Six Seeds of the Pomegranate

Ah. We come at last to the long-anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Well, I wasn’t anticipating it, but its recent appearance in local news pushed it from potential anniversary gift to censorship issue. Basically, the Chicago Transit Authority, cash-strapped and literally falling apart after (at least) a decade of mismanagement, was shamed, by Fox News of all things, into pulling the ads for GTA IV.

Before the CTA succumbed, the game existed in that unfocused mental space reserved for releases that don’t interest me but are preceded by too much hype to fall off the radar. Personally, I’m not a big fan of games that involve human-on-human violence; the only shooter I’m comfortable playing is Halo, because exploding extragalactic tentacled zombies, while messy, is cathartic and totally guilt-free. But now I feel a moral duty to stand up for GTA, or at least to complain about the shrill media frenzy and the ensuing disposal of rare and valuable ad revenue.

Aw, who are we kidding? This isn’t about the money. This is about shrill, uninformed, sensational “news”-induced panics, about censorship and hypocrisy, and about the total abdication of personal responsibility. The people howling about the game and the ad campaign are the same ones who ignore the nice game store clerk’s repeated warnings and purchase it for the 8-year-old offspring whose affections they’d rather buy than earn. (An acquaintance who worked a previous GTA release saw this happen on multiple occasions.) These are the same irresponsible parents who want video game ads stripped from public spaces to save them the trouble of having difficult discussions with their kids.

And do not get me started on the kind of hypocrisy that can ban video games — or even video game advertising — while conveniently overlooking violence saturation in other media. Nobody complains when the CTA runs ads for violent movies, but would you prefer to look at/consider the implications of this or this for 35 minutes? I don’t like casual realistic violence, on TV, in movies, or even in video games. It trivializes our lesser proclivities and desensitizes us to real suffering. GTA is not just gratuitous violence for its own sake; you could play the game that way, but you could play lots of games in ways that deviate from or pervert their primary objectives — say, for example, strip Monopoly.

Lurid fantasies are nothing new. All that has changed is the sophistication of their rendering. Don’t believe me? Check out the original Sweeney Todd, medieval visions of Hell , or just about any ancient mythology. Violent tendencies are a sad fact of human nature; we shouldn’t succumb to them indiscriminately but we won’t get rid of them by censoring a video game.

That said, I’m not a huge fan of the GTA franchise. The carjacking, crazy driving, hooker-hiring, underworld dealings, etc. just aren’t my thing; besides, I lack the attention span to pursue multiple mission-based games. But I will admit that Rockstar designs the franchise with biting social commentary (the talk radio is, like Idiocracy, chilling and riotously funny) and points irreverently and profanely at the darkness and vapidity on which we build “respectable” society. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why the game has been so shrilly denounced. Its very existence upends the fantasy that we live in an orderly, wholesome world populated by people (uncorrupted except for the noxious influence of video games) where manipulation, dirty dealings, theft, and even bloodshed are the exception rather than the rule. In an apt metaphor, the news outlets have offered only sensational and uninformed accounts of a perceived social ill, mistaking a symptom for the sickness. Ironically, Rockstar seems to be the only party interested in thoughtful dialogue about the gruesome consequences when our darker impulses go unchecked.