GTAV's Characters Are Just Bad

[Remag]

" I've heard a lot of other people make the case that Trevor is intended to be a representation of the behaviour an average player shows when set loose in a sandbox game. A depiction that makes sense when he's being portrayed more as a sort of amoral free-spirited rogue, but not in the moments when he is merely nasty. A player, released in the sandbox and free of consequences, is reckless and whimsical, not cruel. They might kill someone if they're in the way or because they fly off in a hilarious manner, but prolonged and calculated torture isn't the same."

I feel he may give gamers too much credit with this point. The very existence of the concept of trolling, tea bagging, and various other forms of online harrassment stands as proof positive that an online community is both capable and willing to engage in unnecessary cruelty for no other reason save provoking a response from the afflicted.

 

[Lieju]

On the topic of main characters, not directly related to this article, does anyone notice that the straight white man protagonist is being critisized just because of those characteristics, as the typical archetype?

What is this, the age of political correct protagonist man where they have to be half-caucasian half-black, pansexual and democrat to be a "valid" character?

Maybe try not to get offended so easily by the perceived 'Political correctness'?

Those characters are criticised because they're over-represented, and just being an archetype without any defining quality doesn't make for a good character.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

Lets face it: Rockstar wants more story, not more game play. Otherwise they wouldn't put so much emphasis on going through the story to get to the same destination that San Andreas put you at the very start.

But... San Andreas walled off two-thirds of the game world until you'd done enough story. GTA III and Vice City did, too.

 

[Lykosia_v1legacy]

I really can't emphasize what I'm trying to say anymore without just repeating myself. Yes, you got info, but what would you have gained if you hadn't tortured him? Mr.K constantly tells you he would tell you anything even if you didn't torture him, but no, because he's of Middle Eastern descent, 'enhanced interrogation' is the only possible option. Why? Because fuck you, that's why! Finally, keep in mind that the two missions you had to do in order to get to 'By the Book' has you gunning down government agents who are merely doing their job. In 'Dead Man Walking,' Michael is the one who breaks into a highly classified agency and blasts his way out, there's no doubt you're the bad guy there.

Yes, Mr. K claims to tell everything, but he never delivers when he is given the chance. He even couple times says that he doesn't know anything more, but still after T tortures him he suddenly remembers more things. In that scene, torture clearly worked no matter what Trevor says afterwards. It's hard to take what Trevor says seriously when they just showed that torture worked. Show, don't tell.

One way they could've made the scene work as anti-torture would've been that they had later shown that the information they got was wrong and the guy killed was not terrorist. But it was never brought back up again.

 

[Bastard King]

And no, the central narrative never tells you the man you're hunting isn't a terrorist, but after the mission, the radio will tell you he's an industrialist known for his very charitable nature. Another thing that sticks out, and really kind of clinches it for me, is what you have to go on. You're only ever told he's Azerbaijani, and that's not an organization, it's a place. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan You don't think it's slightly suspicious that the only thing you know of the man you're assassinating is where he's from? Especially considering that Azerbaijan has a history of being peaceful? The real world equivalent would be hunting someone down based solely on the fact that they're Saudi Arabian (the same nationality as Osama bin Laden). Games are not beholden by their central narratives to relay messages, they're games after all, not movies.

Dan Houser made Mr. K Azerbaijani, and a Christian if you notice the cross, because they don't want some insane Pakistani or Northern Nigerian leaving a carbomb outside Rockstar North. There wasn't any other reason to it. Lykosia's 100% right.

You know what this conversation has caused me to remember? The fact that games don't have to use any story of any kind to relay a message, especially when game mechanics can do it just as well. The game's story doesn't have to comment because what you do in GTA games is enough of a comment.

Go ahead, play 'By the Book' again, and afterwards, give yourself fifteen minutes just playing the game as you normally would. After that, simply ask yourself how many laws you broke, how much property you destroyed, and how many people you inadvertently hurt. The irony of being offended by a torture scene in the game where the end goal is to hurt people (intentionally or not), to get a leg up in the world in just innate.

You keep acting like the torture was what offended me, it wasn't. What bothered me was that GTA V wanted to act like it had an anti torture message when it clearly had the opposite.

Hell, you could make a better case for GTA V as anti crime than anti torture.

When I do any of those things you mentioned, law enforcement officials come after me with deadly force, and usually end up killing me. Nothing close to that happens with "By the Book."

Now, I know you used the example of Glee earlier, but that doesn't really stand up. Glee is not about homosexuality, it's about being yourself and self-expression regardless of who you are. GTA on the other hand, is unquestionably about causing chaos and destruction in your journey ever upward.

Considering that anyone Ryan Murphy's even passively annoyed with both real and fictional is made out on the show to be a completely unlikeable shithead, the message Glee actually portrays has always been anyone Ryan Murphy doesn't agree 100% with is less than garbage. But that's quite off topic, so I won't approach it any further.

Maybe you're right, maybe it's not a very effective anti-torture message, but then again... maybe it's not trying to be. Perhaps, it is not so much a critique of society, but more a critique of how people react to this kind of content in a game. Why in the world does this one act of violence deserve so much more attention than any other?

What I'm reacting to is the message being a failure, I never reacted to the content of the scene. There's plenty of stuff in the game way more messed up than the torture scene, and plenty of games with even more graphic torture scenes (MGS3, God of War 3, hell, even Black Ops) that actually have an effective message regardless of weather you agree with it. GTA V failed regardless of which message on torture positive or negative on torture it wanted to tell, end of story.

 

[Bastard King]

Yes, Mr. K claims to tell everything, but he never delivers when he is given the chance. He even couple times says that he doesn't know anything more, but still after T tortures him he suddenly remembers more things. In that scene, torture clearly worked no matter what Trevor says afterwards. It's hard to take what Trevor says seriously when they just showed that torture worked. Show, don't tell.

One way they could've made the scene work as anti-torture would've been that they had later shown that the information they got was wrong and the guy killed was not terrorist. But it was never brought back up again.

This, a thousand times this.

The objections of people who are right about the torture scene, like you and me, isn't that it depicted torture, or even made it interactive. Kratos does way worse things in the first half hour of God of War III than anything Trevor did to Mr. K. People who are right about their objections are objecting because it's a narrative failure.

Hell, I have more respect for Zero Dark Thirty, a movie who's message is essentially that torture works, than the torture scene in GTA V, which says it's being anti torture even though the story portrays it as pro torture.

Zero Dark Thirty is of course totally wrong. It's possible that torture can work, but it's incredibly immoral, especially as a method of interrogation. But at least it properly portrays its intended message.

 

[ServebotFrank]

I still think Yahtzee totally misinterpreted Michael's character arc over the game. His motivation was not to get a ton of money so he can retire, his goal was to a bunch of heists because he loves it. If you go his therapist at the end of the game he talks about how he wants to love his family but at the same time he really misses his life of crime. Hell most of his character was just him realizing that he's kind of a selfish asshole but he's okay with it now and now that he's a movie producer and his family loves him again he has a better life.

It's like Rockstar didn't want to tie the audience down with characters that had a solid arc, so we get three characters who's arc don't go anywhere.

By the end of the game there's no conclusion to Trevor's, Michael's, and Franklin's story. They're exactly the same as when we first met them, except slightly richer. With Michael there seems to be not even one ounce of difference; He's still an unhappy asshole with an unhappy asshole family. Trevor is still a sick fuck in his trailer, and Franklin is alone in his big villa.

So what was the point to all of this?

I disagree very strongly, all three characters have some sort of resolution to their arc at the end. Michael becomes much closer with his family (If you switch to him post-ending you can find him hanging out with his kids and going on dates with his wife) and is a successful movie producer which gets him out of the life of crime.

Franklin spends much of the game trying to get out of the hood and get away from his friends because they're idiots and he wants to be successful. When Lamar gets into some serious trouble near the end of the game, Franklin's ex-girlfriend convinces him that they're friends whether he likes it or not and he can't just abandon him.

Trevor...Okay admittedly I think Trevor goes through the least development. The most I thought Trevor revealed as the game goes on is he strong loyalty and hatred towards betrayal.

Spoiler: Spoilers for two of the game's endings regarding Trevor

If you try to gun down Trevor in Ending A, he calls you a judas and dies being betrayed by his friends, cursing them for their actions. If you try to kill Michael in Ending B, he chews you out for betraying Michael despite his hatred of the guy and refuses to help you.

So yeah, Trevor has less development but he doesn't really need a conclusion as he never really had a conflict besides hating Michael.

 

[smithy_2045]

(spoiler warning)

Personally, I really enjoyed the characters in GTA V.

Franklin wants to get out of the slums however he can, thinking he can just discard everything from his old life. But no matter how hard he tries to move on, he's still friends with Lamar (who's hilarious, fwiw) and is still loyal to him, so he continues to bail him out of stupid situations he should never have got himself into. Hence why Franklin's target is Stretch, even though Stretch is Lamar's problem.

Michael is pretty quickly shown to have a very short fuse, but even though he's a complete asshole he does give a shit about his family. He only gets back into the game because he needs cash to fix the drug lord's hillside mansion, and his only profitable skill is performing heists. The only reason he continues to go along with it when Trevor pops up is to protect his family. His family eventually reconciles with him because they realise that for all his irrational bullshit, he does a hell of a lot for them (even if they don't want it). The movie premier highlights his priorities perfectly IMO.

Trevor is a difficult one, because I never liked him. But I still thought he was a good character because even though he appears to be a completely psychotic individual who does whatever the hell he feels like, he rigidly follows certain rules and customs. His motivations outside of just cash are harder to determine, but I believe that a significant part of it is his desire for companions. He's so unlikable that you have to be an absolute oddball to even tolerate him. Just look at the characters he associates with across the course of the game.

 

[Lykosia_v1legacy]

What chance? The half second interval Steve Haines gives him at one point where he kind of stumbles over his thoughts? I don't know if you know this, but humans tend not to be extremely eloquent when their under incredible pressure, it's like trying to argue your point when the other guy won't stop screaming.

And no, the central narrative never tells you the man you're hunting isn't a terrorist, but after the mission, the radio will tell you he's an industrialist known for his very charitable nature. Another thing that sticks out, and really kind of clinches it for me, is what you have to go on. You're only ever told he's Azerbaijani, and that's not an organization, it's a place. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan You don't think it's slightly suspicious that the only thing you know of the man you're assassinating is where he's from? Especially considering that Azerbaijan has a history of being peaceful? The real world equivalent would be hunting someone down based solely on the fact that they're Saudi Arabian (the same nationality as Osama bin Laden). Games are not beholden by their central narratives to relay messages, they're games after all, not movies.

Mr K. says several times that he doesn't know anything more and he is telling everything he knows, but then he knows and remembers more things after the torture, which is pretty clear to me that the torture was working.

He still manages to give them enough information to pick one target apart from the rest of the people in the house. I checked several times and there was only one character in the party that fit the exact description mr. K finally gave. Being charitable doesn't prove that he wasn't a terrorist. Hell, Hamas uses 90 % of their funds to fund hospitals, libraries and schools.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

Critiques like this stifle creativity.

No, they don't. I'm not stifling creativity when I say that Tomb Raider wouldf have been a better game if you killed less mooks and Yahtzee isn't stifling creativity here. We are just expressing our opinions about a product. We are giving feedback. If enough people had problems with GTA V's characters then that shows that the gaming community in general doesn't want to play with those types of characters. This is a natural part of a product's life cycle. The argument that people are smothering ideas when they critique a game is ridiculous.

 

[Azrael the Cat]

Zero Dark Thirty is of course totally wrong. It's possible that torture can work, but it's incredibly immoral, especially as a method of interrogation. But at least it properly portrays its intended message.

There's also the nasty little problem that someone who's tortured has a motivation to tell you what they think you want to hear. Which is not the same as telling you the truth. Whenever people raise the 'what if it was the only way of finding the location of a bomb?' they never take into account the possibility of the bomb going off while you're searching for it in the wrong city, because you got a guy who didn't know where it was but was willing to give you a false location in order to get a few hours respite from being tortured.

 

[II2]

Let it be said: I LOVED GTA5. Now, regarding things said:

- Torture

Is it worse than knifing people, setting them on fire or crushing them with cars, or riddling them with bullets in the story / gameworld? Logically, no. But those are mostly elective or exciting action moments in a transgressive sandbox, as opposed to a scripted sequence requiring input. That's the structure of the logic in that one, irrespective of personal thresholds for what turns you off. The same is true of any other unavoidable story actions.

The scene's presentation seem like a symptom of the larger tone of the script. I'd argue that the entire backdrop of voice acting, TV, radio, characters and subjects that brings Los Santos to life is a lot more mean spirited than it ever was in GTA: San Andreas. These are Scottish writers (Dan Houser and crew), primarily, weaned on material like Irvine Welsh as comedy, but the exasperatedly silly "oh you" humor in their earlier game's piss taking seems to have morphed into a much angrier "FUCK YOU" by way of saturation bombing cultural ridicule. The satirical / parodying / jokingly-altered vision of California and America is served up with more vicious contempt than comedy. Ironically, I think that actually plays quite well into one of the games greatest strengths in humor:

- Trevor Philips

Even in a sell on the strength of its name property like GTA5, it was a bold move to make the ugliest, evilest and most horrible character your comic relief. It really worked for me. I loved playing as Trevor, since he was both hilariously over the top and completely in step with his own brand of psychotic mayhem. Whether enthusiasm, agitation or rage, he flew through the story like a force of nature, delivering the best lines and awesomely awkward sit com moments the game had to offer. His early missions sold me instantly, but then watching him integrate with Michael and Franklin and watch them try to deal with his whimsical and terrifying temper was a real treat. Steven Ogg, the voice actor and motion capture performer for Trevor Philips took a difficult role and executed it perfectly.

- M and F

By contrast, I didn't find much to like with Michael or Franklin. They both had functional character arcs, but neither was particularly magnetic. Micheal is oscillating between two desired states of being, neither make him happy, but one makes him feel alive; there's a bit of interesting conflict there, but he's mostly just sarcastic when he's not actively angry. My favorite bit of Michael was his interactions with Solomon, since he actually showed some genuine enthusiasm for what he was doing. Similarly, Franklin has an understandable 'dig out of the gutter' motivation, but unfailingly throughout the game, he's an unimpressed pessimist. CJ was a lot more fun to be.

 

[TurkeyProphet]

I think Yahtzee criticism's kind of smack of finding a criticism to justify an opinion he already has. He writes about how the characters motivations are hard to follow and they switch between personalities and he can't see much change but you could characterise a lot of stories like that and then call the characters shit. Just as an example let's replace some of what he said with The Sopranos.

"Tony Soprano switches back and forth between monster and free-spirited rogue. Relatedly, Tony can't seem to decide if Christopher is a dangerous threat to him or an protege with whom he must protect. Does Tony want to escape from organised crime and make something of his life, or does he want to stay true to his fellows?"

And let's not get started on the motivation for the characters in the Sopranos because that is a fucking minefield. Nico is an easy comparison because he's a really formulaic character but to regard him as a superior character because of this is bonkers. Nico is the character you would write if you were following an outline from a beginner's guide to screenwriting.

It also strikes me as ironic that a game like GTA will get shit on for its fairly weak plot even though its writing is better than the vast majority of games. You wouldn't ever have this kind of discussion about Gears of War or Sonic.

 

[Qvar]

GTA 5 is not a bad game by any stretch, but it is definitely not a 97 as metacritic claims it to be.

Give it a year or two and people will be claiming that I deserves no more than a 70, like it happened to Skyrim.

"Tony Soprano switches back and forth between monster and free-spirited rogue. Relatedly, Tony can't seem to decide if Christopher is a dangerous threat to him or an protege with whom he must protect. Does Tony want to escape from organised crime and make something of his life, or does he want to stay true to his fellows?"

Wow I suddenly understand why I found The Sopranos so damn boring and had to stop watching it at season 5.