So despite the cryptic comment: Welcome John, it’s good to have you on board.

John’s last blog post..Extraordinary Ministry by an “Ordinary Pastor” (Pt 3)

My wife walked in a couple years back while I was meandering around the digital sandbox that is Grand theft Auto: San Andreas and was horrified that I stopped an old lady on a motorcross bike, kicked her in the face to knock her off, stole her bike and then accidentally ran over her while trying to drive away. As the pool of digital red began to spread under her fallen form and a couple wads of cash began to appear around her, my wife goggled, not really sure what to say. “Wow. That’s horrible.”

She is not the kind of person who should be playing something like GTA:SA.

What is the difference between her and I? Neither of us remotely support violence or theft. The thought that something like the game scenario I just described actually takes place on occasion in the real world sickens me. I’m not violent. I’m not prone to theft. I don’t rejoice in iniquity. And neither does she. And yet I don’t have any moral compunction about driving a camper into a crowd milling about a plaza in San Fiero or shooting a surface-to-air missile into my ex-girlfriend’s car in Los Santos. Why is that?

I think it’s because the two of us are observing different things going on in the games space. Where she sees me, her husband, stomping on a woman until she dies, I see little more than a game mechanic.* I have never really been able to identify with the roles presented me in games. The term role-playing game has always been a bit of a joke when applied to video games.** I was not a plumber crawling through pipes to find a mushroom where there ought to have been a princess. I was not an elfish fellow hunting for Tri-Force. I was not trapped on the isle of Myst or Riven or even J’nanin. I was not Gordon Freeman. I was not even Thedane or Cossarwal, adventurers in the land of Azeroth.

And I am not CJ, stealing cars, killing hookers, and decimating the state’s law enforcement legions.

In fact, there is no God or morality in the realms where those concepts (Mario, Link, etc.) dwell. There is only the mechanic. Those who can see that can play games like these without fear for their soul’s well-being. Those who can’t, those who empathize with the mechanic as if they were actually people, shouldn’t touch the stuff. It’s a matter of self-awareness and self-honesty.
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And now, more directly to your point here, while I’m not rushing out to get the game at launch (I have a hard time justifying $60 for a videogame, no matter how awesome), I’ll probably end up getting it eventually—probably when it’s lost its sheen and is selling at Target for nineteen bucks. And the reason I’ll get it is pretty simply this: it looks like an awesome game.

All the sundry reasons that people would reasonably boycott the game are good and fine when applied to their individual consciences, but as I related in the story above regarding GTA IV’s predecessor, I just don’t process game violence on anything near a level as I would real violence. I personally have a hard time imagining myself being affected by the moralities played out within the scope of the virtual environment in any real way.

In a sense, this conversation winds back to Carissa’s a couple weeks back when she explored the idea of whether it was necessary to forgive Willoughby. The ability to divorce the imaginary from the real is, I think, one of the higher functions of the human experience.*** The power of a story is to draw you into its world, but the power of the mind is to recognize the fact that the story is a fiction and the happenings of that world just your imagination.

So yes, I’ll likely get GTA IV, play it, and enjoy it, despite the fact that it both proffers an inadequate social commentary and presents its pitiable, sinful protagonist in such a way that his murderous actions are fun. And I’ll do so, because I was relying on neither of those concepts to justify my playing of the game. I had no need to justify my playing of the game at all (at least not to myself).
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As far as the list of complaints that included “The game is a cop killing simulator,” it may be that I’ve only played San Andreas, but I haven’t seen anything like “You can sleep with a prostitute and then beat her to get your money back” or “You can drive drunk, and it’s fun.” I’ve given rides to protitutes, taking them from job to job and prtecting them from violent clients, but if you can have sex with them in the game, it’s not immediately apparent how. And I can’t even begin to imagine how to drive drunk in the game. As far as partial nudity goes, I guess there was a nudie bar wear the girls wore bikinis… not that I can imagine how one might find videogame girls enticing—but we live in a very strange world, so anything’s possible I guess.
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NOTES:
*the little more that I see is related to visual interests.

**see Escapist Magazine’s thirtieth issue for a decent treatment of this – and especially John Tynes’ “Masks in the Woods.”

***not that I’m saying I am Awesome for being able to do this. It’s just something that comes with a lot of practice.