Hey baby, wanna come over to my place and Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Select, Start?
Warning: this post contains graphic language and may not be suitable for young readers. Rated M, for mature.
Grand Theft Auto is a video game with prostitutes. It is not, I assume, the first video game with prostitutes, nor the last, but for some reason that has become its distinguishing characteristic.
Oh, sure, there are other things you can do in the game; the scenery is beautiful, some people like to just go down by the docks and relax. But the other kind of relaxation is the game’s trademark.
I’ve never owned a video game console. My parents wouldn’t let me have a Nintendo when I was a kid; the closest I got to owning video games was a weird cop-chase shoot-em-up thing my mom got at a garage sale. It was a live-action videotape that you played on your TV and shot at with a strange remote-control gun. A siren placed atop the TV would go off whenever you hit something, or something hit you.
Actually, now it sounds kind of cool, in a dorky, old-school way. But in 1989, it was not cool (thanks for trying, mom).
So, because I am relatively unacquainted with this form of entertainment, people are always showing me their favorite games. Every time someone has showed me Grand Theft Auto, the first thing they’ve mentioned has been the hookers.
You see, in the game you can steal a car and pick up a prostitute. Then you take her to a secluded location – an alley or some bushes – and the car starts creaking and rocking. If your health points are down, they go up. And the longer the car rocks, the healthier you get.
Which, I must say, is pretty unrealistic. In real life, the longer you hang out in cars with prostitutes, the more likely you are to experience some unfortunate health problem. But, then again, in real life you can’t run over the prostitute with your car and get your money back after you\’re through, as you can in the game.
And I guess that’s the whole point. Video games are meant to resemble reality (the graphics in Grand Theft Auto are stunning, although if you get too close to the strippers they look a little like dancing Rubik\’s cubes). But Grand Theft Auto is not supposed represent or replace reality. The very reason for playing Grand Theft Auto, the video game, is so that you can pick up prostitutes, run over pedestrians, and maybe take a break down by the water on the docks, with the knowledge that it’s not real.
Just because you want to do something in a video game doesn’t mean you’d want to do it in real life, even if you could. The only reason you might want to run over pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto (and, trust me, you probably will, it’s fun) is because you know they’re not really pedestrians. They don’t have families and memories and jobs to go to. They don’t have anything at all to do, ever, besides meandering down the boulevard chatting with the hookers and waiting for your flaming, stolen car to barrel down the sidewalk.
There are, of course, some deranged people out there who really do want to run over prostitutes and pedestrians and do all the other horrible things that are possible in video games. But those things were possible in real life before they were possible in the games. And anyone who plays a video game to satisfy their desire to do awful, real-life things was in trouble long before they picked up a controller. It may be that killers and criminals like playing video games, but that doesn’t mean video games made them killers and criminals.
Maybe in the future, when the video game strippers start looking indistinguishable from real strippers, we’ll have a problem. If video games ever approximate reality closely enough that players feel like they’re hurting real people in the games, then the wall between reality and fantasy will be at risk of crumbling.
But I don’t think that’s going to happen, at least not in the near future. Because making a video game that resembles reality is one thing; making one that replaces it is quite another.
Plus, there’s the difficulty of marketing a video game where, for every few virtual minutes you spend rocking in the car behind some bushes, you get a very real burning sensation in your pants.
Only the real crazies would pay for that.