Grand Theft Auto III takes place in Liberty City
– a completely unique universe with its own laws, standards, ethics, and
morals (or lack thereof).
There are dozens of ways to take out the
inhabitants – punches, kicks, head butts, baseball bats, handguns, Uzis,
AK-47s, shotguns, M-16s, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, Molotov
cocktails and flame throwers.
… Let the crime wave begin!
Page 4 Grand Theft Auto
III Official Strategy Guide.
Why Grand Theft Auto
is wonderful for teaching ethics and morality
Grand
Theft Auto is the latest thing to send our kids and society in general to hell
in a hand basket. We have been warned about watching out for everything from
the written word, to the novel, to film, to comics, to rock music, TV, rap
music, the internet and a steady stream of video games which are corrupting minds and morals at an ever
increasing pace. Before it was Doom & Quake, now at is GTA as it is
affectionately known. I beg to differ.
I
teach game design at Indiana University in the MIME program so I actually
'have' to study games. I have a research budget some of which I use to buy Play
Stations and lots of games. I also buy strategy guides because these games are
in reality too difficult for a guy with a PhD in Information Science from the
University of California at Berkeley to figure out in a normal time frame, like
say a term. This term I have been spending a lot of time trying understand how
GTA is corrupting minds and morals. I haven’t figure out the minds and
moral thing but I have discovered that there some amazing areas where using GTA
in the class room with the kids is a wildly enlightening experience for both
myself and the kids.
The
most recent edition of GTA, Vice, sold close to 1.4 million units in 2 days at
$50s a pop which means two things: this is a really big industry and most of
the kids I normally meet in a classroom are more likely to have played GTA than
they are to have watched the Sopranos or Buffy. Like rock music in the 60s
& 70s, the game industry is driving culture at the moment.
Because
so many kids have played GTA it is really easy to get a runaway conversation
going in class with little prompting from me other than questions such as: So,
what do you think of GTA?
Remember,
I teach game designers so what they don’t reply with is
‘cool’ no matter how you spell the word. The usual response is that
the game is terrible in a moral sense. And, then the class explodes in amazing
directions.
Some
folks will point out that the alleged violence is virtual and not real and
probably a great improvement on spectator violence of the past such as picnic
outings to witness hangings, stonings, beheadings, various battles during the
Civil War in the US, and crucifixions which were actually a regular occurrence
in the days of Christ. That the Coliseum, that great tourist destination, in
Rome was the sight of regular real mayhem witnessed and cheered for by many.
So, maybe the virtual violence of GTA and Doom and Quake serve a survival need
in human beings. Maybe this thirst for blood is slacked by the game. This sort
of discussion tends to bring a moment of reflection and then someone will
launch into the whole aspect of censorship.
The
students look at GTA and other games and talk about violence in the Last Exit
to Brooklyn, the Dutch film 'The Vanishing', Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Rashomon
where evil and lies succeed and thrive just as they do in the real world. The
discussion moves to the difference that GTA is a game so the audience
disappears and the interactor appears and this makes us all nervous: pseudo
consequential decision making. Remember GTA is a game where you play within a
crime wave most of which you are creating.
Then
the discussion hones onto the real hot button issue of GTA, the fact that you
can hire a prostitute to have sex with you – depicted by a rocking car
you have entered. After the deed has been done you can kill the prostitute and
take her money. This is obviously a really bad thing to do and as far as I can
determine none of the students have gone out and actually done such a thing in
real life but just the idea of such an event mortifies most. The discussion
will wander on and someone brings up the fact that as far as anyone can
determine this specific action was not hard wired into the game but may be an
emergent action which combines two rules of Liberty City: you can have sex with
prostitutes and you can kill and rob anyone in Liberty City, therefore after
having sex with a prostitute you can kill and rob her and get your money back.
The idea of this action freezes most students no matter what the discussion but
they do note that in context of the logic of Liberty City with “its own
laws, standards, ethics, and morals (or lack thereof)” it makes sense.
You are in a crime wave, any one in Liberty City can be robbed beaten or
killed. Cars can be hijacked and crashed into walls and people. But if you hit
someone they will hit you back. If you hit a street walker they will hit you
back and if you are in the Red Light district all the street walkers will gang
up on you until you run away or they kill you. If you crash a car into enough
objects or over turn the car it will explode and your character is dead. There
is a definite consequence to actions in GTA. But, still, killing and robbing
prostitutes is a little too Clock Orange-ish for most.
I
don't worry about this too much simply because of media effects research which
basically says that media can increase the probability that someone does
something they are inclined to do but has almost no ability to make most folks
do something they are not inclined to do.(1) The soap opera Simplimente Maria
reported in Entertainment Education by Singe and Rogers explains this very
clearly. Lots of Singer Sewing machines were sold during the run of this soap
because most folks are inclined to better their lives by sewing. I also see
this in Joe Bates' paper Dramatic Presence where his 'interactors' can not bring
themselves to 'make believe' kill a person in a theatrical enactment. Can a nut
case be affected? Sure. Remember when Kubrick pulled the movie 'A Clock Work
Orange' out of distribution when some kids almost kicked a street person to
death? Some folks are whacko and there is nothing we can do. I forgot to
mention that the kids who did the kicking never saw the movie; they read the
book.
Eventually
the discussion always comes to the BIG point. GTA is art like it or not. May or
may not be great art; only time determines this. But, it needs the same
protection and respect as DuChamp's Urinal, Picasso's Guernica, Serrano's Piss
Christ and the Garbage Pail Kid cards. Years ago there was a fad called the
Garbage Pail Kid cards which were disgusting gross out cards aimed at little
boys who loved disgusting gross outs. The odd thing about the Garbage Pail Kids
was that the idea was developed by Art Spiegleman, a comic book artist who
eventually went on to take his disgusting talent and give us Maus, the
retelling of the Holocaust with comic versions of cats and mice. Maus won a
Pulitzer prize award. We can’t have it both ways. We can’t protect
some speech and some words and some images and some games. Art tells us who we
are and what are capable of. Unfortunately GTA does this well which is what I
think scares us.
GTA
seems to encourage my students to consider why the game is successful as a game
and it also forces them to make decisions as to whether they would spend time
building something like GTA. This is what teaching is all about. I can not get
this discussion out of Pajama Sam, I can't not get this discussion out of
Rockett, I can't get this discussion out of the Sims or Black & White. I
can get this discussion out of GTA. For that I am thankful.
Thinking
about GTA and my kids making decisions as players and designers working in the
world causes me to think back to grade school decades ago. I went to Catholic
school in Philadelphia. My teachers were nuns and for the most part they were
obsessed with the sins we might commit. The consensus seemed to be that they
could scare us into being good. Promising us an eternity of fire and brimstone
worked pretty well until 6th grade at which time the hormones kicked
in and some things seemed worth the risk, mostly anything having to do with
sex. I guess the nuns knew we had passed to another level so they brought out
the heavy hitter. They brought out Father Ellwood E. Kieser. Father Kieser
founded Paulist Productions in 1968 to produce life-enriching programming and
preaching the gospel. Father Kieser created a weekly anthology series called
Insight (7) which the nuns showed us every Friday around 2:30 pm just before
school got out for the weekend. I think the nuns thought of Insight as a
potential weekend inoculation against sin. For me I waited for Insight every
week. It was the highlight of my week. It was excellent television with a
message but the message never seemed too heavy handed and Father Kieser never
seemed to tell the me what to think so much as to suggest points of view.
Watching Insight made me feel as if I had a choice in decisions which would
affect my future. I can imagine a Father Kieser in the world today. I imagine
that Father Kieser would look on GTA and see possibilities to produce
life-enriching programming and preaching the gospel in ways never imagined by
creating consequential situations where choices are made which are fun, ethical
and moral. I have no illusion that any of the folks who designed GTA gave much
thought to real morality but I don’t think they should have. They created
a fun, tightly modeled world which kids love to play. I think it is important
that folks who work with kids understand the media which is attractive to them
and why it is attractive to them so that they can use this media in ways Father
Kieser might have for similar impact. The potential is there but only if you
are willing to play and learn.
"A communication system is totally neutral.
It has no conscience, no
principle, no morality. It has only a history.
It will broadcast filth or inspiration with equal facility. It will speak the
truth as lightly as it will speak falsehood. It is, in sum, no more, no less
than the men and women who use it."
-- Edward R. Murrow of
CBS Broadcasting.
References
1.
Grand Theft Auto 3 Official Strategy Guide -- by Tim Bogenn; Paperback
[
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/074400098X/qid=1038705047/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/002-7163478-7764024
]
2.
My Lunch with Annie Lang: Children, Violence, Imitation (and a darned good
house salad)
[
http://www.indiana.edu/~slizzard/lunch/ ]
3. Singhal, Arvind; Everett M. Rogers
Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates 1999. Hardback Textbook. No Dustjacket. Tight Sound Copy In
Very Good Condition with no Apparent Markings to the Book. ISBN 0-8058-3235-1.
[ http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=137464514 ]
4. Dramatic Presence
Margaret Thomas Kelso, Peter Weyhrauch, and Joseph Bates.
Technical Report CMU-CS-92-195, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA, December 1992. This paper originally appeared in PRESENCE:
The Journal of Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, Vol 2, No
1, MIT Press
[
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/web/papers.html ]
5.
Maus : A Survivor's Tale : My Father Bleeds History/Here My Troubles
Began/Boxed -- by Art Spiegelman.
[
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679748407/qid=1038705965/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-7163478-7764024
]
6.
Wayne’s Garbage Pail Kid References. http://www.wgpkr.com/GPK/
7.
Father Kieser eventually produced the movie Romaro which was nominated for an
academy award. )