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Thursday 19 April, 2012
Prewritten: 4/13/11
I’ll take some time now to reflect more on the narrative of the game. To what I can recall, CJ is working for some police officer and now has to regain the respect of his neighborhood homeboys. I can imagine respect is important for the context of this game, seeing as how San Andreas is a very violent area filled with gang wars and whatnot. With an area so tense, just ticking off one gang member is enough to get killed by countless others. That’s what this game communicated to me when I attempted to beat up one of the members dressed in purple - if I had betrayed my green comrades, I’d expect the same to happen. In this manner, I think GTA makes valid commentary about social comraderie when respect is emphasized as a driving variable for success.
Still, I wasn’t very interested in the game’s narrative. What I ended up doing for the next 30 minutes was really playing around with the game like an open sandbox. I figured since the game was so open it deserved to be explored, and I went out as farthest as I could as I was driving in a stolen firetruck.
This is the general foundation of my ethical experience of the game. I didn’t care if I ran people over because there were no real negative consequences surrounding that, and all I really wanted to do was explore. If I ran someone over and the police killed me, I restart at the hospital. If some gang member wanted to shoot me down, I’d simply shoot back. So I kept on exploring. Eventually I ended up on some island, where I guess the police headquarters were, and they decided to shoot me down just for intruding.
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