Grand Theft Auto, the video game everyone loves to hate, allows ethics and morality lessons - Cafe Technos

"Grand Theft Auto III takes place in Liberty City--a completely unique universe with its own laws, standards, ethics, and morals (or lack thereof). There are dozens of ways to take out the inhabitants: punches, kicks, head butts, baseball bats, handguns, Uzis, AK-47s, shotguns, M-16s, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, Molotov cocktails, and flame throwers.... Let the crime wave begin!"

--from Page 4 of Grand Theft Auto III Official Strategy Guide

Sound like fun? Your kids think this video game is a blast. You might, too, if you considered the teaching opportunities it presents.

If you haven't heard about Grand Theft Auto, let me tell you about it. GTA, as it's affectionately known by its users, is the latest thing to send our kids and society in general to hell in a handbasket. We have been warned about watching out for everything from the written word, to the novel, to film, to comics, to rock music, TV, rap music, the Internet, and a steady stream of video games which are corrupting minds and morals at an ever-increasing pace. Before it was Doom and Quake; now it is GTA. I beg to differ.

I teach game design at Indiana University in the MIME (*) program, so I actually "have" to study games. I have a research budget, some of which I use to buy Play Stations and lots of games. I also buy strategy guides because these games are in reality too difficult for a guy with a Ph.D. in information science from the University of California at Berkeley to figure out in a normal time frame, like say, a school term. This term I have been spending a lot of time trying to understand how GTA is corrupting minds and morals. I haven't figured out the minds-and-morals thing yet, but I have discovered that there are some amazing areas where using GTA in my university classroom with the students is a wildly enlightening experience for both myself and the kids.

GTA: A Wonderful Tool for Teaching Ethics and Morality

The most recent edition of GTA, Vice, sold close to 1.4 million units in two days at 50 dollars a pop, which means two things: 1) this is a really big industry, and 2) most of the kids I normally meet in a classroom are more likely to have played GTA than they are to have watched The Sopranos or Buffy on TV. Like rock music in the '60s and '70s, the game industry is driving culture at the moment.

Because so many kids have played GTA, it is really easy to get a runaway conversation going in class with little prompting from me other than a question such as: "So, what do you think of GTA?"

Remember, I teach game designers, so what they don't reply with is "cool"--no matter how you spell the word. The usual response is that the game is terrible in a moral sense. And, then the class explodes in amazing directions.

Some folks will point out that the alleged violence is virtual and not real and probably a great improvement on spectator violence of the past, such as picnic outings to witness hangings, stonings, beheadings, various battles during the Civil War in the United States, and crucifixions, which were actually a regular occurrence in the days of Christ. And someone usually points out that the Coliseum, that great tourist destination in Rome, was the sight of regular real mayhem witnessed and cheered for by many. So, maybe the virtual violence of GTA and Doom and Quake serves a survival need in human beings. Maybe this thirst for blood is slaked by the game. This sort of discussion tends to bring a moment of reflection--and then inevitably someone will launch into the whole aspect of censorship.

The students look at GTA and other games and talk about violence in the Last Exit to Brooklyn, the Dutch film The Vanishing, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Rashomon, where evil and lies succeed and thrive just as they do in the real world. The discussion moves to the difference that GTA is a game, and therefore the audience disappears and the interactor appears--and this makes us all nervous: pseudo consequential decision making. After all, GTA is a game where you play within a crime wave, most of which you are creating.

A Little Too Clockwork Orange-ish

Then the discussion hones onto the real hot-button issue of GTA, the fact that you can hire a prostitute to have sex with you--depicted by a rocking car you have entered--and after the deed has been done, you can kill the prostitute and take her money. This is obviously a really bad thing to do, and as far as I can determine, none of my students has gone out and actually done such a thing in real life, but just the idea of such an event mortifies most.

The discussion will wander on ... and then someone brings up the fact that as far as anyone can determine, this specific action was not hard wired into the game but may be an emergent action which combines two rules of Liberty City: you can have sex with prostitutes, and you can kill and rob anyone in Liberty City. Therefore, after having sex with a prostitute, you can kill and rob her and get your money back. The idea of this action freezes most students no matter what the discussion, but they do note that in context of the logic of Liberty City--with "its own laws, standards, ethics, and morals (or lack thereof)"--it makes sense. You are in a crime wave; anyone in Liberty City can be robbed, beaten, or killed; cars can be hijacked and crashed into walls or people. But if you hit someone, you will be hit back. If you hit a streetwalker, she will hit you back, and if you are in the Red Light district, all the streetwalkers will gang up on you until you run away or they kill you. If you crash a car into enough objects or overturn the car, it will explode and your character will die. There is a definite consequence to actions in GTA. But, still, killing and robbing prostitutes is a little too Clockwork Orange-ish for most.