“They’re the Shock Jocks of the industry”, one of my friends repeats whenever asked why he isn’t inclined to play Red Dead Redemption, or Bully, or any of the Grand Theft Autos. He has a point. Rockstar Games is responsible for the Lion’s Share of “video game controversies” from the last decade or so (well, non-Military related controversies).
If you haven’t been keeping up, here are the highlights:
1. Grand Theft Auto 3 (and Vice City, and San Andreas, and GTA4) allowed the player to pick up, ahem, “solicitors” from the street who would then make the car rock in exchange for in-game currency. (Earlier games just had the car rock and, if you changed camera angles, you’d just see the two people inside the car, sitting in their own respective front seats, staring off into space… GTA4, however, had the (fully clothed!) folks in the front seat climbing around on each other).
2. Moreover, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas had unlockable code in the game that would allow the player to play “hot coffee”. This was a rhythm minigame that was supposedly the player engaging in, and I’m quoting wikipedia here, “crudely rendered” (fully clothed!) sex with a girl at the end of a successful date.
3. Manhunt. Hoo boy. This one was pretty twisted. The game begins with you getting the death penalty. The next scene has you waking up in a bombed out part of town with Brian Cox yelling for you to put an earpiece on (this game is best enjoyed with the PS2 headset). Once on, Brian Cox is whispering in your ear that if you want to survive, you’re going to be making some movies for him. It’s a stealthy sneaker where you are killing dozens of people. Twisted, disturbing, this game will make you a worse person. (Minor spoiler: At one point in the game, I thought that the punchline was that you *DID* die on the table when you got the shot in the first scene and you are now in Hell and this is your eternal fate. As it turns out, nope. But some of the stuff going on is so horrible that that theory made sense to me.)
4. GTA, Bully, State of Emergency, Red Dead Redemption… there’s violence, violence, violence. It’s not just violence against bad guys, either. There is the option of engaging in violence against innocent bystanders. They didn’t do anything but get out of bed and now they’re having the worst day of their lives (in the case of Bully, maybe just a really bad day).
5. You can get “drunk” in GTA4. This makes you stagger and wobble and drive poorly. Yes, “driving” whilst “drunk”.
Now, with all of this wanton sex and violence, what is the appeal of these games?
First off, we could talk about the gameplay which is pretty interesting with the different modes of travel (cars, bikes, horses, parachutes) but there is also the fact that these games have some very good writing to go along with the debauchery. GTA3 told the story of a betrayed two-bit crook who fought his way through several different crime organizations. The storyline on the first island where you are working with the Mob? Brilliant. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. Vice City told a similar story with an 80’s twist (“twist”? Try “firehose”). San Andreas took the story to 90’s LA. GTA4 gives you Niko Bellic who is one of the most complex characters in a video game that I’ve seen until he was outdone by John Marston in Red Dead Redemption. Manhunt, if you can get past the horrific conceit, has a terribly engrossing story whispered in your ear as you play.
On a personal note, GTA3 was the first truly “sandbox” game that I had played. I was given a city to play in and my own time to play in it. I remember clearly the moment where I drove up the street and stopped at a red light… I looked both ways and saw no cars… and I knew, in that moment, that nothing would happen to me if I just made the left turn. So I did.
And nothing bad happened.
To experience a devestating existential moment exposing the arbitrariness of social and legal constructs from something as simple as a left turn is quite a great deal to put into a video game but Rockstar pulled it off.
My friend who argues against Rockstar points out the video game bans in other countries, and the lawsuits, and “the children”, and how Rockstar is not helping with the whole “respectability” thing when it comes to this particular hobby. He’s right. He’s absolutely right.
I can’t wait for LA Noire.
Australia has terrible trouble with games getting banned, they don’t have an R18 for games, so anything that passes M15 gets banned.
It’s really odd what sets the censors off. For example in Fallout 3 there’s a drug called Med-X, which reduces the damage you take (it’s a painkiller). It was originally to be called Morphine, but the Australian censors objected because they didn’t want a game depicting positive outcomes for using real-world drugs, even if the outcome are in line with what they do in real life!
By contrast, SPOILERS!
KOTOR has slavery, torture and the annihilation of a whole world. Hell, you can force one of your allies to kill his lifelong friend an other ally is constantly asking you to start massacres.
And then there’s Arcanum, where there was a quest to exterminate a village of innocent people. An optional evil quest, but still you are specifically directed to kill a bunch of people you’ve been doing minor quests for and selling stuff to for hours.
END SPOILERS!
It just goes to show you how superficial this debate is. I suspect Rockstar Games get attention because they’re one of the only developers the moral guardians can name.
When it comes to taboos, it does seem pretty universal that there are fewer taboos when it comes to violence than there are when it comes to, you know, “it”.
I suspect that that is because we know that you’re never going to revamp a lawnmover into a helmet that you can use to chop up zombies into mulch, but, someday, you’re going to find another person with whom to engage in “it” and you’re a lot more likely to do damage to this other person if you have all sorts of wild ideas from video games and movies than if you go into it with all sorts of terror and trepidation.
That’s my best guess at an explanation, anyway.
Since my last posting I have recalled that Arcanum had prostitution as well, including men, women and a sheep. It didn’t occur to me the first time because I don’t associate prostitution with immorality.
This leans things more toward the public profile explanation.
While I have any number of ethical issues with prostitution, there is almost no overlap with the ethical issues with in-game prostitution between a main character and some code.
Though, for the most part, I avoid such things in video games (and, avoid them absolutely in real life).
Seems a good way to get a virus.
Too true 🙂
I only mention it because that’s precisely the sort of thing moral guardians wig out about.
I have never been a fan of playing an anti-hero or the villian. I have never liked been told to cheer for people like that.
This is an essay in itself.
I’ve long shied away from Rockstar, though mainly because I remember playing a little GTA2 and hating it, and then trying GTA3 and merely finding it boring.
Their reputation as provocateurs bothers me a little, but like Trey Parker and Matt Stone, I find the hysterics they engender to be much worse than whatever attention-getting devices they’re using themselves.
If you have any inclinations toward Western movies at all, I recommend Red Dead Redemption. There are a handful of shocking moments but nothing more shocking than you’ve seen if you’ve seen The Outlaw Josey Wales.
It’s a very strong story that covers a lot, I mean a lot a lot, of territory and explores an exceptionally complex main character.
If you’re into the vidya game thing at all, you should look into it.
I was actually quite interested in Red Dead Redemption, but not enough to purchase a PS3 or an XBox 360. I keep hoping Rockstar will port it to PC and sell it via Steam as they’ve done with a lot of their earlier catalog.
Hey, if you’ve been thinking about a Blu-Ray player…
“There are a handful of shocking moments but nothing more shocking than you’ve seen if you’ve seen The Outlaw Josey Wales.”
Well, except for how you can cause your horse to get hit by a train and explode like that dude in “Robocop”.
You know, if you’re the kind of person to put your horse on the train tracks and watch to see what happens, I don’t think that you’re the type of person who needs content disclaimers.
Isn’t half the fun of video games trying stuff to see what happens? Many years ago, a friend of mine had a two-player ice hockey game. It was just OK until we discovered that if you could maneuver your player to screen out the ref’s view, you could get away with clobbering the opponent with your stick. Much more fun than anything intended to be a fight game, because the violence felt illicit.
I don’t know about “half” but I usually try to shoot the guy who is talking to me in any given tutorial.
You know. Just to see if I get some kind of non-standard game over or if the game refuses to let me do that (and, thus, refuses to let me live with the consequences thereof).
But I’m not one of those folks who would write a letter saying “this game let me shoot the doctor in the first scene!”