Reality check

On Tuesday Grand Theft Auto IV hit the market, which means that right now, approximately six million gamers worldwide are sprawled in front of their HD-TVs, enacting violent fantasies of thug life on the virtual streets of a pseudo-New York City. Or maybe I’m wrong, and actual thugs are taking time out of their busy schedule stealing cars and shooting cops* to play video games about it instead. Like how all the drug dealers in Baltimore hang out together watching The Wire. Ah, the fantasy is so much better when you can pretend it’s real.

Like all video games, Grand Theft Auto inhabits the realm of fantasy. Unlike other video games, however, which feature superhuman fighting machines or magical forest creatures, GTA offers something different: the fantasy of realism. Set in what NYT reviewer Seth Schiesel calls “the exhilarating, lusciously dystopian rendition of New York City,” (see review here) GTA IV disavows its own phantasmagoric qualities by concentrating its energies on a world of gritty urban crime whose ‘realness,’ at least to its gaming audience, is the main draw.

From Schiesel:

“It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York. From Brooklyn (called Broker), through Queens (Dukes), the Bronx (Bohan), Manhattan (Algonquin) and an urban slice of New Jersey (Alderney), the game’s streets and alleys ooze a stylized yet unmistakable authenticity.”

Stylized is one word for it. Schiesel does note that the characters are “each a caricature less politically correct than the last,” but somehow fails to find anything problematic about the depiction of “black crack slingers, argyle-sporting Jamaican potheads,” and “Puerto Rican hoodlums.” Does anyone else find it disturbing that a journalist living in New York finds these blatantly racist stereotypes to be “authentic”? What about the authenticity of the portrayal of women in the game? Does Schiesel believe that all women are prostitutes? That our purpose in life is to be fucked, and perhaps killed afterwards?

Don’t get me wrong, unlike some people, I don’t have a problem with prostitution or its representation in video games. If there were a game where the avatars were hookers and the goal was to sleep with as many johns as possible, then kill them and take their money, I’d probably buy a copy. But there is a big difference between violence as subversion and violence as subjugation. As I’ve discussed before, violence against sex workers is a technique of patriarchal dominance. In a world where women are systematically oppressed on the basis of gender, there is nothing subversive about glorifying sexualized violence against women. (More on this here.)

This is not to say that the game itself is not subversive in other ways. After all, the premise of the game is a sharp critique of the American dream:

"What does the American Dream mean today? For Niko Bellic, fresh off the boat from Europe, it is the hope he can escape his past. For his cousin, Roman, it is the vision that together they can find fortune in Liberty City, gateway to the land of opportunity. As they slip into debt and are dragged into a criminal underworld by a series of shysters, thieves and sociopaths, they discover that the reality is very different from the dream in a city that worships money and status, and is heaven for those who have them and a living nightmare for those who don’t." (source)

Turning conventional values upside down, the game rewards players for behaviors that society has deemed criminal. And judging by the legislation the game has inspired, not to mention the lawsuits, more than a few people are convinced that GTA is indeed threatening the moral fabric of American society. Whether or not you believe that Grand Theft Auto is a “thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun,” as Schiesel would have it, there is no denying its immense popularity. This is no doubt due in part to its virtual “open world environment” in which players are free to roam and complete tasks at will. Combined with its embrace of recklessness, cars, guns and sex, is it any wonder this game is so appealing to its primarily male 18-35 year old demographic? After a long day of mindless work in your office cubicle, a trip to Liberty City is indeed liberating.

Of course, it’s not liberating for everyone, unless you consider watching racist/sexist stereotypes of yourself getting killed to be liberating. Grand Theft Auto may offer a critique of the American dream, but it does nothing to challenge dominant structures of racism, sexism and heteronormativity. It's a shame, because the beauty of nihilism is that it doesn't discriminate. Regrettably, the makers of GTA missed the point.

*Wait, I thought this game was supposed to be realistic. Last I checked it’s the cops doing the shooting, not the other way around.