Hit the Center of the Target - The GTAV Debacle.

Last week Target Australia removed Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) from its stores. An online petition about the sexual elements of GTAV forced Targets hand into removing the offending material. People took the internet and further petitioned Target to remove other offending material from its stores such as Fifty Shades of Grey, or even The Bible. So the question should be raised, are gamers missing the point? 

Gaming culture can be a bit precious at times. The culture as a whole doesn't like people messing with their games - they don't like censorship. I am not a fan of censorship either, however in some cases it's acceptable. With the removal of GTAV from Target, I feel that it's acceptable. I would even argue that it should go as far as being removed from other family friendly stores like K-Mart and Big W. Why? Well, before we get to that, lets discuss what the problem is to begin with.

The Grand Theft Auto series has been one of the major entertainment movements in the past twenty years. Ever since the top down shooter hit the Playstation, it's spawned imitators. At its core though, Grand Theft Auto has always been an open world game where essentially you can do anything. Want to race around a city at top speed with no consequence when you hit a building? Sure! Want to enter a cheat code and spawn a tank and go on a rampage? Of course, go for it. Want to hire a hooker, have sex with her and then shoot her to get your money back? Ah... ok? Do I have to?

Well, no, you don't have to. The benefit of Grand Theft Auto is that they have all these great elements to play with. It's a giant adult sandbox full of mayhem and fun. The downside to this is that Rockstar have created an adult sandbox full of adult elements. Yes, you can kill and slaughter people, but you can also do other adult things like have sex. 

Now, Grand Theft Auto isn't the first game to include sex in it. You'll have to go back to Leisure Suit Larry and other games to see that. Yet the inclusion of violence and sex makes Grand Theft Auto unique. I personally have nothing against having sex in games. Just like sex in films or literature, it needs to have a purpose. It can't be there 'just because'. Sexual violence however is even more of a sensitive subject and GTAV does not handle the subject sensitively.

Sexual violence is still a major problem in society. Articles about sexual violence need to have trigger warnings written on them. We have days where men pledge that they will never commit an act of violence against a woman. GTAV has no trigger warning on it. In fact, it doesn't even mention sexual violence in its rating. If you can imagine a 

So why are Target only just now removing GTAV from its stores? With the arrival of GTAV on the new round of consoles has also brought the arrival of a new mode in the game - first person perspective. This is a first for the Grand Theft Auto series and it changes up the style of play in an interesting way. I've personally played a few hours of GTAV and have found it handles a lot better in first person. What I haven't encountered though is the city of Los Santos' many prostitutes. 

I haven't sought them out at all, but they're there. They're available for a short fun time and that's it. After your time, you can shoot them down and collect the money they've dropped. The fact that any other person in the city of Los Santos can be killed and has money to be collected is negligible - it's the fact that your character has just had sex with a prostitute and you've then killed them to get your cash back. It's an element that takes the idea of 'you can do anything!' too far and should never have been included in the first place. Sure, games have elements that are there just because - you don't have to pick flowers and hunt wildlife in Skyrim to progress the story, but it's there if you like - but to have this element in there is pointless and offensive. 

You can quite easily play through Grand Theft Auto without ever having to encounter this, which furthers the argument that it shouldn't even be there to begin with. Lets get back to the core question though - should Target have removed GTAV from its stores? 

Yes! Without a doubt. Sure, it's slightly hypocritical when there are other games that are rated R out there, but this is a special case. GTAV is one of the major game releases of the year and it's a title which teens and kids younger than 18 will be asking for Christmas. Unfortunately, regardless of the rating system, we still have parents who will buy their kids these sorts of games without really assessing the content in them. 

Add the problem that a store like Target is predominantly staffed by under eighteen year olds. Legislation states that any game or film that is rated R18+ cannot be sold by anyone under eighteen years old. So realistically, it's counter productive for a store like Target to have to have someone who is over eighteen come and sell the game every single time. Target hasn't removed other R18+ games like Watch Dogs or Wolfenstein from their shelves. It's blacklisting a game for a certain reason, but realistically they should be taking any R18+ game off the shelf. 

Target are doing the right thing by addressing an issue that has been around for a while. Sure, it's taken them a year to address this problem, but they're addressing it and that helps create discussion about having sexual violence in video games.It also helps create a discussion about what sort of entertainment is available to people in family friendly stores. Unfortunately the backlash from gamers in Australia has been childish and missing the point of the removal. There is a long way to go for sexual violence to be taken seriously by gamers and game developers. 

Interestingly enough, one of the other controversial moments in the game hasn't been brought into question this time round - the torture sequence. Later on in the game there is a moment where one of the characters you play as tortures someone. I haven't reached this part in the game so I can't comment on my feelings of that moment, but as far as I understand it's an uncomfortable moment that's made even harder to watch by putting the character in first person. It brings back memories of another Rockstar game - Manhunt. 

There's greater issues at the moment within the gaming culture that relates to whether killing people in games is having a broader effect on players, and that's not even with going into the gender issues with gaming right now. 

Where this will go from here, who knows. As a gamer I've found myself straying towards games that question violence, or don't feature violence heavily in them. Whether they be platformers or strategy games, I'm drawn towards games that aren't shooting all the time. I just don't have the patience anymore for those sorts of nihilistic games that don't question what they're doing. I also believe that as a form of entertainment, video games should not go into certain areas - sexual violence being one of them. It is such a major issue that I simply do not think that gaming will be able to address it in its current form. 

I don't entirely believe that there is a link between video game violence and violence in the real world, however, I also don't believe that the far reaching consequences of this has been realised yet. We live in a world where children are exposed to violence earlier than previous generations. The accessibility of these things is greater and whilst we can sit around and say 'well, real world violence and video games aren't connected', I don't honestly believe that we can say that is the case right now without seeing how this current generation grows up. It could be like films and literature where people previously thought that minds would rot and it would encourage children to lead to a life of crime and violence - and yet time showed that this was not the case. 

The next year or so with gaming will be interesting to see progress. We live in a culture now where the quality of games is so high that we now simply can't accept slaughtering countless amounts of red shirted foes just because - I'm looking at you Far Cry 4. We need context as to why we're doing this. I look at a game like Dishonoured which came out a few years ago and provided the player with the option of completing the game without killing anyone. On the flipside of that - a player tried to play Grand Theft Auto Online (the online component of GTAV) as a pacifist. You can read here how that went.

I hope that the culture can move past this and reach a point where women are treated equally and with respect. It will be a long path to that - and one that I'm afraid we may never actually reach. If that is the case, then I'm not sure where I see myself as a gamer. I'm not sure I want to be part of that kind of culture.