their 'community', which only makes sense if you were brought up in a village full of lobotomised psychopaths whose diet consisted largely of crystal meth). GTA V itself is worthy of a nuanced discussion about its treatment of women - but the response to any attempt at that discussion so far has been absolutely, unequivocally misogynist. The game may or may not have a problem with women. Its ardent defenders absolutely hate women.

This outpouring of anti-woman hatred isn't the first. It's not even the first in the past month - you may be aware of the utterly depressing and nasty campaign to Stop Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian's academic work on the depiction of women in games is imperfect but that's not the problem these aggressive man-children have with it; the crime of which their court convicts her isn't imperfect critical work, it's stating an opinion while female.

"This isn't just about women - it's robbing every single one of us of the opportunity to have intelligent, interesting discussions about the medium"

Why do I raise this, again (and again)? Because it's incredibly important - not the specific question of whether GTA V is misogynist, or whether Sarkeesian's work is academically rigorous, but the broader context, in which we are all being robbed of the ability to have nuanced, interesting discussions about games by a culture that shouts down criticism from any quarter, and shouts it down twice as viciously if a woman is involved. Complex subjects are reduced to meaningless soundbites, a sin of which the supposedly thoughtful corners of the media are often guilty as well. There's no room for a spectrum of opinion, especially for women, who are regularly, idiotically, asked to act as representatives of their entire gender in discussions, while the existence of any woman who doesn't think something is misogynist is held up as incontrovertible proof that every other woman is automatically wrong. This isn't just about women - it's robbing every single one of us of the opportunity to have intelligent, interesting discussions about how our medium deals with gender, sexuality, race, class or any one of a host of other fascinating, complex topics. We're reduced to shouting and throwing rocks. It's frustrating, it's stupid, and it's downright boring - and it risks making our games stupid and boring too.

What's the solution? "Don't feed the trolls" is the usually cited adage, and it's true to an extent - but it only works up to a certain point. "Don't read the comments" is bloody good advice for the most part, although it still raises the point that most consumer sites' justifications for having comment sections at all are deeply flimsy. There is an extent to which the internet is just hostile and unpleasant because it exposes us to a grimy underbelly of humanity in which people, granted anonymity, are hostile and unpleasant, especially to women and minorities, and we just have to get used to that and build a thicker skin until such time as we can build a better society.

We can, though, help to cut off the oxygen that the trolls breathe. Speak up. Carry on intelligent discussions without fear of the backlash, recalling when you flinch that the backlash comes from people to whom you wouldn't grant the time of day in any case. Support people who say interesting things even when you don't agree with the things they're saying. Seek to create environments that are safe and welcoming, if you have a hand in such a thing, and always remember that freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to publish whatever you want, wherever you want - comment threads, forums and so on are private publishing spaces and nobody has a right to spew hatred in them, nor is it censorship to clean up and moderate those spaces, any more than it's censorship to stop a child tearaway from graffitiing a sexual slur on the bonnet of your car.

Most of all, don't be part of the problem. You may disagree - vehemently! - with the notion that GTA V is misogynist, or that Resident Evil 5 was racist, or that Killer Is Dead is unpleasantly sexist, but respect those who put forward opinions you disagree with in an intelligent and reasonable way, and respond in kind. It's easy to be tempted to just tell someone to shut up online. Don't. The whole world of talking about, criticising and debating games and their culture has become hostile and nasty in recent years, a turn for the worse which threatens to damage the entire medium in subtle yet profound ways. If being polite and reasonable when your brain mutters at you to type obscenities instead is all it takes to be part of the solution, then not one of us has an excuse for being part of the problem.

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Gamasutra: Kris Graft's Blog - This isn't about Grand Theft Auto V

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By Kris Graft on 09/17/13 01:48:00 pm
Kris Graft is EIC of Gamasutra (@krisgraft)

The insular, incestuous, hive mind nature of the video game community is never so apparent as when there’s a new blockbuster commercial product.

Marketing teams build upon or outright fabricate credibility of the product as the video game “community,” enamored by narrative-driven TV ads with booming voiceovers, latches on, instinctively. Press coverage wholly uncritical of the product’s actual worth flows into undiscerning eyeballs. The community makes its mind up weeks, maybe months before a game is commercially available, to line up for hours, slap down $60 for the product, and hell or high water the community will love it, because it has been foretold.

The community continues to rally behind the product, though the most contact it has had with the product is through sanitized press interviews and hyperbolic advertisements. They have no idea if this product is of any value whatsoever, but the loyalty to the product is unwavering. Inherent to this unidirectional wave of unchecked enthusiasm is the tendency to wipe out, drown, tear down or eradicate anything that stands in opposition.

Any supposed member of the supposed community that expresses anything less than unbridled enthusiasm for the product is labeled “hipster,” “pretentious” or “elitist.” Anyone who says that the product is anything less than peerless is labeled “hipster,” “pretentious” or “elitist.” “Do you think you’re better than me?” is the subtext. The people who shrug their shoulders at the impending existence of this product in a marketplace are trying to spoil the fun, rain on the parade, are being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. They’re dissenting to simply to raise a ruckus and to get attention, while the people who are giving them the most attention are typically the ones loudly complaining that these dissenters are just trying to get attention.

The product is now available in the market. There is little change in community sentiment here, from the anticipation to the actual availability of the product, because the community already decided weeks, maybe months before that they would slap down $60 for the product, and that they would love it, hell or high water, as had been foretold. Sight unseen, they had already made the emotional commitment to the product long before they made the financial commitment to it.

To the hive mind, said product will be — is — a significant contribution to an art form, a redefinition of a medium, a standard to be followed for years to come, nothing short of a revolution, as had been foretold. Even if none of those traits are there, the hive mind will fabricate them. If there are rudimentary hints of those traits there, the hive mind will amplify them in deafening crescendo.

Sentiment that falls outside of the cacophony of this product launch orgy, and suggests that the hive mind consider the fallibility of any aspect of the product, is perceived as a breakdown in logic. For the hive mind, “Product must be excellent because [X] worked on it.” “Product must be peerless because it cost [$X] to make.” “Product must be perfect because it took [X] years to develop.” “[X press outlet] said it’s a revolution.” “Product TV ad was so bad-ass.” “Product cost me $60, it must be worth every penny.”

Instigators of that perceived logical disconnect are met with swift retribution. It might come in the form of a petition to have you fired from your job, bombardment of your social media account, death threats via email, a mile of hateful comments under an internet article. You’ve stirred Legion.

The force behind the product is so intense that, for just a moment, you doubt yourself — maybe you’re wrong, maybe you’re blind to the significance of the product. Everyone says your credibility demands you surrender to the product. You’re probably jaded, cynical, prejudiced, somehow off-balance.

Then you see it again: The community is galvanized behind the product. To the community, you are your opinion, inseparable from it, and you cannot exist both inside the product orgy sphere and outside of it. The physics of the space in which the sphere exists do not allow for dual residency. You are positive or negative, for or against, inside or out, because the community drew the line long beforehand. Outside of the product orgy sphere, you lack credibility, as to them, you only exist in theory, but even the theoretical idea of you is upsetting enough that action is taken to eradicate even the idea that you might exist, that you — the unfathomable you — may have a point.

You realize you do have a point.

So, you shrug your shoulders and move on because you had little emotional investment in the product in the first place, you never really considered yourself part of that community and you know you have a strong understanding of what is valuable, to you. You pay $60 for the product, you treat it like a product, evaluate it like a product, you love it, hate it, somewhere-in-between it, all the while knowing that it’s just some stupid fucking thing that neither defines you nor dictates your criteria for what’s valuable and worthwhile.

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"Grand Theft Auto V" durchgespielt: Gesellschaftskritik mit dem Holzhammer - SPIEGEL ONLINE

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22. September 2013, 15:57 Uhr

“Grand Theft Auto V” durchgespielt

Gesellschaftskritik mit dem Holzhammer

Von Carsten Görig

“Grand Theft Auto V” hat in drei Tagen eine Milliarde Dollar eingespielt, wurde hymnisch bewertet, gefeiert. Doch Gewalt, Zynismus und eine Folterszene sorgen für Kontroversen, Menschenrechtler kritisieren das Spiel. Was bleibt am Ende von “GTA V”? Wir haben es durchgespielt.

Spoilerwarnung: Im letzten Absatz dieses Textes wird das Ende der Spielstory von “Grand Theft Auto V” angedeutet. Hinweis für Eltern: “Grand Theft Auto V” ist ab 18 Jahre. Zu Recht.

Es ist das richtige Ende. Im Sonnenuntergang auf einer Klippe über dem Pazifik. Im Nirgendwo nördlich der Stadt. Da, wo Ruhe ist. Wo man den Wahnsinn der Los-Angeles-Kopie Los Santos abstreifen, sich für einen Moment zurücklehnen kann. Durchatmen nach rund 30 Stunden. Die Geschichte von “Grand Theft Auto V” ist vorbei. Zumindest die, die Entwickler Rockstar Games erzählen möchte. Wer mag, kann jetzt seine eigene schreiben.

Kann mit dem Auto durch die Großstadt fahren, mit dem Mountainbike vom höchsten Berg des Spiels rasen, mit dem Flugzeug über die Wüste fliegen, tauchen gehen. Oder ziellos durch die Landschaft fahren, HipHop-Klassiker, Dub oder Country-Radio hören. Sich freuen, dass Bootsy Collins oder Pam Grier moderieren, oder sich in seinem Unterschlupf vor den Fernseher setzen und “Republican Space Rangers” glotzen. Kann sich fragen, wie Rockstar es schafft, innerhalb kürzester Zeit und auf kleinstem Raum komplett verschiedene Landschaften darzustellen, ohne merkliche Brüche dazwischen. Wie sie dieses spezielle kalifornische Licht hinbekommen.

Bis dahin aber ist “GTA V” die Geschichte von Michael, Franklin und Trevor. Ein alternder Dieb im Zeugenschutzprogramm, dem es wieder in den Fingern kribbelt, ein Jungspund aus der Hood, dem die Arbeit für einen betrügerischen Autohändler zu viel Ärger und zu wenig Geld einbringt. Und dann ist da Trevor. Der Mann aus der Wüste, aus dem Trailer Park. Paranoid, Drogen konsumierend, saufend, mordend. Ein alter Partner von Michael, bis zu einem Raubüberfall, der schiefging. Die Figur, durch die sich “GTA V” von seinen Vorgängern abhebt.

Drei Protagonisten geben Rockstar neue Möglichkeiten. Zwischen ihnen lässt sich hin- und herschalten. Wie in einer guten Fernsehserie wechseln sich nun Familiendramen und Alltagsgeschehnisse ab mit Raubüberfällen und Verfolgungsjagden. Das Spiel ist vielseitiger, vielschichtiger als die Vorgänger. Dass nebenbei lästige Fahrzeiten überbrückt werden können, indem man einfach zu einem anderen Charakter schaltet, ist ein willkommener Nebeneffekt. Doch all das wäre egal, gäbe es da nicht Trevor.

Manchmal bekommt man Angst, wenn er auftaucht

Bis er auftaucht, scheint das Spiel vorhersehbar, typische Rockstar-Geschichte, wie man sie aus “Max Payne”,“Red Dead Redemption” oder alten “GTA”-Teilen kennt: Typen, die eher widerwillig in kriminelle Machenschaften verwickelt werden. Die stehlen, rauben, morden und doch gegen diesen Lebensstil wettern. Max Payne, CJ oder Niko Bellic fungieren dabei als Über-Ich der Spieler, als Gewissen. Die Spieler würden sich schließlich in der echten Welt nicht so verhalten, wie sie es hier tun. Und werfen sich doch mit Lust in dieses Spiel, rauben und morden, fahren immer mit Vollgas, ohne Rücksicht auf Fußgänger oder Gegenverkehr. Wenn ein Auto Schrott ist, wird eben das nächste geklaut.

Trevor ist anders als die gespalteten “GTA”-Helden der Vergangenheit. Er zelebriert sein kaputtes Leben in der Wüste. Benutzt Crack-Huren, schlägt Junkies tot, metzelt Rednecks nieder. Doch gerade dann, wenn er seine schlimmsten Gewaltausbrüche hinter sich hat, zeigt sich, dass da wohl doch so etwas wie Menschlichkeit in ihm steckt. Sein kaputter Kompass braucht extreme Ausschläge, um sich wieder einzunorden. Trevor ist der unberechenbare Teil des Spiels. Manchmal bekommt man Angst, wenn er auftaucht. Macht die Augen zu, bevor wieder etwas Unsagbares geschieht.

Wie in der Folterszene. In der Trevor auf Wunsch eines Beamten einem Menschen Zähne zieht, Elektroschocks verpasst und Waterboarding anwendet. Das ist quälend, kaum zu ertragen, schlimmer als Folter im Film oder im Fernsehen. Ein Moment, in dem man kurz davor ist, den Controller hinzulegen und sich zu wehren. Manche haben genau das getan.

Menschenrechtsgruppen kritisieren Folterszene

Es ist die böseste Szene in diesem Spiel. Nicht wegen der Gewalt, die schließlich hundertfach stattfindet. Sondern weil sie Spieler zwingt hinzuschauen. In Nahaufnahme. Nicht glorifiziert, nicht spannend, sondern schmutzig, quälend. Und die damit dem Rockstar-Spiel am nächsten kommt, das verteufelt wird wie kein zweites: “Manhunt”, das ebenfalls unter all seinem Schmutz zutiefst moralisch ist und Fragen an die Spieler stellt. Fragen nach Gewalt, nach der eigenen Moral. Warum man eigentlich so etwas spielen möchte. Auch in der Folterszene fragt “GTA V” explizit nach der Moral einer Gesellschaft, die genau diese Foltermethoden zulässt. Die gegen ihre Grundsätze handelt, wenn sie sich bedroht fühlt. Schließlich haben US-Beamte Waterboarding und andere Quälmethoden tatsächlich angewendet, um Gefangene gefügig zu machen.

Zwei Menschenrechtsgruppen haben die Szene trotzdem heftig kritisiert. Man kann Rockstar durchaus Zynismus vorwerfen, denn natürlich ist diese Kontroverse einkalkuliert. Gleichzeitig kann man nicht behaupten, dass die Folter hier - wie, sagen wir mal, in Serien wie “24” - als notwendiger Akt, als zielführend oder gar notwendig dargestellt würde. Schließlich wird sie von einem verabscheuungswürdigen Wahnsinnigen ausgeübt - und selbst der hält sie für sinnlos. Hinterher sagt Trevor zu seinem Opfer, bevor er es freilässt, im Duktus des rational argumentierenden Soziopathen: “Folter ist nur für den Folterer da. Oder für denjenigen, der die Folter anordnet. Man foltert um des Spaßes willen! Wir alle sollten uns das eingestehen. Um Information zu erlangen, ist sie nutzlos.”

“Wir bestätigen Ihre Vorurteile”

“GTA”, so heißt es oft, ist eine Satire auf Amerika. Doch im Grunde ist es vor allem ein erboster Kommentar zu einem Land, das - zumindest in seinen Medien - zu seiner eigenen Karikatur geworden ist. Wer einmal den USA ferngesehen oder Radio gehört hat, wundert sich nicht mehr über die Abbilder in “GTA V”. Hier ist kaum etwas allzu sehr überspitzt. Es gibt liberale Laberrunden genauso wie reaktionären Wahnsinn. Die Gesellschaftskritik ist nicht subtil. Sie wird Spielern mit dem Holzhammer eingebläut. So, wie es Jon Stewart in seiner “Daily Show” macht. Man greift sich die schwachsinnigen Höhepunkte der Sender und stellt sie heraus, isoliert sie. Mehr muss nicht sein. Die Idiotie entlarvt sich selbst. Und damit es auch der Letzte mitbekommt, wird es anschließend erklärt. So wie im Slogan des “GTA”-Nachrichtensenders Weazel News: “Wir bestätigen Ihre Vorurteile.”

Das gilt auch für das Spiel selbst: Das neue “GTA” macht all das, womit seine Vorgänger teils wütende Reaktionen provoziert haben - nur noch schlimmer. Rockstar bestätigt die Vorurteile seiner Feinde. Und natürlich ist “GTA V” kein karitatives Produkt - es hat in den ersten drei Tagen eine Milliarde Dollar umgesetzt, das ist Weltrekord.

Trotzdem ist “GTA V” unter all seiner Pracht, seiner Größe, seiner Brutalität ein moralisches Spiel. Es will seine Spieler erziehen und beeinflussen. Es will die Lügen offenlegen, mit denen sich die amerikanische Gesellschaft - und letztlich jede westliche - zufriedengibt. Rockstar nimmt sich die Freiheit, empört zu sein über das, was man als gegeben akzeptiert. Und am Ende fast überraschend naiv zu werden: Michael, Trevor und Franklin stehen dann trotz allen Wahnsinns wie die drei Musketiere füreinander ein und können stellvertretend die hässliche Fratze des Kapitalismus besiegen. Dann muss “GTA V” nur noch mit der letzten Ironie klarkommen: selbst Teil des kritisierten Systems und zudem eines seiner erfolgreichsten Produkte überhaupt zu sein.

“Grand Theft Auto V” von Rockstar Games, für Playstation 3 und Xbox 360, ca. 60 Euro; PC-Version angekündigt; USK: Ab 18 Jahren

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013
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Why is Grand Theft Auto V So Conservative?

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This post doesn’t have any spoilers that I am aware of.

v_jimmy_1024x768

I.
I’ve played something like ten hours of Grand Theft Auto V and while I don’t feel like I have a good read on the structure of the game, where it is going, etc., I do have another feel: boredom. I have mostly been bored.

There have been some great moments–switching between characters on a mission, the heists, riding an ATV, playing tennis. Mostly, though, it has been a great morass of driving around and doing very predictable, dare I say GTA-style, missions. Most have lacked excitement. “Go here,” the game says, “and kill this guy.” Or even worse: “Go here and do a fine-grained and intensive yet utterly unexciting task like towing or dockworking.” This isn’t how I want to be spending my stimulation simulation time.
II.
This past summer I played some Grand Theft Auto III. It holds up as well as you would expect. The control scheme, like most of the control schemes from the early PS2 era, is fumbling at best, and I’m honestly surprised that I was able to beat that game as many times as I did when I was a #teen. And I did beat that game, over and over again, playing through every mission and collecting every secret package and tracking down every weird internet rumor that I could about the game. If you can fly the Dodo all the way to the first island, or you can purposefully glitch into Blue Hell, then anything could be possible.

“Anything could be possible” is probably the best summation of my memories of GTAIII. I didn’t understand how games were designed and built then, being a #teen, and so I had a wild-eyed acceptance of everything I was experiencing. I also thought it was amazing for all the things you could do, including running down pedestrians, murdering rival gangs, and doing sick jumps. While today that game feels painfully limited (you can’t even swim!), at the time it was amazing, and I have fond memories of the experience.

When I fell in love with the idea that “anything is possible,” I also became deeply attached to the object that gave me that “anything”. I didn’t want to give up the world, the possibilities. More importantly, I didn’t want to give up the chance that we could get more but better in the future (which Vice City eventually did give us). These feelings on my part were partially politically oriented. To my young mind, it seemed like what I enjoyed doing with my free time was under attack–Jack Thompson and the various legislators who had, and have, made it their pet project to “protect” children from “excessive” media were spinning up on the topic of video games (yet again) just as I was really settling into “my” world [Jacked is a good book on this. I had my problems with it, but the sections on Thompson are great.]

So I went to ground. I doubled down, as young men do, on rhetoric about free speech and censorship and media effects. I learned about the history of the arguments around the topic. I read up on polemics written during the birth of the novel, film, radio, and television. I became a small-scale “expert” on the topic so when teachers would try to pin me down on questions about violent representation I would be able to speak up.

At the same time, I spent every weekend with friends where we talked about how cool the characters of Grand Theft Auto III were. We fake-planned drug deals, talked about freedom, talked about how to get rid of bodies. These are all things that teen boys talk about, I think–we would have had these odd fantasies of fictional power whether we had video games or young men’s novels or just some sticks in the woods–but GTA gave us a particular frame to discuss it. The game was, after all, modeled on the real world. Then some of us went on to try for that absolute freedom, the dealer’s life, excessive violence in the face of our social situations and I really do wonder about pattern recognition.
III.
I told that long story to give a sense of my investment in GTAIII back in the PS2 era. As I said before, I recently returned to the game.

It isn’t funny. It isn’t engaging. It is boring and a chore to play. More importantly, it always was.

The Grand Theft Auto series is only successful because of investment. It is the old Thomas Hobbes trick–you give someone an entire world and it is up to that person to make something of it. In the case of GTAV, the world that is given to the player is (intended to be) the largest possible world. Not only is this apparent in the physical location, as shown very clearly in the map size fetish around the game, but also ideologically. The game very clearly intends to allow as many people as possible to be part of the experience, and nothing gets at this better than the “humor” of the game; it is designed to be above all politics, the kind of “we make fun of everyone” that gives even the most virulent racist or sexist a way of escaping criticism. The radio is full of jokes–about conservatives admitting to being assholes during their campaign commercials, about liberals who claim that having a tv show makes you a liberal, about consumerism and Weasel News and everything in between. The sundry cast of characters the player meets in the game works similarly: the paparazzo who has to get the scoop and casts his blatant awfulness in the language of a public good, the FBI agent who demands a torture for the sake of torture rather than to get information, the yogi who preaches selflessness and concentration while demanding that a customer push her butt into his crotch. By making fun of “everything,” GTAV is trying to convince us that it is above any real commitment to an ideology.

I said a few words ago that the game “very clearly intends to allow as many people as possible to be part of the experience,” and I want to follow it up with “the game clearly fails at doing so.” The very attempt to speak from the position of the God’s eye view, somewhere away from ideology, is a guarantee that you are enmired in it. The game is so deep in casual and explicit sexism and racism that it can’t see it, let alone be critical or above it; oppressive politics is the air that Grand Theft Auto V breathes.

v_frisk_me_1024x768

IV.
So why is Grand Theft Auto V so conservative? I don’t mean that in the sense of the political party, although they’ve taken that moniker on for a reason, but rather why is its politics so regressive, racist, and sexist? Why has “doggy style” sex been a visual joke twice in ten hours? Why are two of the primary narratives “black man trying to struggle out of the hood” and “white successful criminal,” both of which have been rehearsed over and over again in media?

I think part of it is a time issue. The political moves of Grand Theft Auto V make a lot of sense in the context of the ever-more-sanitized late 1990s. In a decade where the body, the fetish, and violence were increasingly seen as the only aesthetic ways from breaking out of the “end of history,” Grand Theft Auto makes a lot of sense. Lampooning Democrats and Republicans on in-game radio hit so hard in 2001, but in a world where pundits and politicians are already sounding like parodies of themselves, these jokes don’t really land. When the world you’re creating as a parody is hardly distinguishable from the real world, the parody might as well not exist.

Another part, related to time, is that that core tenets of GTAV are no different than those of GTAIII: making a point by shocking people. When GTAIII came out, there was still power in that–MTV, independent cinema, and Marilyn Manson had all demonstrated that purposefully alienating parents was a powerful way to draw an audience. It worked–for many people I knew, GTAIII was just as exciting for its function as a “fuck you dad” as it was as a game. But in retrospect, the “shocks” of GTAIII weren’t shocking at all. They were the dominant culture repackaged in ethnic stereotypes, in homophobic jokes, and in misogynistic writing.

The Grand Theft Auto series has always been about selling our own shitty culture back to us and then explaining that we’re transgressive because we buy it.

What’s shocking after reality tv? What’s shocking after sex tape culture? What’s shocking when grisly and graphic murder is some of the most popular entertainment? This isn’t an appeal to something far away, to a long lost past, but a real question: what is Grand Theft Auto even doing anymore? To make its regressive politics seem progressive it has to project us into a past, or worse, create a strange fake version of the world where being a generally crap human being is seen as heroic. When we’re playing GTAV, we’re not experiencing a fiction of the present; we’re playing historical fiction, ideological fiction, where terrible and boring people can be thought of as progressive and interesting.

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