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REYNOLDS |
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More On Grand Theft Auto
Bad
Reasons for Me To Play
by John Mark Reynolds [author,
academic] 5/14/08
Bottom Line: I love gaming
and the best game of the year, based on reviews is Grand Theft Auto.
Since the game has a lot of tough content, it seemed worth thinking about
whether it was worth my time and money.
I decide that I could not
play and did
so publicly in part hoping that gamers could help me see what was good
about the game. The results have not been promising for my chances to play
the game.
Argument:
If you like gaming, and
I like gaming, then Grand Theft Auto looks promising. It is well
made, stretches the virtual reality envelope, and is by all accounts fun.
Fun is good.
Contributor
John Mark Reynolds
John
Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of
the Torrey Honors Institute and Associate Professor
of Philosophy at Biola University.His
personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and
his blog can be found at http://scriptoriumdaily.com.
[go to Reynolds index] |
But, the game has a “virtual
character” engage in behavior that stretches (or at least tests) the
boundaries of mainstream gaming. As games become more realistic, American
culture is engaged is a social experiment to see what the boundaries are
between entertainment and reality.
We don’t know what
will come of such an experiment, but we are going to find out. We pretty
much know violent media is bad for the soul. This is not in dispute
in psychology.
Really everyone should
read this article before commenting on the issue.
The choice facing me was
simpler: I have one soul and a limited amount of entertainment time. What
should I do with both?
I decided that Grand Theft
Auto was morally objectionable and published my reasoning. I invited criticism
and I got it. One board where the essay was posted is here. My
quotations are drawn from the board since the responses were typical, better
written than most, in the public domain, and profanity free.
Here are the defenses of
the game or criticisms of my post, followed by my comments.
The Chill Out Response
You can’t reason
people out of a position that they didn’t use reason to get into
in the first place.
This is a version of the “chill
out” response to my post. Why take a game so seriously?
Of course, part of me agrees.
What is easy to think about (and quick) takes time to write down, qualify,
and then for you to read. Why bother?
First, I am thinking this
through for myself. I do want to be reasonable and I don’t want to
adopt positions that when subject to reason collapse. That seems very dangerous.
Second, I often come to
a position (”I want ice cream.”) without using reason (Mmmmmm.
. . . ) and then talk myself out of it (calories . . .), so it seems false
to say that you cannot reason at least some people out of decisions based
on non-reason.
Third, I am going to spend
scores of hours of my time playing the game, if I play it. Thinking about
something in which I will have some serious money (given my entertainment
budget) and even more serious time (given how little free time I have) is
important. My entertainment choices have impacted me for good (the decision
to play sports in high school) and bad over time.
Just because a thing is “for
fun” does not mean all the consequences are fun any more than saying “I
was just joking” makes everything I say acceptable.
Here is a version of this:
I think you are WAY over-analyzing
this.
If you’re uncomfortable
playing the game, don’t play it.
It’s not exactly one
of the great philosophical questions of this Age.
Well, no. I have to think
about those for a living. It requires much more than a couple of pages of
blogging to make a decision about big ethical issues, religion, or the meaning
of life.
Assuming that the person
making this comment gives those questions the time they deserve, what is
his hurry? Millions of people are spending millions of dollars and hours
of their time playing a game that is very violent. What will come of it?
Psychological studies don’t
look promising.
Shouldn’t we think
about things we do?
The “Elvis
Was Shocking Once Too” Response
The other typical comment
I received was to dismiss concerns as typical cultural fears that never amount
to anything. Elvis is the most frequently cited case of fears of decadence
that amounted to nothing.
Let’s assume that
these fears were overblown. Some fears after all. On the other hand, some
fears are not overblown.
Which is it in this case?
Unless we know there are
no wolves, the fact that someone once cried wolf when there was no wolf does
not mean someone else is doing so now. Let’s get beyond this kind of
facile response:
All those ghosts I ate
playing Pac Man…I’m so ashamed!!!
A comparison of one cartoon
character eating another cartoon character (neither looking anything like
a real object) is surely different than highly realistic player characters
beating (and being rewarded for beating) other characters, stealing (and
being rewarded for stealing), and other unsavory actions. The cartoon sounds
of Pac-Men are very different than the realistic sounds of Grand Theft
Auto.
Sadly, it appears that
some level of cartoon violence may also be bad for a person.
The data may suggest
that my standards are too libertine!
I am assuming there
is some way around such data (though I don’t see what) . . . and
the evidence that violence in virtual reality is not good for even adults.
That is a very, very generous assumption to those who would play GTA (including
me!), but we should note that it may not be warranted.
Suppose (as a not foolish
hypothesis) that at some point virtual violence has some negative effects
(whatever they are) on gamers. Evidence seems to suggest that this may be
true. Surely, our concerns about Grand Theft Auto would be much
greater than about Pac-Man style games!
The response also ignores
the fact that in the pornography and crudity of the game are not any more “unreal” than
any other porn or crudity.
For what its worth I
played one of the earlier GTA vehicles (so to speak). I enjoyed the missions
as a driving challenge, and really enjoyed driving around to the sounds
of “Speed Demon” and “Take it to the Limit”. I didn’t notice any dark side
to the game, though its possible I wasn’t paying attention.
Maybe the later GTAs
are worse, but games just don’t get made over a certain rating as WalMart
won’t sell them. I would guess that the game is going to be ‘cleaner’ than
you might expect from the advertising and the hype.
This response reminds me
of the “I don’t listen to the words, I just listen to the music” argument.
If a singer calls women disgusting names and celebrates racist rhetoric,
then my ability “not to notice” disturbs me more than it encourages
me. The same thing would be true if I could participate in a game that treats
realistic looking people as objects, is filled with crudity, but could screen
it all out to enjoy the driving simulator.
At what point have I trained
myself to detach what I am hearing and seeing from self? Is that a good thing
to learn?
That, of course, is a question
each individual must decide.
Here is a another version
of the same response with an important addition:
Wow - if you have the
kind of time to write all that stuff you must have lots of time to play
video games.
I have shot down over
10,000 aircraft in various air combat simulations. Some went down with
no parachute so we gotta assune they died. Does all that killing mean I
am a bad person?
No, of course not. However,
I do question whether pretending for hours at a time to be an allied fighter
pilot in World War II is morally the same as pretending to be a street thug.
Killing in combat seems morally different from killing in a robbery after
all.
The back story does make
a difference. A book that celebrates Nazi violence may be no more “violent” than
one that condemns it, but the first is wicked and the second is not. Whether
I should take the time to read a wicked book will depend on my circumstances.
I cannot see intentionally
pretending to be wicked for “fun.” Surely I could find better
things to do with my time?
The usual response is that
I must have a great deal of free time to spend this long on a game, but the
time spent writing this post (twenty minutes or so) would hardly get me past
the first stages of a game like Grand Theft Auto.
The “It is a Great Game, so It Must Be Good to Play It” Response
This might work if I were
a game reviewer or in the industry in some way.
However, the fact that
a thing is well made or well done does not mean it is morally good. Achilles
was an excellent fighter, but not a good person.
The Game Teaches
Me About Evil Response
The best reply (by far)
I have received runs like this one:
I used the game to teach
my kids about the realities of crime.
See, it’s easy to make
a quick buck doing this two-bit crime, but watch.. If you want to get out
of the trouble that two-bit crime caused you, you will now have to kill
Mr. Police officer. Uh, oh, now you have to kill more. NOW YOU HAVE LOTS
of COPS after you, and look they aren’t arresting you they are shooting
to kill. That’s the way it works kids. Crime pays, it pays in more trouble
than you want to deal with.
I can’t possibly be the
only person who has done this.
The problem is that the
behavior of the criminals, cops, and by standers in the game is unrealistic
and so not very useful for a lesson.
To give two examples:
The urban landscape is
inauthentic.
It is very easy to escape
the cops (compared to real life). After all here in LA we know that in real
life car chases rarely (never?) end in the escape of the con.
The game presents a false
image of evil by making it more attractive than it is as well. Anybody who
has worked with street people knows this is the case.
Surely there are better
means of teaching these lessons? While junior is supposedly learning that “crime
does not pay,” he is also being exposed to crudity, porn, and simulated
violence.
Junior also learns that “wining” consists
of defeating the good guys.
I will admit that I could
learn about a very artificial form of evil this way, but I have never found
that learning about evil is hard or takes me hours of time. It is much more
difficult to learn to be high minded than to recognize vice.
The “We Have
Always Had Crude Entertainment Defense”
Here is a typical version
of this argument:
The same England that
produced Shakespeare also produced John Ford and elevated bear-baiting
to royal sport. And her Golden Age was just around the corner.
Well, yes, but bear-baiting
is not why we remember it is a “golden age.” It is true that
some people have always chosen debased forms of entertainment, but that does
not mean we should rush to join them.
I think it is a good thing
that we no longer find (most of us) bear-baiting amusing. I doubt that a
taste for it produced one line of Milton.
“It Does
Not Harm Me” Response
The personal testimonials
are more persuasive at first glance. Here is one:
Personally — I don’t
buy it. I am an occasional video-game player, and though I have not played
GTA … I have played some violent games with definite adult content
(God of War, for instance — a game that I cannot recommend highly enough).
I am a conservative, a Christian, etc., and I just don’t buy that this
particular video game (due to crudity, lust, whatever) is much of a concern
for an adult mind. Children are a different situation entirely.
One should notice that
there is no argument here. It does not deal with objections. It just reports “no
harm here.”
O.K.
I will believe him for
the sake of argument and because I have no reason to doubt him.
I don’t want to be
the kind of person who is not offended by mindless crudity. I don’t
want to see images of women being beaten for fun. The fact that show images
do not horrify me is too bad.
But perhaps we have different
goals . . .
The writer continues:
The analogous situation,
to me, would be movies. I watch relatively violent movies, where foul language
is fairly common, and occasional nudity/lust is certainly not unheard of.
Among my favorite movies of late is The Departed — the language is consistently
objectionable, and the movie is a general bloodbath … but, like GTA,
it is a genuinely good movie. Gladiator, Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan,
300 and The Patriot were all bloodbaths. All are still entirely worth seeing.
Despite my movie preferences, I remain the strong Christian conservative
I was before viewing them.
I simply don’t buy that
people of otherwise strong morality can be unwantingly corrupted by movies,
video games, or even the occasional adult feature (which my wife and I
have been known to very occasionally partake).
Weak moral conviction
or weak marriages might be succeptible — truly strong values are likely
not. Like money, “corrupting influences” do not destroy morality in men — they
may simply expose deficiencies that were always there.
This person seems to believe
that “strong morality” only consists in what one does . . . and
that mental activity is not activity with moral content. Evidently, despite
being a Christian, he disagrees with Our Lord about this. Jesus points out
that anger and lust in the heart are (for the person angry or lusting) as
damaging as anger or lust acted out.
Surely in the case of anger
and bitterness, we know this is true. What not assume it is true of lust?
I understand the writer’s desires, but not his confidence. Given how
difficult it is to be good or even civilized, it seems morally reckless to
toy mentally with ideas and then assume one can simply abandon them.
The writer can be married
any way he likes. In my case, my goal is for a deep intimacy shared with
no other person than my wife. We may not achieve it, but when we fell in
love we vowed to try to give all to each other. I include my mind in that.
Of course, I often fail.
Sometimes I failed intentionally and justified it, but doing so fell short
of my deepest desires. The writer has chosen a different way. Good luck to
him.
He should know that he
cannot have both this deepest intimacy (cleaving mentally only to the beloved)
and intentionally break those bonds.
As for the film examples.
. . I dealt with this in my original post. I am no prude.
There are good reasons
to watch great films as art. Great films may show evil as evil and so disturb
our complacency. Nobody has yet effectively argued that Grand Theft Auto has
a moral center or that it is great art.
It is a great game (by
today’s standards), but the script (of parts I have seen) is hackneyed
and the acting very, very marginal. It only looks good by the very low standards
of games.
The final response
I often get is “You Hate Games Any Way or You Are Judging Me, Fascist”
Here is one post more thoughtful
than most along this line:
I scrolled about half
way down and read all the negativity about games and such, but I’ll comment
anyway…
GTA is a riot… All
of them… I play them now that I have won them all, just to see the
extreme depths of the games program.
Coming from the era of
pac man and space invaders, and then picking up a game where you can steal
cars, do drive by’s, hit jumps and do barrel rolls in cars and trucks,
is cool. Am I now a mind full of mush because of it? No. I ain’t no different
than before I picked up a PS2 controller.
Well, years later one would
hope you would be. Supposing it has not made you more tolerant of crudity,
then what could you have done with the entertainment time you spent of GTA?
Are you as mentally developed
as you could have been?
A failure to degenerate
is faint praise, since it could have been bought by a failure to advance.
Are you growing into real
adult entertainment? Are your choices in entertainment good for you and not
just “not causing you to kill people?”
The writer continues:
For all the naysayers
around here that say this is “Bad for someone” is down right silly…
You don’t wanna play
video games, don’t play. Although this author set him self up as first
person, he is still sending a message. A message that I for one think is
a waste of time…
Why is it silly? Some studies
do show it is bad for you. What would persuade you? If you “wanna play” something,
does that make it good?
I am sending a message:
it is wrong for me to play. It looks like it would be a bad idea for others.
What is wrong with the argument?
My fear is that time spent
of GTA has been time not spent reading a good book or learning about arguments.
You have the right to do as you please and I would not take that right away.
Just as you have the right
to say I am wasting my time and am wrong, so I have the right to say your
behavior in playing this game may be harmful to your soul.
The difference is that
I have given reasons for my point of view and you have given none.
The fear is apparently
that if I think a person wrong, I will want to keep them from playing. Read
the following:
I think you are WAY
over-analyzing this. If you’re uncomfortable playing the game, don’t play
it. It’s not exactly one of the great philosophical questions of this Age.
Ah, but the object is
to over-analyze, find it guilty, then work to eradicate it completely,
because if someone who’s got the fear o’ God in him can be
led astray by a game, can we possibly take a chance with those who didn’t
have a good Bible teacher?
IOW, we’ve got
people who don’t trust themselves to make good decisions, so they
can’t trust anyone else to do the same.
You have the freedom to
play this game. You should have that freedom.
I do not base that on my “trust” for
you, but on my view of the role of government.
My “trust” for
you has nothing to do with whether you should do what you have a right to
do. I don’t think adultery should be illegal, but also don’t
think anybody should do it.
For some reason in our
culture, if it is “entertainment” we assume it cannot hurt anyone.
Surely another assumption
is that if the harm is not obvious or immediate (killing someone), then it
does not exist. We all know that some things hurt us, but do not manifest
the harm until later and not directly.
The fact that one cannot
see that harm the next day does not mean it is not there.
Apparently, the fact that
this is “escapist entertainment” means that any worry about it
is like worrying about Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Such people seem to think
that any form of “virtual entertainment” is harmless to adults
(assuming they are normal to begin with), but this seems obviously false
given the psychological data.
My fear is that like too
much of the culture, I too will justify what I want to do in the name of “fun.”
Ritual Disclaimers:
*(Not all unhelpful mental
dispositions are or should be illegal so law is a bad way to judge whether
a thing is good for me. Not all unhelpful mental dispositions are even “sinful” in
and of themselves. What might provoke righteous indignation in one person
might provoke snobbery or self-righteousness in me. It is of course easy
to kid oneself.)
**(Important Disclaimer
I: My thoughts are based on reviews of the game. I have not played it. That
limits my ability to comment on the game and opens up the real possibility
I am missing something “good” about it. Since however reviews of the games
seem to agree on the content relevant to this review, I feel justified in
writing it. I am open to emails that suggest I should reconsider this decision.
***(I am not in favor of
censorship. People should have the ability to make the game, but should also
consider whether they should. I have the right to worry about the impact
of playing on self and on my culture. I don’t favor banning the game or access
to the game for adults.
I do think adults should
be able to discuss whether playing a game is good for them without screams
of outrage. Most gamer magazines never seriously engage these questions.) ExileStreet
copyright
2008 John Mark Reynolds
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