GTA 5 Getting Pulled From the Shelves in Australia

– Disclaimer There are a lot of posts about this on the internet already, spanning from well written ones to ones that try to defend the opinion with empty statements. This will be nothing more than a rant about what some peoples opinions are and generally my own one on the topic. You are free to agree and/or disagree with me or even critizise me in this regard, but be warned that I won’t get into a discussion with you in anyway about this topic. It is possible that I might bring up the same argument as other people, but that’s just the nature of rants. Also, this may contain mature content and heavy outrage, so take this into consideration before reading on.
– Disclaimer end

I don’t think I have to replay the situation again, because, as I have mentioned, there are enough articles out there already for this topic. So what is my take on it? I haven’t played this game in particular, but I have played previous games from the same series so I know what the game is about, but I can’t tell you anything about the exact storyline in this instance.

To make this short for you, here’s my standpoint: It is completely fine for Target to remove a product from their shelves, but the reason why is completely and utterly, sorry, bullshit. I’m not saying that Target should not listen to a petition made by alleged customers, because that would be wrong as well. However, the point where I think it is wrong is that the people who made the petition (also including those who signed it) either have a bad attitude towards games in general and thus come from a way too subjective standpoint or don’t really understand how things work in games.

Because all I see in the petition and blog posts who support this opinion is always focused around the idea that you can “murder” prostitues to gain benefits (thus encouraging you to do so) and that they’re portrayed as victims. There’s more to it, but that’s the gist I read from those posts.

But are they? I have yet to see an actual reference or citation for this where you can “murder” a prostitute (after you had sexual intercourse with her) IN A SPECIAL WAY. This is key: “special way”. Yes, you can kill them. But there are two things that are bound into this.

First, you can only kill them the same way you can kill any other NPC in the game, thus not treating them any different from literally ANYONE ELSE in the game.

Secondly, who tells you to kill them? The game itself doesn’t. I have yet to see an instruction in the game where it says that you should kill prostitues after you had sex with them. You have the option, yes, but the decision is on your behalf and if you feel like you should do it, then the blame is on you, not the game. The game simply allows this because it allowed you to kill everyone else, which you seem to be ok with.

I don’t see why the equality here would be anything but the right thing. In fact, everwhere else people want equality, now they get what they want and then it’s still wrong? I don’t get it.

Lets get to how they are depicted in the game and also compare it to how society outside of the virtual world is depciting them. Do you see a difference? I don’t feel like they are depicted any differently in the game than in the “real life” society and I would blame the society here, not the game. Because the game just imitates the society we live in (and from what I’ve seen so far, I think it does that pretty well). So blaming the game is like criticising the result and not the underlying issue, which you should do instead.

What I find more disturbing is that the petition claims that you can do things which are -BY LAW- not even allowed to be in a game that is getting sold in Australia. If those things would be in the game, the game would be indexed and not be allowed to be distributed to customers in the first place. Also, the game is already rated as 18+, which should tell you that the game may contain a lot of violence, sex and other such things. This is quite obviously saying: “If you can’t handle this, don’t play it, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED”. If you still buy it and play it, it is, again, your own choice. If you go to a museum and look at a picture which displays the idea of burning women just because other people claim they’re “whitches” it’s fine as well right? Just because it’s a videogame where you can interact with the environment yourself it is any different? HA, no. Unless the game forces you to do those things, which it obviously does not. So it’s still all your own decisions and if you chose to do certain things, the only one to blame is yourself.

Last point I want to raise here is the fact that we’re talking about a virtual world, a world that does not reflect back into our world and is completely made up. It might show similarities to our world, but that doesn’t mean you have to take them that way. If you cannot distinguish between the virtual and real world, I’m sorry, but then there is something wrong with you. If you let yourself get influenced by a game in such a way, then I would be really worried about your general reasoning abilities. Because I’m pretty sure, books can have the same effect, yet maybe to a lesser extend, yet nobody is worrying about that.

But lets go over to the response from the Take-Two CEO because his main point is what I find a really good response. “It’s one thing for someone to not want to buy a piece of content, which is completely understandable. […] And that’s really the solution. If you don’t like it and it’s offensive to you, then you don’t buy it.” I think this is not only a good response but the solution to the problem. If you don’t like a game, why would you bother buying it? If a game is bad or horrible and people won’t buy it, it already tells the developer/publisher enough about the product they made. There’s no reason to overreact and also shout in their face that they should feel bad. “Are you telling me to ignore the ‘issue’ at hand?” By now, it should be pretty clear that I would not consider GTA 5 to be any kind of issue contrary to what the people wanted to express with the petition. This is not like a law that was forced upon you and thus making the situation completely different, it was made an issue because you chose to make it an issue of yours even though you had the choice to not be affected by it.