My mom asked me about the killing of prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto 4, as mentioned in this week’s New York Times. Here’s what I wrote back.
Edit: I refer below to “Hot Chocolate” when I mean, “Hot Coffee.” Maybe I was hungry when I wrote this.
Can of worms, for sure, but it’s an old one (remember, ‘net years = dog years, so GTA3 came out 21 years ago)
Yeah, it’s not new, and part of the Mature rating the game has (at least, I think it’s Mature, if not higher), and while that’s something you *can* do, it’s not something that any part of the game directs you to do. Last year’s smash hit BIOShock had a component that involved killing the symbiotic counterpart of giant half-mechanized monsters who would happily ram your crushed body right through a wall if you got in their way.
The counterparts looked like evil little girls though. There was discussion in the gaming industry about how bad people felt killing little girls to get their strength back after fighting a “big daddy.” I’m not saying the topic was ever put to rest, or that everyone’s decided that “Bad Big Daddy = Bad Little Girl” but it was part of the game. It was something that gave a little more “oomph” to the emotional impact of an underwater city being taken over by some kind of virus that makes everyone go insane, including little girls and their deep-sea-diver killing machines (think the giant and the midget from Mad Max Thunderdome). You felt like this place is terrible, and you’re maybe part of what’s so terrible about it, and maybe we should just all buy a Wii and spend all day playing MarioKart Racing instead.
Yes, sadly, there’s prostitution within the game (which amounts to “pay the lady, and you get into a car, which bounces”), and it HAS been in the last two versions of the game (GTA3 and now GTA4). If I recall correctly, having sex (with a prostitute or a “love interest,” and there are some non-player-characters in the game you can go on “dates” with) will give you some health back. That’s the only thing I could see someone saying the game invites you to do. Killing doesn’t do anything for you.
But it’s not *just* prostitutes you *can* run over, it’s everything, and everyone. GTA3 was the first game to have this sort of “open world” where anything that was possible within the realm of (game) physics was possible to do. If you could jump your car off the top of the building into that police helicopter, killing yourself, the pilot, and forty bystanders, it would let you do that. In GTA4, you can have your (real) friends jump into a car that you’re driving, which (I’m told) usually turns into a Keystone Cops moment of friends running their friends over many times before finally saying “Okay, I’m stopping the car for real this time.”
It was never a mission within the game though. The game doesn’t *make* you do it. It’s not a mini-game, or some sort of unlockable. It’s a thing you *can* do, if you want to, but you need to go out of your way to do it. The game increases your danger for killing people you haven’t been giving a mission to kill. The ‘hood will come after you, (as will the cops) for killing *anyone*, including random little old ladies, sweaty dudes with baseball bats, and other gangsta wanna-bes like yourself.
Saying that GTA4 “invites” the killing of a particular group of people is taking a pretty narrow view of what an open world is. When Halo came out, folks spent MONTHS trying to get piles of grenades to make jeeps fly through the air, killing people, and monsters, and the law of gravity as efficiently as possible. People get married in World of Warcraft, get divorced in TheSims Online, and cause huge swarms of flying penises to interrupt live CNN interviews in Second Life (no, really, that happened).
They are all things to do in-game, things that the game engine allows, and you’ve got to wonder why people fixate on it in a game (or why there needed to be prostitutes in GTA at all), but there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. While we’re at it, can someone please explain why there’s always the “stripclub scene” in every cop movie up until about 93? At least GTA is full of mafia, so they could claim that the sex, drugs, violence and swearing are all due to The Sopranos being the #1 show on HBO for five years (or maybe it was Six Feet Under, for exactly the same reasons).
More damning than the prostikilling in GTA3 was the “Hot Chocolate” mission, which was an ACTUAL mission in the game. The mission demanded that you went through an insanely elaborate bunch of milestones in a certain amount of time (and I think it had to be in a certain order) and then you unlocked the OPTION of blocky-animated moderately-graphic sex between consenting adults.
Remember the Adventure64 game, when you’d die if you moved in the dark without a lamp for more than three moves because you’d “fall and break your neck”? Remember what I did to get past that part? Yeah, I removed the RETURN in the subroutine, so I could still SEE for long enough to get through the cave to where there was light again. Yes, I cheated, and that’s what a small group within the PC-gaming community did when they figured out there was this mission called “Hot Chocolate” in GTA3 that they couldn’t seem to figure out how to unlock, or what it was about (whenever a new GTA game comes out, the community collectively starts pulling it apart in any way they can using decoding, HexEditors, and DiskInspection, to see what’s in it, what the cheat codes are, and how to make their car into a semi-transparent tank that belches blue smurfs out the exhaust and fires spaghetti out the front).
{Okay, so that one’s not real, but you get the idea}.
Hot Chocolate was something that was written by (probably) one or two people, tucked away in some deep dark scary place in the code, and after MANY MANY interviews with the developers and their parent-companies, found to be something that no normal human being would EVER find, even if they were TRYING to. EVEN if you WERE a gamer…
BUT a bunch of game crackers figured out how to trick the game into thinking that this crazy impossible mission had actually been completed, and would show you sex that was slightly more obvious than trying to watch scrambled satellite signals of “9 1/2 Weeks.”
Does GTA invite killing prostitutes? Does it invite bad driving? Does it invite not showering, sleeping, or going to work/school? Does it invite showing up to pick up a date in a stolen semi-trailer that’s plastered with dead bodies and phonebooths because you “had leetle trouble” finding the street your girlfriend lives on?
To be honest, I don’t know.
It’s an environment. It’s a physics engine. It’s a very nice physics engine in a brutal and dangerous environment.
It doesn’t invite anything more horrifying than 90% of the movies in theatres around Hallowe’en.
It simply invites.
What you DO with that invitation is up to you, but the game isn’t smart enough to stop you from being an asshat.
At this point, if you have questions, it’s worth talking to your 15yo son about what he’s DOING in the game. Who is his character? What sorta “robbing a bank for medicine for your dying daughter” missions has he accepted? Which ones has he turned down? Is it fun? Scary? Sexy? Dangerous? Tough? Cool? Pretty? Evil?
It’s a toy. A freakishly elaborate toy. But a toy.
…but it’s absolutely your job to call “Bullshit!” when people start saying “Oh well, boys will be boys.”
Thoughts? I’m okay with comments and discussion, but will delete troll posts. It’s my blog – my rules. Go argue on the NYTimes if you want to play slapsies online with strangers.
