Buchholz101 said:
MysticSlayer said:
As for me, I don't see what the problem is. None of those people are real, and so long as I don't take the game into the real world and start committing actual acts of violence, then there is no harm done. At worst you're disturbed and can't look away, but that's actually a strength of video games--it forces you to confront the disturbing rather than hiding from it--not a weakness.
I think of games as being like a movie where you're in the shoes of the protagonist. A movie in which you have no attachment or sympathy with any of the characters is a movie you probably won't recommend to all of your friends. Even if the victim in that torture scene isn't real, the sympathy you feel for him as he begs for his life is no less valid than the sympathy you'd feel when Simba finds his father dead in
The Lion King, or when Rose realizes that Jack has frozen to death in
Titanic.
Storytelling as a medium is meant to communicate meaning or invoke empathy in the audience. All that I felt during that sequence was disgust and repulsion, and the meaninglessness of that sequence is even lampshaded by Trevor afterwards when he's driving. There are movies, and even other games, that have used torture, but then it seemed to serve a purpose or the victim deserved it in some way (ex:
Taken, The Last of Us). In GTAV, it's seemingly placed only for shock value.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't or don't sympathize with characters in a game, but they are only meaningful to us within the context of the game's world. They bear absolutely no relevance to our world, except in a way I'm going to go into later in this post, and therefore are not deserving of the same moral consideration as people in this world are. The issue I had with your post was that you sort of blur the line between the game's world and our world:
Watching this, it made me question for a moment whether or not the media has a point: video games are ludicrously violent, and the overwhelming amount of Facebook posts I see praising the game seem to confirm that we as a whole are less sympathetic to the victims of such horrifying acts.
Even disregarding all of the seemingly crowbar'd in sex scenes, I feel appalled and disgusted with Grand Theft Auto: V, and I can't help myself but to think less of anyone who praises the game without considering the things it forces them to do.
My issue here is that it puts the victim in the game on the same level as real, intrinsically valuable people who have suffered real acts of torture. This is particularly problematic in the part I bolded. Just because people are praising the game doesn't mean that they are unsympathetic to those who suffer real-world acts of violence, as there is a major difference between a character in a work of fiction and a real-life person. If the game was glorifying the act, then yes, I can see taking serious issue with it, but to my knowledge, it doesn't. It's a negative take on torture, and at worst it is neutral on the subject.
The thing is, this could be used to good effect. If it makes someone uncomfortable, that should get the to consider the acts of violence being committed against real victims of torture and, hopefully, it will spark them to do something about it in the real world. The issue I really take is that so many people are leading some "righteous" charge against GTA V's torture scene and they are doing little, if anything, to figure out what they can do to help real-life victims of torture. Maybe it is a storytelling issue with GTA V that they couldn't translate our discomfort for an in-game act into a real-world response, or perhaps it is just the result of a misplaced righteous cause on the part of those playing the game.
Now, if people got incredibly excited about the opportunity to torture someone and enjoyed it in-game, as in they had fun with it, then I would call into question their moral character, or at least recognize that their ability to immerse themselves in fiction is very low. Perhaps, also, they are simply naive to the actual problem of torture (we are dealing with a mostly teenage audience here). However, sometimes people find enjoyment in the discomfort, but that doesn't mean they condone what made them uncomfortable. Perhaps they realize the benefit of feeling discomfort over fiction at times.
The Heart of Darkness is incredibly disturbing, but it also highlights numerous problems with dehumanization, not to mention its analysis of our own moral shortcomings, and that's part of what makes it so enjoyable.