A Grand Theft Auto Proposal

I was sitting in a faculty meeting about three months ago, stuck at a table full of teachers I didn’t know very well.  This wasn’t all that surprising; our administration had decided to do some kind of team-building exercise that morning, meaning we didn’t get to choose our own groups.  God forbid we be comfortable. 

So I was sitting there, making faces at my friends at another table because some things don’t change no matter how old you are, when I realized that the discussion at my table was getting heated.  I tuned back in, only to discover that they’re talking about the latest pep assembly theme. 

Well.  Talking is such a weak word.  Complaining is really more accurate, since the theme the students had chosen that year was Grand Pep Auto, reminiscent (and nearly copyright infringing) on the game. 

Everyone around me was pissed.  They were bitching about the same issues with the game that I’ve heard a million times before: that it advocates cop-killing, violence against women, committing crimes for prestige, and a million other things.  One teacher’s husband is a cop, and so she said she couldn’t with a clear conscience stay silent about the issue. 

Within days, it would go to my building principal, and within days, it would get changed to something more innocuous.  More sanitized.  More acceptable. 

And still none of them understood why I was chuckling as I listened to their argument. 

Grand Theft Auto is the Modest Proposal of our day, and yet no one seems to notice.  It’s as if I suggested we replace school lunches with babies, and instead of laughing, everyone started screaming. 

I just don’t get how no one else has figured it out.

Don’t get me wrong: I 100% realize that GTA = satire is not exactly a new thesis.  But having taught A Modest Proposal, and having witnessed countless discussions like the one above, I still cannot help but be surprised. 

I did not create this image, but fuck, it's funny. 

First: A Modest Proposal.  For years, I taught this pamphlet as part of Senior Literature, and every year, I passed it out and asked students to read it without any kind of preamble or explanation.   This goes against a lot of teaching wisdom – I should be giving them background information, connecting it to other stories we’ve read, making it relevant to them.  And I do, once we read. 

Doing all that BEFORE they read takes away all the fun. 

For some context (just in case you aren’t familiar with this text): Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal in the early 1700s as a reaction to the poverty crisis of the Irish under British rule.  In it, he suggested that the Irish should, quite simply, birth and raise and finally sell their children to the wealthy upper class in order to make money and work themselves out of poverty. 

The wealthy upper class would then eat the children as a tender, succulent supper.  Yum!

As you can imagine (I hope), this idea did not go over well.

Now, close to 300 years later, this overreaction is still the result I get from my students, and it’s hilarious.  They don’t realize it’s satire, at least not the majority of them.  Here and there, I get students who looked it up before they came to class, or students who walk in going, “Ms. E, he’s not serious, is he…?”  But far, far too many walk in asking why I made them read such an awful story, complaining about what a terrible human being Swift is, and (occasionally) wondering aloud what their parents would think if they told them what I had them read. 

Always, always, always hilarious. 

By the time the day’s lesson is over, most of them are persuaded.  It’s satire. Swift doesn’t really want us to eat babies.  They didn’t miss some important part of Irish/British history in their studies.  No worries. 

But there are always exceptions.  No matter how much we talk about fairy tale satire like Shrek, and sarcasm in writing like Dave Barry, Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris, etc., some students still walk out going, “What a messed up story.”  It won’t click – they aren’t abstract enough thinkers for this to work, and no matter what I do, some of them will stay that way. 

They then, in turn, grow up to become the teachers and parents and everyone else who doesn’t get what’s going on with Grand Theft Auto. 

This is really a shame, because what Rockstar Gaming has done with the GTA franchise is kind of amazing. 

This series is a satire, through and through. Many, many let’s players before me have analyzed the shit out of this, so I’m not going to rehash all the basics like Sprunk and eCola, the 'deliciously infectious' soda, or Lifeinvader, the social media platform of choice in-game, or anything else.  They've been done, and done well, before.

But there is so much more depth to this satire that just that we Americans are a bunch of over-caffeinated, sex-obsessed assholes.  (It’s terrifying to think that’s how people the world over think of us, isn’t it? *shudder*)

Think about the biggest complaints about GTA.  Cop killing.  Prostitute killing.  No consequences for committing crimes. All those things that, apparently, parents are terrified that little Johnny will start doing if they play this game, as if the world is just one tiny push away from descending into total chaos. 

Then again, we did put an oversized, racist Oompa Loompa into the nation's highest office. 

But the 2016 election aside, generally, America isn’t entirely abandoned to the darkness just yet. 

Parents, teachers, politicians, and many others, however, disagree. 

This is how GTA earned its terrifying reputation.  I understand there are certainly elements of GTA that are despicable, but to me that’s almost part of the hilarity.  Players can visit a prostitute, at times complete with cut scenes, pay her, and then kill her and take the money back.  That’s awful on the face of it, but the sheer absurdity of the exchange is hilarious.  That’s one of the most obvious tenets of satire – hyperbolic events in order to showcase their absurdity.  So it’s fitting, even if I cringe. 

But so much more of GTA is a commentary on what people are able to do, and get away with, in our culture. 

How many times have we as Americans seen men commit violence against women, and get away with it?  We need only think back to last year to the Stanford rapist, a man whose crime was absolutely heinous, and yet the judge was so concerned with the rapist’s future that he only received 6 months in prison – and only served 3. 

Not a word was spoken about how destroyed the victim’s life was.  The media instead often covered just how ‘ridiculous’ it was that such a promising star had fallen, most famously in Michael Miller’s apologist Washington Post article.

There is less difference between how players get to treat women in GTA and how real life men are allowed to treat women than we like to think.  Fewer repercussions in the real world than we want to think.  Fewer consequences. Less jail time.  More like GTA, really, and no one wants to say it. 

People around the country called out the rapist himself, his defensive father, the author of this article, the Washington Post itself.  The case and how it was handled changed rape and sexual assault laws in California, strengthening the wave of ‘yes means yes’ consent and sexual education rolling through college campuses across the country.  That's all positive, but it doesn't change the statistics of on-campus rapes, for example, or the mindset that if I'm wearing a short skirt, I'm asking for it. 

Hearing that that message is absurd needs to happen, and if GTA is the vehicle, so be it. 

How many times are cops attacked for how they respond to crises, whether it’s with too much or too little force, too many or too few officers, whatever the case might be?

I’m not talking about Ferguson, where there are still murky gray areas of what actually happened and how race played a role in the death of Michael Brown.  I’m talking about cases like that of a 17-year Chicago PD veteran who did not shoot the man who eventually beat her into unconsciousness for fear of media backlash. 

GTA, by allowing players to beat up, shoot, set fire to, what have you, the cops in the game are pointing out just how absurd it is that cops really do get treated like this.  It may not be the norm, of course, but when it’s plastered across the news, it certainly feels that way. 

The issue of police violence inevitably leads into issues of racial stereotyping, and here, GTA deals frankly with just how ridiculously prejudiced our culture is. 

How many times have young black men been stereotyped as part of gangster culture?  That they are shitty human beings, simply for wearing a hoodie? 

Trayvon Martin springs to mind, as does Michael Brown and an unfortunately large number of others attacked or killed in recent years.  Hoodies routinely get banned in schools for the reputation they carry. 

And I certainly hope I don't need to break down institutional racism in Los Angeles (or anywhere else in the country) to prove that we as Americans are still prejudiced to a terrifying degree.

How we are still arguing that somehow GTA is the problem in the face of the rest of America is beyond me. 

All these satirical takes on real American issues aside (as if we can just forget them that easily), critics often forget that the game itself is not advocating any of these crimes.  There are in-game penalties for killing citizens at random, for shooting hookers, for running over cops.  Hell, you attract the attention of the police by running red lights, something I know for a fact doesn’t always happen in the real world.

The game doesn’t want players to be assholes – it wants them to follow the story, like all games.  The fact that they’ve built a world where the player can interact with 100% of their surroundings is testament to how much time and effort the developers put in, not that the game should be condemned. 

Rockstar is hoping, perhaps even praying, that their players have at least some morals guiding their decisions.  While I don’t know for sure, I have to suspect that when they first started getting massacred in reviews for being able to murder people at random, someone in their development team was surprised.  Of course, the assumption that people have scruples is time and time again proven incorrect – like the numerous stories of tourists carving their initials into historical icons like the Colosseum or the Luxor Temple in Egypt – but we can hope. 

one of my favorite satirical billboard in the game

Let me also remind you: GTA is not a game for kids. 

I feel like I shouldn’t have to say that, but all things considered, I absolutely have to.  My eleven and eight year old nephews have played GTA, for god’s sake, and then their mom complains that video games are too violent. No shit.

That’s an essay for another time though. 

Whenever this comes up, Bishop inevitably tells me this story from when he worked at Game Stop as a teenager:

A mom came into the store looking for a game for her young son.  Since this was the early 2000s, Bishop recommended Pokemon, a fun and popular game rated perfectly for her child, who was about 10.  The mom, I shit you not, said that she wouldn’t be buying Pokemon for her child because it was Satanic (and if you don’t believe me, just Google it; there is a TON of discussion out there about how some deeply religious people see those little Japanese monsters as demons.  Something about a satirical interview no one understood -- no surprise!)

So, possible demonic connections aside, she didn’t want to buy Pokemon for her kid.  Fine.  Did she instead go pick up Super Mario? Any of the Harry Potter games? Hell, even Lego Star Wars?

Nope.  She walked over to the felony-titled Grand Theft Auto and, ignoring the giant M FOR MATURE label, proclaimed it perfect. 

Bishop also never fails to finish this tale with how pissed this woman was when she tried to return it later, as if her poor parenting was somehow Game Stop’s fault. 

The warning labels are there for a reason, people. 

10-year-olds are not supposed to be playing Grand Theft Auto, or Call of Duty, or Wolfenstein, and the game developers know it.  That's why the ESRB rating system exists -- to help parents make informed decisions about the content of games they let their children play.

Frankly, the whole notion of someone seeing the M rating, shrugging, then being pissy that the game was full of drugs and violence, is as hilariously absurd as reading a 1700s pamphlet and legitimately thinking that the author wants you to eat a boiled toddler for dinner. 

Rockstar doesn't want you to kill hookers in real life!

No one wants a kid under 17-18 to be playing Grand Theft Auto!

Swift doesn't want us to eat babies!

But somewhere, somehow, we’ve missed the point, and GTA has suffered for it.