I've always been something of a Grand Theft Auto apologist.  This is in part, I'm sure, because GTAIII came out when I was a college sophomore, and before that we would play the original over our dorm's network.  Ironically, or perhaps not ironically, we played stolen copies of the game.  The long and short of the series is that, aside from being a technological marvel, it's a great deal of fun, which is where the cognitive dissonance arises.

You see, when I come to the defense of the series, my primary line of argument is that it's satire, a raunchy purple dildo that's been used to bludgeon all the problems inherent in the American way of life.  It's a great argument, with plenty of evidence to support it, as long as the audience sees it that way.  But we don't.  Walking down the streets of fake New York with a rocket launcher is, to call forth my sixteen-year-old self, fuckin' awesome.  In this way, the series is kind of like a more unwieldy version of Fight Club: the audience is too entranced by the violence to realize that the makers are presenting it as a stupid and deeply flawed way of life.

Grand Theft Auto IV, in many ways, works to change this.  By making everything more realistic, and by creating a main character that doesn't exactly revel in the life he leads, Rockstar shifted the dynamic for me as a player.  I found myself more concerned with staying in the bounds of acceptable behavior, because throwing a grenade into a busy intersection was no longer just good times.  I shot at tires instead of heads.  I took taxis home when I was drunk.  I was always sure to wear a helmet on a motorcycle.  Sure, I still stole a lot of people's property, but in the motherland, we call this a redistribution of wealth.  This, perhaps, is the game's greatest accomplishment: bringing a moral compass to the series.

But I wonder if it was just an accident.  Yes, there are individual components of the game that do (and have always) work as satire, and now there seems to be some measure of weight to the story and its consequences.  Jason Sudeikis' version of Rush Limbaugh was pretty brilliant, and maybe even important, for example.  Niko and Roman's relationship is compelling, even though I thought Roman was more than a little bit of an ass.  But underneath these trimmings there's still racism, sexism, and homophobia that seem more glorified than skewered.

I'll give you an example: there's a character, Bernie, who lived in Niko's homeland and is now living in America and openly gay.  Niko doesn't judge him, and actually rescues him from some guys who are beating him up just for being gay.  Now, this looks like a rather important moment where the game makes a clear stance on how it feels about homophobia.  The problem is that this is precluded by 2-3 minutes of following Bernie on his morning run watching for someone to harass him, which boils down to 2-3 minutes of "Hey, faggots sure run funny!"  The game invites you to laugh at the man and then tasks you with chasing down and killing the people who are tormenting him.  So what's the message?  I guess it depends on what you're willing to forgive, and which side you're already on.

Don't worry, though.  I laughed at Bernie too.







(This is just an aside, but if you feel anything besides embarrassment at going to a fake strip club and getting a fake lap dance, then maybe you're not as much of a grown up as you thought)