GTA San Andreas: Carjacking

So when walking to class this morning I thought about hijacking a car. I don't believe that I ever would, my ethics and self-control (though not perfect) could not mesh with an action such as this. However, it got me thinking about people who used the excuse of "being influenced by video games" for their real life actions. I had always dismissed this as simply a sad excuse, but having the thought today made me question just how much of an excuse it is. I do not believe that it should excuse somebody of their actions, but might it also put some blame on GTA and Rockstar Games? I've never been one to blame companies for this type of thing, but I've also never had a thought like the one that I did today.

image credit: Rockstar Games

note: I googled "carjacking" and this came up... talk about pop culture

Well, that's not entirely true. Sometimes I think about what it would feel like to be hit by a car. Not for the purposes of suicide or anything of that sort, but just to see what it would feel like.

Playing GTA recently: CJ got hit by an 18 wheeler on the highway, and simply fell over with damage that could be fixed by eating a slice of pizza. What the hell?

GTA San Andreas: Characters

So I never played GTA until this week. It's all that the media said about it, all that the overwhelmingly positive reviews said about it, and more in a melting pot of fantasy life. The main characters are wonderfully fleshed out, rounded, full of character and life, believable, and unique.

This is not the case for the people on the street. At the beginning of the game, Sweet talks about how messed up it is that several of your homies have been killed. Of course then you procede to kill hundreds if not thousands of other people throughout just the early stages of the game. Are these deaths not just as messed up? The people that you kill are not shown to have connections except their one-track status as a member of the eses or another gang. Officer Tenpenny and his henchmen (so to speak) show the only reaction to your killing people, except that he's nonchalant about it (e.g. "Oh Carl, try not to kill any more respected police officers. Please?").

image credit: Rockstar Games and IGN

So it's all about you and your homies. Everybody else amounts to jack shit on the emotional scale.

That's the most disturbing thing. I find myself not caring about killing people in this game. Death should cary weight, particularly in a game as socially oriented as this.