@insectecutor said:
Isn't GTA supposed to hold a mirror to society? I thought the sexism in GTA was part of its commentary on how much society and the media fails in those areas but Patrick made it sound like it was genuinely hateful. I've not played GTA5 yet so I don't know, seems tough to believe.
See, I used to think that too, but it's been a harder and harder for me to find that stance legitimate as time goes on. Idle Thumbs has a really good example of an annoying habit 'satirical' or parodic games will fall into. It doesn't really in itself concern social matters, but I think it illustrates the same sort of problem admirably.
Basically, suppose that you and I set out to make a parody of SNES and other early era JPRGs—nevermind our actual dispositions to the genre, just run with it for now. In making this game we would certainly want to highlight and lampshade every sort of funny, strange, and peculiar quirk which pervades the genre, and maybe even call out a couple of specific titles for affectionate teasing. It's all going splendid. Now, naturally we'd also want to hold mirror up to some pitfalls of the genre—some genuine annoyances we have with them.
And, of course, one of the first such examples would be the frustratingly long and tedious boss battles where the dickbag has a ludicrous number of transformations and separate forms he undergoes just as the player depletes his health for the umpteenth time and so on. Basically, for whatever reason suppose that we took issue with this trope, and found it instead to artificially and cheaply lengthen boss fights at the direct expense of a players direct enjoyment of the game. There's no way we could set out to parody classic RPGs without touching on this. So what do we do? We exaggerate and hyperbolize it. Our big bad evil guy ends up having 20 or 30 bullshit super-forms or more, and every step of the way the protagonists and the villain himself are notable self-aware of this absurdity and increasingly exasperated and so on. It's hilarious, I'm sure.
But however successful this parody of RPGs may or may not end up being, there is one particular aspect wherein we indubitably failed far beyond any appropriate measure of expression. If we had at any point sought to actually address and deal with those issues we perceived to be legitimately holding our favorite genre back, we may rest assured: we did not do that. For, in lieu of actually confronting the bullshit artificially lengthened boss fight, we instead made one even more bullshit, and still subjected our players to that experience. However clever we might have been our presentation and execution, at the end of the day we still made another goddamn bossfight that just won't fucking end. We had a golden opportunity to make the exception that proves the rule, and instead made the quintessential example.
This has been a overly-long way to articulate a point that probably doesn't need so much context to argue. I apologize for that. It doesn't help that it's late at night here and my writing style gets stupid and pretentious when I'm tired (I swear I almost used 'articulability' at some point or another). Nonetheless, I think it's an observation worth noting that illustrating or bringing attention to a problem, while not inherently bad or destructive, is not the same as actually addressing and fixing persistent and lingering issues. Grand Theft Auto, since its inception, has always held this so-called mirror up to American society and demonstrated and illustrated all of our failings and hypocrisies and so on. The delivery, as always, is fantastic, and to the end that Rockstar wanted to remind all of us that videogames and society are pretty damn deplorable and sexist, they succeeded brilliantly. But what they haven't and have never done is actually help move videogames (and the little sliver of society videogames can be said to represent) beyond these problems. It's insensible to think that GTA was somehow unable to do this if it had so-desired: GTA V is a multibillion dollar production, let alone the financial scale of the franchise as a whole behind it, and the company behind that. The opportunity was there to show the world what the next step is beyond this systematic problems, and that opportunity was ignored.
I suppose all I mean to say is this: if you want to improve the quality of acting down at your local community theater (which has, of late, been absolutely horrific), you ultimately have two options. You can send Tommy Wiseau to be your next Hamlet, or you can send Laurence Olivier. Both, at the end of the day, will have beyond measure of all doubt assured everyone just how bad the acting at the theater has been, but only one will have actually improved it.
So. I don't want to criticize GTA for not doing something it never promised it was going to do in the first place, but I can understand peoples' exasperation if they are tired of yet more illustrations and examples of just what is wrong with the status quo, and would instead appreciate something that really attempts to change it.
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