Grand Theft Auto: The Violence

Does Grand Theft Auto really affect kids? Are today's kids going to be jacking cars to do drivebys for corrupt cops tomorrow? Of course not; that's so 90's (before the games even came out).

Besides, in my day, the biggest game was Pacman. Did my whole generation end up eating pills and running around a dark room to a repetitive beat?

Hmmm... Bad argument. Let's try a different tack.

First, kids aren't supposed to be playing these games.

Pacman was pretty much for everyone, except the small number of people who were over 25 when it came out and therefore never got it. But there were games clearly intended for different markets by the time I was a teenager.

You wouldn't want a 6-year-old to face the trauma of real combat in the form of wireframe tanks approaching over a 2D landscape. And it takes a certain amount of maturity to face up to the awesome responsibility of losing at Defender and failing the last of the humanoids. And the demonic talking space station Sinistar would scare the crap out of any young kid other than maybe Damien the Omen.

On the other hand, the Strawberry Shortcake game was torture to anyone in double-digit ages.

And then there was Master Blaster, a game for the Apple ][ that simulated masturbation, which was obviously too mature for anyone under 18 and far too immature for anyone old enough to masturbate for real.

Now we have this rating system, brought to you by the Clinton/Gore/Lieberman families (you know, the ones who were going to save us from the Bush family fascism). I'm not sure I like the rating system, but it's the same people who pushed for it who are now attacking game companies that follow it.

RockStar claimed that GTA:SA was Mature, and it is. It has lots of violence, tons of antisocial content, light sexual content, and the kind of social satire that nobody really enjoys until they're in college (and not for long after).

The M rating, for Mature, means that if you're not an adult, you have to get your parents to buy it for you. Sort of like R for movies, but with much more detail. There's no way your parents could buy you GTA:SA without knowing what it was about. Besides, the name ought to have been a clue.

Second, if any of these governmental wives had played any of the GTA3 series, they might have liked the messages. Bad guys screw each other over and always lose in the end. Drugs kill. When you spray a room with a Tec-9 it's really easy to accidentally kill your friends. The good cops hate the bad ones. Chuck D is insane. You can make more money putting out fires than setting them (although you do have to steal a firetruck first).

The violence in the GTA3 series is less extreme, less graphic, and at the same time less realistic than you find in movies--and the guys who make those movies get to be governor of Minnesota or California, while the game developers are threatened with bodily harm by Congressmen.

And when is the Predator himself going to get to be governor instead of letting the minor characters get all the glory?