Sometimes we CAN have nice things (for a bit)

July 31, 2015 4:19 AM

"I do like to believe that people will be inherently good if you offer friendship in the game. ... I communicate entirely through Jazz Hands." A player describes an attempt at a non-violent gameplay in Grand Theft Auto Online (via @TheQuinnspiracy).
posted by exogenous (22 comments total)

> Before I was squashed flat by the truck, the last thing I made out through the carnage was The Fox, beating the body of a driver on the tarmac with a baseball bat.

This is exactly how I would expect "an attempt at a non-violent gameplay in Grand Theft Auto Online" to end.
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:33 AM on July 31, 2015 [7 favorites]

My character is a classic French Mime

*headshot*
posted by echocollate at 5:39 AM on July 31, 2015 [8 favorites]

Reminds me of Jim Munroe's "My Visit To Liberty City", where he takes a Canadian Tourist perspective of the city and produces a travelogue of his time there.

He's right about the trees.
posted by davemee at 6:05 AM on July 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

I could never get into the GTA games because I always felt like they were literally made to corrupt the player. I couldn't drive without accidentally murdering pedestrians, I always got the "fire" button mixed up with the "talk" button so I'd accidentally shoot people in the face, and even walking down the street would occasionally result in random fistfights. It was as though whatever demiurge had constructed the game's world had tweaked all of the physical laws for maximum calamity.

It sounds like they might have gotten that tamped down a bit for the newer games, but I can't even think about playing GTA without feeling as though I'm subjecting myself to severe moral hazard.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:14 AM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

You know how you have that one friend who seems to have so much more drama in their lives than everyone else?

That's how GTA feels to me. Like if Larry David was 21 and had a meth problem instead of comic timing.
posted by chicobangs at 7:35 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ha! This is how I play games.

My play sessions don't last very long.
posted by Monochrome at 7:55 AM on July 31, 2015

Yes! I love it when I can point people at this: When I finally exhausted everything you could do in GTAIV offline, I started a crimeless playthrough, which is when you try not to commit any crimes unless you absolutely have to. Turns out others had the same idea and someone wrote up a whole walkthrough on GameFAQs. Myself and a few others contributed through a board topic.

One of the few times in life where the phrase "walk into him to death" is exactly what it sounds like.
posted by numaner at 8:40 AM on July 31, 2015 [4 favorites]

I could never get into the GTA games because I always felt like they were literally made to corrupt the player.

At least by the time it got to the third iteration, this was exactly the point. These are satirical games, in part commenting on the link between environment and criminality. It is sometimes argued that wrongdoing is always a choice and that environment has nothing to do with it. Well these games put players in a position where they are constantly (subtly and explicitly) pushed toward evil. What happens to them? Most people join in and do evil.

They're satires: bitter, Swiftian satires written (primarily) by Brits commenting on an imagined USA and the influence of conservative politics both in that country, and (through its cultural production) on the outside world. What's more, they're brilliant satires, because the best satire implicates the reader. When you're reading a satirical book, you can imagine yourself above the fray. When you're playing a game like this, you are 100% implicated in the satirical intent of the text.

I actually use these games as an example in class when I'm talking about war crimes.
posted by Dreadnought at 9:05 AM on July 31, 2015 [22 favorites]

Greatest reddit comment ever.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:16 AM on July 31, 2015

I was once just walking around in GTA V, when this player pulled up next to me. I assumed the the player was going to murder me, but they just started honking at me. So I got in the car. For the next thirty minutes this random person drove me around. Whenever they wanted me to do something they would honk at me. The guy drove up to a fighter jet and started honking so I got in the fighter jet. We ended up becoming XBox Live Friends but then I got an XBox One and I haven't played with him since.

My most memorable non-friendly encounter with GTA V was when I was caught out and about by a player with a sportscar. I was by the side of a building and had nowhere to go. The other player kept backing up and flooring it towards me. I managed to jump out of the way three times before the player crushed me with their car.
posted by A Bad Catholic at 11:34 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Dreadnought, you just blew my mind, and now I can see a small blind spot in my own assessment of these games. It occurs to me that although I'm fairly comfortable with transgressive literature and film, I am somewhat less so with games. I put a ridiculous number of hours into both Hotline Miami and The Binding of Isaac, but was able to process the violence as an artistic abstraction, just colors and shapes. GTA disturbed me because it was ostensibly a realistic world in which I couldn't stop my avatar from doing the wrong thing all the time, and I couldn't handle it.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:41 AM on July 31, 2015

Errant Signal has a great review of GTA V where he talks about how much he enjoyed just being in the environment. The simple pleasures of driving around, seeing the detail put into the world, and just experiencing this alternate universe. But then, inevitably the reality of the game would creep back in, such as when he was admiring a sunset in the mountains and then BAM, gets killed by a random wild dog out of nowhere.

Great overall critique and analysis of the series as well.
posted by Panjandrum at 11:58 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

I get tired of the argument that GTA is a satire, honestly. I heard it a lot with the previous versions and even more with GTA 5, with its inclusion of torture, and it's not that I can't see the satirical jabs that Rockstar puts in the art and the story (Tom Bissell detailed a bunch in his book Extra Lives, for Liberty City, I think), but that the game as a whole has no moral weight. It can't, by design, because the violence has to be fun for you to keep playing and buying. Not to dump on your comment, Dreadnought; I just am tired of people telling me there's a difference between satirical misogyny and real misogyny. When I'm watching a representation of sex workers being abused or killed, I feel too angry to do the cerebral work of considering the image to be a criticism of something else. It just looks to me like sex workers being abused or killed. There is a satirical message about the origins of crime in American society in GTA, to be sure, but I think it is at odds with the message that says "this game is fun."
posted by thetortoise at 2:31 PM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

I just am tired of people telling me there's a difference between satirical misogyny and real misogyny.

This might be subjective but, as I parse the phrase, “Satirical misogyny” should poke fun at the people who perceive misogyny in things. Killing a hooker would decidedly not qualify as this. Rather, it should involve a feminist character somehow taking revenge on people for doing things that aren't actually offensive.

Correspondingly, “satirical misandry” should poke fun at people who perceive misandry in things. So, a man killing women for saying bad things to him. Except, of course, that actually happens, so that doesn't really work either…
posted by Going To Maine at 3:16 PM on July 31, 2015

If you want to watch someone try to play GTA in an ethical way, I present: John Green plays Grand Theft Auto with his Morals. He does discover it is hard to be an ethical person, though he also discovers a great affinity with Franklin, the thief with a heart of gold.
posted by guster4lovers at 3:23 PM on July 31, 2015

This might be subjective but, as I parse the phrase, “Satirical misogyny” should poke fun at the people who perceive misogyny in things. Killing a hooker would decidedly not qualify as this. Rather, it should involve a feminist character somehow taking revenge on people for doing things that aren't actually offensive.

I'm probably just being unclear. What I mean is, images of misogynistic acts where the creator of the image has a satirical intent, vs. imagery that is authentically misogynistic.
posted by thetortoise at 3:32 PM on July 31, 2015

Metafilter: Pretentious, airy-fairy weirdos in a world full of savage mistrust.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:00 PM on July 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

(To clarify, that's meant as a compliment.)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:00 PM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

I could never get into the GTA games because I always felt like they were literally made to corrupt the player.

That's how I felt playing Civilization.
posted by Brachinus at 4:14 AM on August 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

The thing about GTA is, you can get plenty out of the games without being evil. You can wander away from the story and there is a whole world to explore. You can deliver pizzas and put out fires and drive taxis and even become a cop and chase down crooks yourself. Hell, you can play video games within the game. You don't have to go out there and beat hookers to death or go on a Travis Bickle shooting spree.

People talk about how evil those games are. But they're as evil as you make them, really. They're a lot like life itself, that way.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:36 AM on August 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think the disconnect comes from where the free roaming ends and you have to continue the story, at which point 90% of the time you are forced to be this immoral persona to get shit done. For my part though, I put it mostly on the characters and the storyline, and me performing these actions is what the game asks of me. When I detach from that and drive around and explore, I try not to run over people or do a hundred other things that would bring the law down on me, like in real life. It's almost a transition between life and a movie.
posted by numaner at 8:18 AM on August 2, 2015

Maybe my experience was different from most people's, because I usually bogged down on some mission and couldn't get past it, so the story was quickly closed off to me and it became all about exploring and listening to the crazy radio stations. (That was part of why San Andreas was my least favorite of the games. I don't like hip-hop as a genre, and I'm especially not into early 90s hip-hop, so the radio stations were full of stuff that bored and annoyed me.)

There were also all the cheats. As soon as I figured out I could turn into a blonde hooker in a miniskirt, Vice City became a very different game for me! Oh, and the stunts! Jumping your car off the roof of a car garage! Really, you hardly need the story to have lots and lots of (relatively) wholesome fun in those games.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:23 PM on August 2, 2015