Want to know how successful Grand Theft Auto is, as a series? It inspires a couple thousand words about the video game industry and how it relates to politics because another version of it is imminent. While it's not explicitly stated as such, GTA 4's imminent release was most assuredly on the mind of Mitch Krpata when he wrote this piece in the Boston Phoenix last Thursday (Disclosure: my wife is a freelance contributor to the Phoenix). Krpata, who ordinarily gets one page per week to talk about a single game, managed to get a three-page spread about all the controversies that video gaming runs into, and the responsibility of the video game industry in regards to them.
It took me a good time to digest the piece because, to be perfectly blunt, it's a rambling mess. If you've ever wanted to hit me on fact-checking (and I have the emails to prove how often you do), you're going to cry in pain over this article. There are plenty of issues with that in the article, but they essentially come down to one major mistake that leads it astray in many cases it all too easily conflates the video game industry and the video game community.
Now, I'll admit that the two have a much closer relationship than most industries do with their hardcore fans (you think Paramount is concerned about movie snobs the way Capcom is about gamers? Me neither). But there has to come a certain point in which you differentiate the actions of the fan versus the actions of the industry. When Krpata seems to blame gamers for the Hot Coffee scene (when the lion's share of the blame has to go to Rockstar), you know that something's way off.
I think the clearest way of showing how off-base Krpata comes off is in his discussion of Jack Thompson's "Modest Proposal" the one where Thompson challenged companies to make a game involving the murder of a thinly-veiled version of Take Two Interactive and its then-president. We all know about how quite a few games, of various quality, were made to meet that challenge, and Krpata rips into the industry, saying that Thompson should have been left to dry on that one. Here's the thing: the industry did completely ignore the challenge. That was all the video gamers, amateurs who wanted to code something that they hoped would meet the challenge. I think it's ridiculous to call out Sony, Microsoft, et al. for what fans did.
Not only that, but Krpata completely ignores why the fans did what they did. There are two reasons that I've heard quoted by the folks who actually made those games based on Thompson's premise. One, they wanted to see Thompson follow through with the promised reward - $10,000 to charity. Putting aside whether an amateur game could qualify (I say this because I don't have the time or energy to talk with Thompson about the subject again), you can at least appreciate the sentiment of getting money to charity. Heck, if Thompson called me up (fun fact he does have my phone number, though I can't guarantee he remembers it), and asked me to do something in exchange for a $10K charitable donation, let's say write a column trashing the violence of GTA4, I'd have a hard time saying no to that. But even beyond that, there is the simple argument that if we let him talk on his own, he wins the debate by default, and no gamer wants that.
I could sit and break down each such instance in the article, but I hardly want this response to be longer than the original. It's illustrative, though, of the fact that Krpata's errors and lack of focus ultimately result in his actual good points getting lost in the shuffle. The main theory behind his piece does warrant quite a bit of introspection: that video games are basically advocating antisocial ideas and not totally owning up to them.
Let's take Grand Theft Auto as an example. There are quite a few issues that the game brings up violence in general, poor treatment of women, glorification of criminal culture, and pretty much everything else people say will decay the morals of today's youth. And yeah, you'll see metric tons of writing about how deplorable the games are for that reason, or how cool they are for the same reason. If you were to believe much of the major coverage, you'd think that's all there is to the game.
But meanwhile, I've seen some rather thoughtful articles and snippets written about the game in general. I've seen a discussion about how the role of prostitutes in GTA is emblematic of society's treatment of women in modern society, and the psychological and sociological issues attendant. I've seen musings on the police/government in those games, about how the game's blasι attitude about crime (traffic laws don't in the games; theft is punished with a slap on the wrist, and so on) are indicative of a growing societal distrust of the police and a reflection of more blatant corruption in our government. I have even read a great piece on race relations through the prism of San Andreas, and how both suburban whites and urban blacks reacted to the game.
Sounds like I refute of the article's premise, right? Well, it's not. I've read all those pieces before. But for each one of those, I end up seeing a few dozen pieces on the GTA games about which cars are the best to jack, what stunts are the most fun, or the most amusing use of curse words in the game. In simpler terms, the signal-to-noise ratio for those articles is admittedly too shallow.
The last article I mention about San Andreas is worth extra mention, because Krpata's article is at its best when he walks right into the thorny issue of racism in gaming. It's kind of the elephant in the room, with many people not discussing it for various reasons. I can only give my own more often than not, it feels like it's not my place to discuss it. While I might be quite right in saying that, the result is a bit sobering I never get anyone to confront the issue. And I know I should confront it, since I think it's important and not discussed enough. But how to do it properly has tied me up for over five years, and I'm still not quite ready to do it yet. Admittedly, that's a failure on my part.
With all that said, though, I do find one thing from the article particularly ironic under the sub-feature "Not-so-great moments in video game controversy", he cites the infamous Super Columbine Massacre RPG, the independent game in which players actually take the role of Harris and Klebold on their killing spree. It's presented in the same vein as Custer's Revenge and Postal, but it completely ignores something rather vital. Namely, it doesn't mention at all that the creators of the game themselves made it as a commentary on violence in video gaming and to force a conversation about both the role of violence in gaming and video gaming's role as an influence on children. It was actually created to force the kind of conversation Krpata wants about video gaming and he's completely ignoring it.
Honestly, in all this, I feel pity for Krpata. I see what he's trying to do he wants to get gamers to have a legitimate discussion about what video games have wrought, the artistic meanings behind these images, and give video game discourse more respect. But when his writing is so unfocused that it's unclear if he even knows who to blame for various issues, and when a game deliberately made to invoke the kind of introspection Krpata wants is dismissed by him, I can't help but think that the article is a failure. Video gamers are going to feel like it's an error-filled attack. Non-gamers are going to think we're a bunch of reflexive children afraid to actually deal with the consequences of our hobby. And the good ideas that lay in this article like seeds are left alone, unable to really take root and get the attention they deserve.
