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.

I don't worry about this too much simply because of media-effects research, which basically says that media can increase the probability that someone does something they are inclined to do but has almost no ability to make most folks do something they are not inclined to do.

It's Art, after All

Eventually the discussion always comes to the big point. GTA is art, like it or not--it may or may not be great art; only time determines this. But, it needs the same protection and respect as DuChamp's Urinal, Picasso's Guernica, Serrano's Piss Christ, and the Garbage Pail Kid cards. Years ago there was a fad called the Garbage Pail Kid cards which were disgusting gross-out cards aimed at little boys who loved disgusting gross-outs. The odd thing about the Garbage Pail Kids was that the idea was developed by Art Spiegleman, a comic book artist who eventually went on to take his disgusting talent and give us Maus, the retelling of the Holocaust with comic versions of cats and mice. Maus won a Pulitzer prize. We can't have it both ways. We can't protect only some speech and some words and some images and some games. Art tells us who we are and what are capable of. Unfortunately, GTA does this well, which is what I think scares us.

GTA seems to encourage my students to consider why the game is successful as a game, and it also forces them to make decisions as to whether they would spend time building something like GTA. This is what teaching is all about. I can't get this discussion out of Pajama Sam, I can't get this discussion out of Rockett, I can't get this discussion out of the Sims or Black & White. I can get this discussion out of GTA. For that I am thankful.

Scared Straight?

Thinking about GTA and my students making decisions as players and designers working in the world caused me to think back to grade school decades ago. I went to Catholic school in Philadelphia. My teachers were nuns, and for the most part they were obsessed with the sins we might commit. The consensus seemed to be that they could scare us into being good. Promising us an eternity of fire and brimstone worked pretty well until about sixth grade, at which time the hormones kicked in and some things seemed worth the risk (mostly anything having to do with sex). I guess the nuns knew we had passed to another level, so at that point, they brought out the heavy hitter: Father Ellwood E. Kieser.

Father Kieser founded Paulist Productions in 1968 to produce life-enriching programming and preach the gospel. Father Kieser created a weekly anthology series called Insight, which the nuns showed us every Friday around 2:30 p.m., just before school got out for the weekend. I think they thought of Insight as a potential weekend inoculation against sin. For me, I waited for Insight every week. It was the highlight of my week. It was excellent television with a message, but the message never seemed too heavy-handed and Father Kieser never seemed to tell me what to think so much as to suggest points of view. Watching Insight made me feel as if I had a choice in decisions that would affect my future.

I can imagine a Father Kieser in the world today. I imagine that he would look on GTA and see possibilities to produce life-enriching programming and preach the gospel in ways never imagined by creating consequential situations where choices are made which are fun, ethical, and moral. I have no illusion that any of the folks who designed GTA gave much thought to real morality--but I don't think they should have. They created a fun, tightly modeled world in which kids love to play.

I think it is important that folks who work with kids understand the games which are attractive to them and why they are attractive to them so that they can use these games in ways Father Kieser might have done for similar impact. GTA is rated an adult game just as many movies are rated as adult material. We know kids see adult movies, and we know kids play adult games. It is part of a kid becoming an adult, trying to jump the turnstile as early as possible; we have all done it. I work with adults, so I can bring the games into my classrooms and not get into trouble--but most of you cannot do this (otherwise, I'd be reading about you in USA Today). I think it is reasonable to talk about the media your kids are playing with. They want to talk about their media, and they can talk deeply about this media and what it means to them. This is important. As they get older the next level of discussion is when they start to design and build, and the discussion will then turn to what they as human beings, as artists, want to bring into the world and leave for their children. The potential is there--but only if you, the teacher, are willing to play and learn. Can't just criticize the book jacket.

"A communication system is totally neutral. It has no conscience, no principle, no morality. It has only a history. It will broadcast filth or inspiration with equal facility. It will speak the truth as lightly as it will speak falsehood. It is, in sum, no more, no less than the men and women who use it."

--Edward R. Murrow of CBS Broadcasting

Resources

Bogenn, Tim. Grand Theft Auto 3 Official Strategy Guide. (Brady Games, 2001). See: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/074400098X /qid=1038705047/sr=22/ref=sr_2_2/002-7163478-7764024.

Gillespie, Thom. "My Lunch with Annie Lang: Children, Violence, Imitation (and a darned good house salad)," Cafe TECHNOS interview. TECHNOS Quarterly (Summer 2000). See: http://www.indiana.edu/~slizzard/lunch/.

Kelso, Margaret Thomas, Peter Weyhrauch, and Joseph Bates. "Dramatic Presence," Technical Report CMU-CS-92-195, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (December 1992). This paper originally appeared in PRESENCE: The Journal of Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, Vol. 2, No. 1, MIT Press. See: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/web/papers.html.

Singhal, Arvind, and Everett M. Rogers. Entertainment-Education: A Communication Strategy for Social Change. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999). ISBN 0-8058-3235-1. See: http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=137464514.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History/Here My Troubles Began/Boxed. (Pantheon, 1993). See: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679748407/qid=1038705965/sr=2-1/ ref=sr_2_1/002-7163478-7764024.

Wayne's Garbage Pail Kid References: See http://www.wgpkr.com/GPK/.

* MIME = Masters in Immersive Mediated Environments

[section] Alternate spelling = "kewl"

# Father Kieser eventually produced the movie Romaro, which was nominated for an Academy award.

Thom Gillespie, the Maitre d'Igital of the Cafe TECHNOS, has written a quarterly column for TECHNOS since 1998. The long versions of his articles are available online at http://www.indiana.edu/~slizzard. Thom is also a professor of telecommunications and director of the Masters in Immersive Mediated Environments program at Indiana University in Bloomington.

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