[On October
21st, 1997, DMA Design and Tarantula Studios released Grand Theft Auto, the controversial first game in what would
become one of the most popular (and
even more controversial) video game series of all time. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy GTA and four other
seminal video games. Share your thoughts on these and any and all other games
for a crowd-sourced weekend post that requires no quarters or tokens to play!]
Forgive me for
focusing this post less on GTA itself
and more on broader gaming topics. But that seemed like a good way to begin
this week’s series, and plus I’ve never played any of the GTA games (and welcome comments from those who have). So to wit,
here are three aspects of video games that a focus on GTA can help us discuss:
1)
Their Effects: The elephant in the room when it
comes to GTA, and really all violent
video games for that matter, is the question of their potential
effects on (especially) impressionable young players. From what I can tell,
the first GTA featured mostly just cartoonish car violence; it was with
the series’
fifth game in particular that the stakes were significantly raised, with
players for example having the ability to rob and kill prostitutes after
sleeping with them (and, it seems, being rewarded by the game for choosing to
do so). I don’t believe that any form of art (which games on, on which more in
a moment) can or should be directly correlated with any particular effects on
their audiences; it’s nowhere near that simple. But at the same time, it’s
worth noting that unlike most other art forms, video games ask their audiences
to make many of the choices themselves, and it would be disengenous to suggest
that choosing to kill a woman is the same as watching a character do so in a
film (for example). So while I don’t believe a game like GTA makes its players more violent,
it does at times ask them to act violently in troubling ways that are worth
recognizing and critiquing.
2)
They’re Art: Perhaps it’s now widely accepted
that video
games are an art form; certainly disciplines like Fitchburg State’s new and
groundbreaking Game
Design Major have that idea as a key starting point. But I’m not sure that
the communal conversations about games tend to incorporate that definition, as
it seems to me that they are still often seen more as a combination of toys
(and thus more
appropriate for children than any other age bracket) and distractions
(and thus taken less seriously than other cultural forms and media). Obviously
any definition of art is open to interpretation and argument, so I can’t claim
with absolute authority that video games are an art form (although I believe
very strongly that they are). But I will say that narratives which treat games
more dismissively lead directly to less thoughtful and helpful engagements with
questions like the ones I raised in point one, to perceptions of games as (for
example) simply delivery systems for violence rather than an art form featuring
artistic subgenres that include violence as a key element (just as action
and horror
films do, to name two other such art forms).
3)
They’re Flexible: If we do see video games as an
art form (as I do), what differentiates them from most other such forms (other
than Choose Your Own Adventure books, I
suppose!) is that they are interactive, depending on the choices of their
audience members (who of course are far more than just audience members) for how
their stories and thus their art are ultimately created. I know that’s a
well-known point, but I have a specific and surprising GTA anecdote related to it. When my sons were relatively young, a
babysitter took them to his house and let them play one of the GTA games on his gaming system. I was
initially horrified when they told me this, but then they described their game
play at length, which involved all sorts of driving craziness and silliness
(driving into swimming pools, trying to drive off bridges onto moving trains,
etc.) and relatedly only self-directed violence (seeing what would happen if
they climbed to the top of a tall crane and jumped off, for example). Not
exactly the highest form of art, perhaps, but far different from a game focused
on killing others. In this case, at least, the game’s flexibility had allowed
my sons to make it their own in a silly but also, I would argue, very
significant way.
Next game
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?
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