Well, I'm not saying that Johnny McInternets is going to wander upon one of these features and say to himself, "By jove! This is just like those murder games Timmy plays!" No, it's probably a feeling that gets under the skin. I know it did that to me. I play video games all the god damn time and even I felt a pit in my stomach by the time I finished clicking through them. I don't know, maybe it's because they're contextualized with this horrendous event. There you are reading the article and being assaulted by images and listening to these eyewitness accounts. It's so...virtual, but you know that unlike video games, there's something real to it. You can't get much more virtual than the use of a phone cam to film officers charging into a building as gunshots pop in the distance.
So there you, you can get all these different perspectives on the events that happened and you can start to piece together something so real that it feels unreal. Or is it the other way around? It seems like some kind of paradox to me and I admit that I just can't shake the feeling of morbidity when looking at it.
And then there are the violent video games. People still don't get them. And what bothers me about that is that they don't even try to get them. It's always been a personal goal of mine that despite whatever personal opinions I might have, I should always try and seek the reasoning behind any position someone else takes. I simply ask that others return the courtesy.
Grand Theft Auto continues to serve as the bulwark for the anti- crowd. They still think you get points for killing policemen and that your only goal in the game is to run over hookers and kill puppy dogs. They're mistakenly layering old gaming conventions on top of new ones instead of, well, actually playing the game in order to understand what's really being implied by the context. The problem is two-fold, though: Johnny McInternets's kid doesn't understand the context, either. He might absorb it by virtue of playing, but it's not something he could recall or explain to his parents.
Not everyone can be a scholar and really most shouldn't for their own good. But it doesn't take an acutely analytical mind to "get" the real cultural impact of games like GTA. Clasped in a shell of violence and sexism is parody and sly socio-political humor. There are also purely mechanical pleasures like driving cars at top speed or finding new ways to traverse the given environment. Grand Theft Auto lampoons the same things it emulates and hopefully the idea that they're not meant to be taken completely seriously gets across to the young player as well as the misguided adults. I leave you with some food for thought:
Interesting graph, isn't it?
