The Grand Theft Auto franchise has been a lightning rod of controversy since its first installment. There has always been a lot of hype about the content of the game; about how it is immoral, degenerate and violent. Now, we’d be lying to ourselves if we said that this was undeserved, the series deserves some of the criticism it gets. However, people on the outside looking in (Mostly senators, “activists” and upset mothers in this case) have a tendency to blow things out of proportion and fabricate misconceptions about things they do not fully understand. They could understand if they played the games, but I don’t think Hillary Clinton is going to be picking up a controller anytime soon, so instead, I'll just lay them out.
Now, to be fair, I’m not saying that Grand Theft Auto is a beacon of morality filled with role models. There's a lot of bad stuff in the games, but the way some people tell it you would think that the series was made by the devil himself to destroy society. I like Grand Theft Auto as much as the next guy, but frankly, that's just giving the games too much credit. Society is doing a grand job of destroying itself. The series only holds up a mirror to the ugliest parts of modern society, and some people don't like what they see. At first glance, it can be easy to believe the worst about the games, so let’s take a look at what everyone gets wrong about the Grand Theft Auto series.
15 Maybe They're Not All As Bad As You Think
Some claim that the characters in Grand Theft Auto, particularly the protagonists are awful human beings and immoral just for the fun of it. In fairness, this is partially true; the games deal with the bad side of society, and it’s often populated by bad people. But the characters in GTA are just that, characters. They aren't two-dimensional caricatures of criminal psychopaths; they are actualized fictional people reacting to the world around them.
Maybe they are seeking the American Dream and helping their family in the only way society allows them to like Nico Bellic or perhaps they are regretfully becoming the monster their world has forced them to be like CJ. The point is, these characters might not be good people, but they are people. A description that unfortunately applies to a lot of folks out there. Anyway, everyone knows the worst people in the game are the 14-year-olds you meet in GTA online.
14 Jet Packs Are Realistic, Right?
One problem a lot of critics of the GTA games is that it realistically depicts life and crime. Now, everyone has their own idea of realistic, but GTA hardly fits that description. Much of what goes on in the games is downright absurd.
Get hit by a train? No problem, a quick trip to the hospital will clear that up for a portion of your cash on hand. Income-based healthcare costs? In America? Now I know you're pulling my leg. Want to dress up like a golfer, buy an airport bus online and jump it off a ramp? Go for it. Steal a subway car while it's in transit? Fly a jetpack taken from an Area 51 analog? Protect Phil Collins from assassination? All doable in Grand Theft Auto. Real life, not so much.
13 Corrupting Today's Youth
Makes sense, right? Show a kid what it's like to be a violent criminal, let him play it out, and they become a violent criminal themselves, right? Wrong. Data shows that violent crime has been on a steady decline the past few decades, even as our video games get more violent. Some have gone so far as to point out that Grand Theft Auto, specifically, has a positive impact on reducing violent crime.
Experts don't agree on why this is happening. Maybe violent people can let out those urges in a video game, so they don't go out and do it themselves. Or, maybe sitting around all day playing video games just eats up so much time that there just aren't enough hours in the day to get around to all that violence and mayhem. Either way, the result is the same, GTA is bringing peace to the planet (kind of).
12 To Be Fair, You Do A Lot Of This
To the uninitiated, it may seem like all you do in Grand Theft Auto is assault people. Killing people is only a small, albeit important, part of GTA. At worst, GTA is a crime simulator wherein you pull off heists, chase and be chased, hijack and blackmail your way into a criminal empire.
Furthermore, anyone who says that all you do in the game is terrible things to other people clearly has never gotten a call from their cousin in the middle of a police chase in Liberty City inviting them to go bowling. The most recent iterations of GTA has players golfing, playing pool, stunt driving, skydiving and more. If Grand Theft Auto does teach us to be murderers, it must also be teaching us to be great at darts, tennis and yoga. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t do a downward dog (trust me, I just checked).
11 Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Shouldn't
An animals rights group got extremely upset at Rockstar, Grand Theft Auto's developer because they believed that GTA V encouraged players to harm animals thereby promoting animal cruelty. They even went so far as to demand a boycott of the game. All of this because Grand Theft Auto V allows players to run over animals and kick the odd cow or two.
To be clear, violence against animals is possible in the game, but it does not reward or encourage players to do so. The game depicts what actually happens when a car (or drop kick) hits an animal. It's even somewhat subdued, as the blood that usually accompanies animal collisions are not present in the game. Maybe the animal's rights group was hoping the game would be oddly devoid of animal life, or that animals would just be deathless monstrosities that are impervious to harm, like all the kids in Fallout.
10 Sorry, No LiLo For You
OK, this one is weird, and honestly, it's mostly just Lindsay who believes this is true, but the news story surrounding her and her Grand Theft Auto controversy has confused a lot of people. Ms. Lohan alleges that a character in Grand Theft Auto V, Lacey Jonas, was based on her and that Rockstar used her likeness in promotional material. She even took a picture of herself in the same outfit and posed as the promotional material in question to show the similarity (see above image).
Now if you're thinking, "That doesn't look much like her, and Lindsay Lohan doesn't have a patent on being a vapid, shallow starlet," then A: you're right, and B: the court agrees with you. They threw her case out, and she didn't get a dime. She did get a ton of publicity though, so, mission accomplished, Lindsay?
9 Size Doesn't Really Matter
This one is not so much for the outsiders, but for the video game players that bought into the hype. GTA V talked up the size of Los Santos, the city in which it takes place, all throughout its development. They bragged that it was bigger than all the other GTAs combined. And it was, kind of. Unfortunately, like yo mamma, just because it’s big it doesn’t mean it has substance.
As you can see in the above image, the map is huge, but it's mostly wilderness. The actual city part is comparatively tiny. Sure it's a technically impressive feat getting that much space into a game, but the hype was a bit overblown. There’s a lot of buildings, people and activity in GTA Vs map, but there’s a lot more nothing.
8 Not As Much Freedom As You Think
This one’s a similar to the last in that it’s more of something that people with an understanding of the game get wrong. As GTA is traditionally set in a “sandbox” type game where you can go anywhere and do anything, it is often lauded for the freedom it gives to its player. But what is freedom really? Subjective, but that’s not the point.
Some might say that true freedom requires choice. GTA gives you the choice of what to do next, but not a choice in how the story develops or the outcomes of storylines. They either happen, or they don't. For the most part, the player's decisions rarely matter in the game world. GTA V introduces some meaningful choices at the end, but all in all, there are far more illusions of choice in the franchise's history.
7 Some People Play It For The Story
With all the controversy around the more risky aspects of the GTA series, it can be easy to forget that each one has a storyline complete with arcs, character journeys and all the rest of that literary goodness. Grand Theft Auto often gets discounted as a brainless shooting and driving activity, but that isn’t fair to its writing team.
The Grand Theft Auto series delves deep into American pop culture and the worst parts of modern society. It uses biting satire and parody to explore themes like nihilism and misanthropy. It's up to each consumer to judge the quality of the game's story, but the point is that it's there. The story has to have some merit to it, the millions of people who buy the games don't play them for hours and hours of just gunning down nameless civilians (most don't anyway, I hope).
6 They're Not As Shallow As You Think
Like I said before, the game isn’t just about stealing and killing, but the things you do outside of those activities aren’t all banal like leisurely mini-games. The Grand Theft Auto games aren't just a mixture of intense violence and action with intermittent quick time events. There's a lot more to the character's actions. OK, there are a lot of quick time events, but let's look past those shall we?
The Grand Theft Auto games, particularly in the most recent installments, have the player working through many different aspects of the character’s lives. The player helps them make friends, find love, help strangers in need and deal with the demons of their past. Perhaps the GTA games were mindless shoot’em ups in the past, but recently they are starting to look more like The Sims with guns… and blackjack, and women of the night.
5 Morality Is Relevant
All right, back to the weirdos on the outside. Jack Thompson, a self-proclaimed activist and disbarred lawyer, decided to make it his life’s work to bring down violent video games, particularly Grand Theft Auto, and end their threat to the morality of children everywhere. He attempted a number of legal actions against Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two, and even wrote an open letter to their chairman's mother.
Thompson has since been shut down pretty hard, but some people on the fringe still believe in his rhetoric. If you ever watch any interviews with the creators of the GTA series, it’s easy to see that they are guys that just like making video games and pushing the envelope by bringing themes uncommon in the games industry to light (see: “Hot Coffee”). At worst, Rockstar just loves drumming up controversy to boost sales, but that’s marketing 101 these days.
4 The Game Actually Warns You Against This
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is, well, exactly what it says it is. The anti-drinking and driving group protested Grand Theft Auto IV because it allowed players to drive while under the influence. While MADD is no dishonest buffoon like Jack Thompson, they went a little overboard with their criticism. It’s hard to argue with such a noble group, let’s give it a shot.
When the protagonist, Nico, gets into his car while intoxicated, he does remark to himself that this is a bad idea and he shouldn't be doing this. The game even encourages you to call a cab. Should the player go through with their risky driving, they will find it extremely difficult to get anywhere, and they will draw the attention of the police who will notice their erratic driving and attempt to arrest them. Oddly, there are more consequences for this crime than for others.
3 What Do You Mean, Glorify?
A big fear of GTA critics everywhere is that Grand Theft Auto makes crime look so fun and glamorous that youths will attempt to recreate it. While some criminal cases have tried to argue that GTA inspired the crimes in question, no causation has ever been established. Do violent video games cause kids to go bad? Or do bad kids gravitate to violent video games? Regardless of the answer, GTA doesn't make crime look attractive as many people think.
The crime in Grand Theft Auto is fun to play, sure, and often has fantastic results, but the big picture is rarely glamorous. The protagonists' lives of crime usually involve betrayal by their close friends, self-loathing and the loss of loved ones. The characters always get the money, but they rarely get happiness.
2 ...It's Not As Racist As You Think
Grand Theft Auto is no stranger to caricatures; its side characters are often exaggerated archetypes of modern Americans. But Haitian and Cuban advocacy groups claim that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City went beyond racial stereotypes and actually incited violence against Cubans and Haitians. The inciting words? At some point in the game, people say to kill these people.
Not only is this a pretty flimsy argument, but the lines of dialogue in question are uttered during a gang war between, you guessed it, Haitians and Cubans. Seems like an appropriate thing to say in the middle of a gang war, but the groups disagreed. Despite the silliness, Rockstar eventually removed the dialogue.
1 Some Things Should Just Be Kept Private
A lot of the controversy circulating Grand Theft Auto came out of the infamous "Hot Coffee" mod. Long story short, a bunch of people got upset that a portion of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that developers cut from the game depicted graphic acts. The offending act turned out to be two low-polygon character models of consenting adults, fully clothed, robotically hitting on each other. The whole scene plays out like if an artificial intelligence made a simulation to represent the act, and all it had to work with was two digital mimes. There's steamier and less awkward stuff on basic cable, at this very moment.
And more recently? GTA IV and V stepped up their virtual game, but it still amounts to fully clothed video game characters repeating the same motion over and over again while reading dialogue cut from the scripts of discount videos. I’m certain a lot of players wished there was graphic stuff in GTA: San Andreas, but they were and continue to be disappointed.