Hi! Interesting article.

It seems to me that the question we're collectively asking is, is it evil, or harmful, to pretend to do evil?

There was a rough bit in your prose, though! This sentence: "On balance, I think that it’s hard to argue that GTA:IV doesn’t make it all that difficult to play a misogynist lead character." Too many negatives -- I had to read it like four times to figure out what you were actually asserting, and I'm still not sure you said what you meant to say, based on the next sentence.

Anyway, gotta go!

I'm not interested in condemning the GTA series outright, I know that there is no particular encouragement or ready opportunity to kill women and that saying that the game is misogynist because you can kill sex workers in it is tantamount to saying that the real world is misogynist because you can kill sex workers in it.

Aha, but the real world IS misogynist! Fair cop. But proportionately, a lot more people probably wind up killing sex workers (in addition to: any person) in GTA games than they do in the real world, and different people for different reasons and with different consequences. Creating a game world that relied upon concerted violence directed toward certain characters and which featured women but which prevented harm from befalling women in particular would perhaps be slightly chivalrous but would also represent sort of a disingenuous half-measure idealism. It wouldn't be convincing, even to the extent that the games such as they are happen to be convincing.

I think there are a few cogent responses to the problems arising that could take the form of more enlightened game design, if enough people with influence would stop just saying LA LA LA NOT OUR FAULT PLUS YOU NEVER PLAYED THE GAMES SO YOU DON'T KNOW. Like you say, games impact our culture, and the truth is they have an influence on the lives and experiences of people who never play them as well as those who log a full time regular work week in front of the console.

The sort of enlightened game design I'm talking about is just recognizing all the things that have to be accepted as excuses for why it is that way and making an effort to make them different. It is ridiculous how overwhelmingly male the NPC population of GTA games tends to be, and that the series relies upon crass stereotypes for characterization is not really a great rationalization, let alone justification, for anything. It's a matter of priorities - female leads are off the menu due to space concerns? Put it on four god damn discs like a latter-day Shenmue, it's not like there's no precedent for bloated game design, and this could be something that really matters.

Another cogent response from The Gaming Community could take the form of a game rivalling GTAIV in quality and immersion that provides a platform for acting out some fantasy - any one! - other than spree killing and larceny. The landscape of video games, with more than a handful of notable exceptions but still overwhelmingly so, is like if the only movies ever made were slight variations on Terminator 2, Dragonheart 2 and Care Bears 2, to differing degrees of success. The power of the medium for subtle storytelling is much-vaunted but, let's face it, tapped to maybe 9% of its generously estimated potential.

In a way, GTAIV is a paragon. But really, isn't it kind of sad that in order to appreciate its triumphs one is expected to make generous allowance for the drawbacks of all the legion ways in which commercial success in its medium demands adherence to stultifying conventions of genre? Why is so much of the industry's prodigious well of imagination pouring into upgrading the parts on such a clunky old wreck as the shoot-'em-up? Like, given the raw processing power of the present generation of consoles, of COURSE hoary old concepts are executed with unprecented panache. How about a little diversity of innovation, there, Rockstar & co.?

How about a little bit of politics for once?

"Political correctness" is not the same thing as politics. The former is a straw-man set of nebulous principles invented by people who chafe at the notion any other person should ever be considered for any reason. Furthermore, the spurious claim that real world constraints are exactly what people play video games to avoid ascribes an awfully simple and inappropriate single motivation to something millions of people do for thousands of different reasons. You don't have to pick up a controller to avoid good politics, you only have to retreat behind the duck blind of privilege.

I think it's also pretty funny to characterize gamers in general as literate and with-it, especially when as a body we tend to be so easily satisfied with the pitiful dregs of literature and concept that make up the vast majority of games. If any GTA game was a movie (setting aside the brand cachet the game has), it wouldn't even be popular with people who like that kind of movie.

I'm not worried about GTA, I'm worried about the quality of discourse it inspires on either side. I know it's a lot of fun and taken without any broader context, relatively innocuous. Gaming in general is a fucking wasteland of ideas, though.

If video games, such as they are, represent a venue of escape and fantasy fulfilment for players, let's be serious - we're not talking about PEOPLE IN GENERAL. We're talking about white boys who don't give a fuck. Sure there's a marginally broader appeal than that, but unless you're capable of tapping into your inner white boy who doesn't give a fuck, the range of games likely to be palatable to you is limited to practically none.

It sucks?

Yeah but dude it's been over thirty years and so far progress is pretty grim on all fronts except... like, polygon proliferation.

I guess plays were probably pretty bad for the first thirty years they existed, too.

Oh man I'm sure you know ones I don't, but I've got my own list of amazing games that bring more (at least more of what it takes to impress me personally) to the table, they're just so sharply anomalous in the grand scheme that I don't feel like I can consider many of them part of overall advancing trends in the field.

I'm pretty sure the first 30 years of plays in the non-Greek Western tradition did suck; they were mostly Church-sponsored morality pieces, the distant precursors to sitcoms.

Will Wright is very impressive.

America's Army is the the most amazing game. I don't actually mean in terms of gameplay or fun or anything, I have never played it. But just that it was designed as a recruitment and propaganda tool.

Haha remember that time we played Warcraft at SpinZone and I got all upset because people attacked me for no reason?

That is my total contribution to this discussion. I think it is slightly relevant.

it was the seriously olden days!

Shaun bought GTAIV and I'm actually really excited to play it this weekend. Mostly because I think it's kind of like The Sims but with shooting, which seems more fun.

That is my total contribution to this discussion. I think it is also slightly irrelevant. :)

This isn't a comment on the mysoginisticness of the game, just on the violence and glorification of crime.

I think the theme of the GTA series of games is part of what makes them work so well. In a sandbox style game you need to let the player be free to do what they want. And who in popular culture has a more 'do what I want' attitude than gangsters? A game about a law abiding recent immigrant who struggles to cope with a new culture while supporting his family would be less exciting.

Very well written and argued.

I haven't played the game (despite them being an "important cultural force", I don't play games) so my comments are based on your minimal description of an admittedly huge creation.

With the huge dating interface and even tutorials on how to date, GTA seems to have positioned itself as a social teacher with a substantial audience of young men at a stage of life where they have to learn how to date and relate. This strikes me as problematic, not only given the context of the game, but given the fact that it posits a rigid model and does not have the ability to adapt and grow with input from its society.

Did they sense the potential misogyny of the game and make this effort to fix it? That might be worse than just letting it stand as in some 70s exploitation fic. At least then it doesn't pretend to be more egalitarian than it is.

I won't say anything about the heteronormative assumptions about the audience because I'll get all worked up and have to spend the day reading Rambo slashfic or something to get me centred.

I vaguely remember some 8-bit Nintendo RPG from the late '80s, early '90s (not one of the Final Fantasy series, and not one I owned -- I must have rented it). In this game, when your character walked into a village, there were cows hanging out in a pasture. If you wanted to, you could walk up to the cow and kill it. However, if you did so, you would swiftly be surrounded and killed by angry cows.

And how do I know this? Because I tried killing a cow, of course. (I know, and I seemed like such a nice little girl!)