This is not my real life, although I've spent enough of my free time here to qualify. It's Liberty City, home of Grand Theft Auto 3, the most disturbing video game available. Disturbing not for the amount of carnage you create, but the amount of civilians you kill along the way. There's nothing new about video game violence complaints, but it's usually from people who have never played video games before. I'm a fairly shockproof gamer, and GTA 3 is the first time I've ever been ashamed at my choice of actions.
The game is rated M, the strictest rating the Entertainment Software Ratings Board gives out. It's not a legally binding rating, just a warning label. Rock Star Games, GTA 3's producer, has the claim to fame of all their games being some manner of illegal activities. They're meant just for adults, but so are cigarettes.
I've described this game to a rather liberal friend of mine with a twelve-year-old son, and he is adamant that his son not play it. The game is currently banned in Australia. It's sold 7 million copies since its 2001 release, and is easily the bestselling Playstation 2 game of all time.
Most video games exist where the only others on the board are enemies to kill. GTA 3 has droves of people milling the sidewalks of the fictional Liberty City, driving dozens of different car models. You can carjack any vehicle you see, smash it against every other car on the road, and run over the entire populace.
There's a ridiculous amount of detail to certain game aspects. The soundtrack is the car's radio, and you can get 10 different radio stations, from reggae to classical to talk. Occasional rain and fog make for different driving conditions. Bullets to the head bleed more than body shots. Different blocks of Liberty City are frequented by different ethnic street gangs. 100 secret packages (which look suspiciously like cocaine kilos) are hidden throughout the city. Buses and airplanes can be stolen, subway and elevated train tracks can be driven on. Speedometers, on the other hand, don't exist in the Rock Star world.
I was going to try an experiment: I would beat the game without killing a single innocent person. GTA 3 gave people the ability to cathartically break every law worth breaking, with no responsibilities outside their memory card. I wasn't going to take them up on anything but what I had to do. I'd become a morally defendable career criminal.
My friends with this game bragged about the amount of police they killed, and the inventive ways they did it. They were picking up the mindset of not just any career criminal, but Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs (the one who cut the cop's ear off for fun). I don't have a particular grudge against cops, so orchestrating their pixelated slaughter doesn't attract me any more than orchestrating the slaughter of dentists or veterinarians.
Granted, the first couple hours I played I wrecked more police cars than the Blues Brothers. But I didn't save. From these hours I learn how my wanted levels worked. There are six levels of how hard the police will pursue you, and how cool the vehicles used to hunt you down. All those vehicles are stealable, provided you survive long enough to reach the door handle. At four stars the SWAT team sends its vans, at five stars the FBI comes, and six stars calls in the Army. You boost your wanted status by killing law enforcement, or killing so many pedestrians that even the corrupt LCPD can't ignore you any longer.
There are 81 official game missions, and several hundred unofficial ones. Stealing a taxi cab lets you play taxi driver and do hundreds of taxi missions, stealing a cop car lets you play vigilante and kill whoever's being reported on the police scanner. For moral high grounders, paramedic and firefighter missions await, although they do require the initial theft of an ambulance or fire truck. There are also Rampage missions, which give you a weapon and a time limit to kill a certain amount of people (sometimes gang members, sometimes any live bodies). The official missions, however, all come from mob bosses.
Missions are increasingly difficult criminal activities, but I could justify these by thinking if I didn't do them, some other recently escaped bank robber would. I'd assuredly be stealing, and probably also killing, but the mob usually puts hits on rival criminals, each of whom have racked up records thick enough to justify the death penalty. (Especially if Liberty City is in Texas, where making a right turn on red is a capital crime.) So long as outright civilian murder wasn't the task at hand, I could complete it.
My saved game began, and I decided to drive like in the real world, the one with consequences. I sat patiently at red lights instead of zooming through them. I didn't take advantage of any shortcuts that involved driving on the sidewalk (or through plate glass windows). I would have even used turn signals if the designers bothered to put them in the game. It took twice as long to go anywhere, and I was driving like I had a DMV instructor next to me.
The first couple missions were easy: drop off Mafioso around town, pick up a gaggle of hookers for the policeman's ball, steal a car back from a guy who owed my boss money. Once I had to go to Chinatown and kill a drug dealer, but hey, it's a drug dealer. All on the up and up. Occasionally my car ran off the road and squashed a couple civilians, but I reset the game and played until I completed the mission without a bloodstain on my hood.
To get health back in most games you get a hamburger or some sort of restoration potion. In this game you get health back by beckoning hookers to your car and finding a dark part of town for her to earn her keep. It costs a dollar a second for as long as a girl's in the car, but you can get 40 hit points back a session. Once she gets out of the car with your money, you can beat her to death and take your money back. I had no plans to beat the hookers to death, even though they are technically criminals. However, I never had a need for the money. If a rocket launcher became $40 more than I currently owned, watch out Misty.
The mission that started my decline was the Turismo rally. It was a race through the city against cars that could essentially break the sound barrier. The only saving grace was that the racers drove like drunken hyenas, and wiped out on each sharp turn. However, invariably, I'd go on the sidewalk for a second or two, and some old lady would get in the way. I drove the race twenty times, and just could not get through it without a casualty.
I gave up. I probably could have lucked into a perfect race if I did it enough, but I was getting tired of the same mission over and over, so I put a personal time value on a single pretend life. I ran the race with my one smushed victim, won it, saved, and moved on.
I was expecting the police to permanently run me down from now on, but nothing happened. The police didn't care if I sped, made illegal U-turns, drove on the wrong side of the road, or used a mound of dirt to jump a warehouse. So long as the cops weren't around when I did something bad, it was as if I never did it.
Pausing the game shows you your stats: missions completed, daily police spending because of you, gang members killed, and civilians killed. I was running a morally defendable zero in Civilians Killed, but now there was a 1 staring me in the face.
One of the first movie-video game tie ins was, of all movies, Platoon, for the 8-bit Nintendo. That game (and several war games since) take your morality into account as well as your health. If you get hit enough times in Platoon, your life bar runs out and you die. If you kill enough Vietnamese peasants accidentally in Platoon, your morality bar runs out and you lose the will to continue on. Innocent life gets treated as just another plot point, but at least it's a factor.
GTA 3 has no morality bar. Absolutely nothing changed once I killed an innocent. The city didn't restrict me from doing anything. The corpse became a chalk outside a few seconds after death, and disappeared completely soon after that. My only evidence was a small number on the pause screen, which I could look or not look at.
I stayed with my limited guilt for the next half dozen missions. I got them done without a second casualty. Maybe the Turismo was the sole exception for me: everything else could be accomplished without me becoming a double murderer.
The last mission from El Burro, a gang leader/porn kingpin, turned me into a mass murderer. The Chinese Triads wronged him, so I had to grab a flamethrower and retaliate to the tune of twenty-five Triads. In two and a half minutes. There's not much aim with a flamethrower, and the seconds it took to point the flamethrower at the scumbag between the non-scumbags were too precious to squander. All attempts to avoid charbroiled civilians left me many Triads behind in my work. The time value came into play again, although I played this level less than Turismo, and lot more death was in question. After I broiled everything in sight and got 25 Triads, my Civilians Killed was in the double digits.
That was the precipice. The Triad mission got me to stop caring. I wasn't looking to squish anyone, but if it happened during a successful mission, I wasn't going to reset any more. What's the difference between 23 and 24 civilians killed?
I soldiered my way up to the final mission (or at least the mission that triggers the end credits when you beat it, since I still hadn't touched the Rampage missions). It took some work, but I beat it, and didn't notice any major civilian death.
I checked my stats, which I hadn't done in a while, and saw my not-quite final total. 451 people killed. A separate stat shows how many gang members I've killed: 210. Subtract, and I've ended the lives of 241 completely innocent souls. I would have guessed maybe 30. There have been military coups with less death.
None of the missions were specifically to harm the innocent. Where's the money in that? Citizens just happened to get in the way. I tried to Gandhi my way through, and I killed 241 people! I've still got all the vigilante and Rampage missions to go, so I could easily stock another morgue with fresh meat.
The game can't help but alter your real life point of view. If you doubt it, play it for an hour and then get in a real car. You'll be going 60 in school zones, weaving through traffic like Dennis Hopper put a bomb in your car, disregarding any pedestrians who might walk in your way. There's 3.9 million people driving this haphazardly, and that number grows by hundreds of thousand every month the game is out.
Grand Theft Auto 3 has done a remarkable psychological feat: put you in the mindset of a criminal. The rules of the game are the career criminal's rules of life. There's no legal way to make money. The quality of your life is almost entirely gauged by how many weapons you can afford. It doesn't matter what you do, just that you don't get caught. Hopefully this lifestyle's not attractive to many players.