Actually a Positive Article about GTA3
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Actually a Positive Article about GTA3
Found this in the Boston Globe yesterday. It's actually an intelligent article about it, not just trashing the violence. It does mention that the game has been banned in Australia.
Article is below.
CONNECTING WITH YOUR INNER THUG
Author(s): Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff Date: January 13, 2002 Page: E1 Section: Focus
On a dark summer night, I am walking around Liberty City with a baseball bat, looking for trouble, and wondering what it will mean if I like it.
That's what happens when you play a video game that feels like a sociological test, one of those lab experiments that summon our basest instincts. This one is called Grand Theft Auto 3 - which is the least of the virtual felonies you can commit - and it's one of hottest video games in the country. Released for Playstation2 in late October by New York-based developer RockStar Games, this version of Grand Theft Auto marks a quantum jump from its predecessors in its complexity and brutality. It has been banned in Australia for its graphic violence and its treatment of the elderly and innocent. In the United States, its popularity has soared. More than 635,000 copies were sold in October and November alone, according to the marketing information company NPDFunworld. In only two months, it became Blockbuster's top game rental for 2001.
That's a lot of people wandering through the virtual world of Liberty City, picking up prostitutes and beating them up to get their money back - more of the virtual crimes you can commit. In a sense, this is nothing new; we're all inured to violence, from watching it on film and TV, listening to raging music, gulping up tales of true crime. The difference here is that we're committing the violence ourselves.
This is what technology has given us: a way to shrink the distance between the part of us that wants to break rules and the good sense that keeps us in line. And it has given us a jolting reminder that, from a safe distance, you can get a surprising amount of pleasure from being bad.
Especially when you can be bad in such a realistic way - which is another Grand Theft Auto 3 distinction. It's one thing to enter a different world - say, a space game with weapons that don't exist in real life, or a game like Crazy Taxi in which you break traffic rules with no apparent harm to your car or the pedestrians. In Grand Theft Auto 3, the world is our world, and real rules apply: rules of gravity, physics, and physiology. So the thrill is in breaking the one rule you can: the rule of law. And the graphics make you feel as though you're really doing it, except you know you aren't.
Which means this isn't just escapism; it's the ultimate escapism, from the upstanding-citizen figure that most of us try to be. It "can really help to douse the irritation that a day of grueling office work affords," says Chris Green, 23, an avid player and computer programmer from York, England. "Some people play squash after work," he says. "I just squash pedestrians."
From the joystick in Grand Theft Auto 3, you control a virtual bank robber, white male, brown hair, seen from a third-person perspective. The game guides him to a variety of mob-boss types, who send him on "missions." But your proxy thug also can wander through the streets on his own, in a way that sets Grand Theft Auto 3 apart from other video games.
You have the freedom, in Liberty City, to go wherever you want and to be as good or as bad as you choose. You can hit people and hijack cars. You can commandeer a police car and run a vigilante operation or overtake an ambulance.
The world you roam is stunningly realistic, shadowy and gritty. When you drive beneath a streetlight, a pool of light reflects on your car. When you pass people on the sidewalk, you hear snippets of their conversation: "Damned foreigners." "Got any doughnuts?" If you jostle them, they glare at you.
Your actions have realistic consequences - to a point. If you drive into cars and buildings, your hood falls off and eventually your car bursts into flames. If you commit a very serious crime, the cops come after you. But if you're arrested, you simply lose your weapons. If you're killed, everything fades to white and you begin again.
In my maiden tour of Liberty City (which the gamemaker says has no connection to the Miami neighborhood notorious for the 1980 riots), I perform a couple of missions for a mobster named Louie. I find a guy who did Louie wrong and beat him up with a baseball bat. Then, I take off to explore the streets.
I walk around with my bat until I spot an old lady and decide to see what happens if I hit her. She falls down. A pool of blood forms around her. A police officer arrives. In a panic, I hit him repeatedly until he appears to be dead. More officers approach, and I'm busted. Game over.
Was it fun? I'm not sure "fun" is the right word, but in a strange way, playing Grand Theft Auto 3 was thrilling - the tiny burst of adrenaline when the officer approached, the odd sense of disjointedness when I realized I could truly do whatever I wanted. In Liberty City, you can give in to your worst instincts, your sickest curiosities. The most you'll see is a pool of virtual blood and a screen faded white.
Real gaming aficionados - the ones who play for hours at a time and refer to the game as "GTA3" - insist it isn't the violence that keeps them playing. It's the richness of the virtual world, the depth of the story lines, and the freedom to go "off-mission" and explore the virtual world seamlessly.
But it's hard to separate the mechanics of the game from the content. Devoted players insist there's nothing wrong with enjoying GTA3, but they also admit there's something pleasantly perverse about it. Jeremy Sonnet, 18, a student at Ohio's Franciscan University who signs his e-mails "God Bless," says the game is "so wrong and thrilling that I want to keep playing to push the limits. . . . Can I steal a fire truck? Can I get the army to hunt me down? . . . In this game the answers are, so surprisingly, `YES YOU CAN!' "
Supriya Gunda, 20, an Emerson College freshman, says GTA3 is more exciting than other shoot-em-ups. It's a "different kind of violence . . . because there's no real good intent to any of it."
Nearly everybody mentions that this is not a game for children - that its "Mature" rating should be obeyed. It doesn't always seem to work; I have a long instant-message conversation with a GTA3 player named Jean, who says he is a 13-year-old middle schooler in Union Park, Fla.
He's the sort of player who concerns Dr. David Perna, director of the Adolescent Anger Management Program at McLean Hospital in Belmont. There isn't much scientific research yet, Perna says, about the effects of interactive media on the brain. But there is ample anecdotal evidence that children don't always grasp the differences between fantasy and reality, he says - stories of kids who shoot their classmates and get confused when a real person doesn't get up again.
But what about adults? Most GTA3 players are students and professionals who presumably follow the law and know right from wrong. There was no uptick in violent street crime in the last few months, no spate of mayhem on the road or surge in muggings of the elderly. And the grown-up players say it's just that space between reality and fantasy that gives GTA3 its appeal.
"I think everybody, deep down, wants to be that criminal," says David Hightower, 18, an Iowa disc jockey who admitted to a thrill when his virtual self attacked an elderly woman.
If, indeed, we all have the imp inside us, this game gives us access to it, at a distance that's just safe enough. The question is whether that distance can, and will, shrink any further - or whether, in an odd way, the sick banality of GTA3 violence will be difficult to top. There's little doubt that video game scenarios will get even more extreme: Industry insiders are already buzzing about RockStar Games' next offering, in which your proxy character, a rioter inside a mob, will apparently be able to decapitate someone, pick up his head, and whack other people with it.
But that violence, as realistically as it might be depicted on a TV screen, still has a cartoonish feel to it. Somehow, it seems even worse to be roaming the streets, ramming into an elderly driver who's going too slow. Or hitting a pedestrian who gets in your way. Maybe with a bat. These are the things that, in some not-so-distant world, are more likely to come true.
For a gallery of 10 screenshots from the game, video reviews, game trailers, and related Web sites, visit www.boston.com/globe/ideas. Joanna Weiss can be reached at [email protected].
Article is below.
CONNECTING WITH YOUR INNER THUG
Author(s): Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff Date: January 13, 2002 Page: E1 Section: Focus
On a dark summer night, I am walking around Liberty City with a baseball bat, looking for trouble, and wondering what it will mean if I like it.
That's what happens when you play a video game that feels like a sociological test, one of those lab experiments that summon our basest instincts. This one is called Grand Theft Auto 3 - which is the least of the virtual felonies you can commit - and it's one of hottest video games in the country. Released for Playstation2 in late October by New York-based developer RockStar Games, this version of Grand Theft Auto marks a quantum jump from its predecessors in its complexity and brutality. It has been banned in Australia for its graphic violence and its treatment of the elderly and innocent. In the United States, its popularity has soared. More than 635,000 copies were sold in October and November alone, according to the marketing information company NPDFunworld. In only two months, it became Blockbuster's top game rental for 2001.
That's a lot of people wandering through the virtual world of Liberty City, picking up prostitutes and beating them up to get their money back - more of the virtual crimes you can commit. In a sense, this is nothing new; we're all inured to violence, from watching it on film and TV, listening to raging music, gulping up tales of true crime. The difference here is that we're committing the violence ourselves.
This is what technology has given us: a way to shrink the distance between the part of us that wants to break rules and the good sense that keeps us in line. And it has given us a jolting reminder that, from a safe distance, you can get a surprising amount of pleasure from being bad.
Especially when you can be bad in such a realistic way - which is another Grand Theft Auto 3 distinction. It's one thing to enter a different world - say, a space game with weapons that don't exist in real life, or a game like Crazy Taxi in which you break traffic rules with no apparent harm to your car or the pedestrians. In Grand Theft Auto 3, the world is our world, and real rules apply: rules of gravity, physics, and physiology. So the thrill is in breaking the one rule you can: the rule of law. And the graphics make you feel as though you're really doing it, except you know you aren't.
Which means this isn't just escapism; it's the ultimate escapism, from the upstanding-citizen figure that most of us try to be. It "can really help to douse the irritation that a day of grueling office work affords," says Chris Green, 23, an avid player and computer programmer from York, England. "Some people play squash after work," he says. "I just squash pedestrians."
From the joystick in Grand Theft Auto 3, you control a virtual bank robber, white male, brown hair, seen from a third-person perspective. The game guides him to a variety of mob-boss types, who send him on "missions." But your proxy thug also can wander through the streets on his own, in a way that sets Grand Theft Auto 3 apart from other video games.
You have the freedom, in Liberty City, to go wherever you want and to be as good or as bad as you choose. You can hit people and hijack cars. You can commandeer a police car and run a vigilante operation or overtake an ambulance.
The world you roam is stunningly realistic, shadowy and gritty. When you drive beneath a streetlight, a pool of light reflects on your car. When you pass people on the sidewalk, you hear snippets of their conversation: "Damned foreigners." "Got any doughnuts?" If you jostle them, they glare at you.
Your actions have realistic consequences - to a point. If you drive into cars and buildings, your hood falls off and eventually your car bursts into flames. If you commit a very serious crime, the cops come after you. But if you're arrested, you simply lose your weapons. If you're killed, everything fades to white and you begin again.
In my maiden tour of Liberty City (which the gamemaker says has no connection to the Miami neighborhood notorious for the 1980 riots), I perform a couple of missions for a mobster named Louie. I find a guy who did Louie wrong and beat him up with a baseball bat. Then, I take off to explore the streets.
I walk around with my bat until I spot an old lady and decide to see what happens if I hit her. She falls down. A pool of blood forms around her. A police officer arrives. In a panic, I hit him repeatedly until he appears to be dead. More officers approach, and I'm busted. Game over.
Was it fun? I'm not sure "fun" is the right word, but in a strange way, playing Grand Theft Auto 3 was thrilling - the tiny burst of adrenaline when the officer approached, the odd sense of disjointedness when I realized I could truly do whatever I wanted. In Liberty City, you can give in to your worst instincts, your sickest curiosities. The most you'll see is a pool of virtual blood and a screen faded white.
Real gaming aficionados - the ones who play for hours at a time and refer to the game as "GTA3" - insist it isn't the violence that keeps them playing. It's the richness of the virtual world, the depth of the story lines, and the freedom to go "off-mission" and explore the virtual world seamlessly.
But it's hard to separate the mechanics of the game from the content. Devoted players insist there's nothing wrong with enjoying GTA3, but they also admit there's something pleasantly perverse about it. Jeremy Sonnet, 18, a student at Ohio's Franciscan University who signs his e-mails "God Bless," says the game is "so wrong and thrilling that I want to keep playing to push the limits. . . . Can I steal a fire truck? Can I get the army to hunt me down? . . . In this game the answers are, so surprisingly, `YES YOU CAN!' "
Supriya Gunda, 20, an Emerson College freshman, says GTA3 is more exciting than other shoot-em-ups. It's a "different kind of violence . . . because there's no real good intent to any of it."
Nearly everybody mentions that this is not a game for children - that its "Mature" rating should be obeyed. It doesn't always seem to work; I have a long instant-message conversation with a GTA3 player named Jean, who says he is a 13-year-old middle schooler in Union Park, Fla.
He's the sort of player who concerns Dr. David Perna, director of the Adolescent Anger Management Program at McLean Hospital in Belmont. There isn't much scientific research yet, Perna says, about the effects of interactive media on the brain. But there is ample anecdotal evidence that children don't always grasp the differences between fantasy and reality, he says - stories of kids who shoot their classmates and get confused when a real person doesn't get up again.
But what about adults? Most GTA3 players are students and professionals who presumably follow the law and know right from wrong. There was no uptick in violent street crime in the last few months, no spate of mayhem on the road or surge in muggings of the elderly. And the grown-up players say it's just that space between reality and fantasy that gives GTA3 its appeal.
"I think everybody, deep down, wants to be that criminal," says David Hightower, 18, an Iowa disc jockey who admitted to a thrill when his virtual self attacked an elderly woman.
If, indeed, we all have the imp inside us, this game gives us access to it, at a distance that's just safe enough. The question is whether that distance can, and will, shrink any further - or whether, in an odd way, the sick banality of GTA3 violence will be difficult to top. There's little doubt that video game scenarios will get even more extreme: Industry insiders are already buzzing about RockStar Games' next offering, in which your proxy character, a rioter inside a mob, will apparently be able to decapitate someone, pick up his head, and whack other people with it.
But that violence, as realistically as it might be depicted on a TV screen, still has a cartoonish feel to it. Somehow, it seems even worse to be roaming the streets, ramming into an elderly driver who's going too slow. Or hitting a pedestrian who gets in your way. Maybe with a bat. These are the things that, in some not-so-distant world, are more likely to come true.
For a gallery of 10 screenshots from the game, video reviews, game trailers, and related Web sites, visit www.boston.com/globe/ideas. Joanna Weiss can be reached at [email protected].
