I find it fascinating that the vast majority of these comments so merrily rebuke Rockstar for providing legitimate, albeit temporary employment to a segment of the population rife with poverty, affording them resume building work experience and exposure to potential careers outside of the realm of sanitation or fast food retail, for shame.
This is especially puzzling when their are plenty of valid complaints that could be leveled at Rockstar. For one, why make 'certified gang member' a prerequisite for employment? Gangs rarely invent their own speech patterns, those patterns are merely indicative of the areas from which they draw their membership. Why not go straight to the source and hire a handful of young men from whichever area they're trying to emulate. Perhaps some of those men are affiliated with an active gang, a great many of them aren't, their speech patterns and vernacular wont vary a great deal. In fact, let's recall for a moment that Rockstar is hardly some beneficent entity reaching out to the impoverished, and that their main concern is "authenticity." If that's the case, using reformed prisoners (depending on length of sentence) would not yield the desired effect. Prisons contain their own pressure cooked microcultures, and while gang sub-cultures naturally glean from prison culture, the two do not directly equate.
Of course, perhaps looking too deeply into Rockstar's search for 'authenticity' makes folk uncomfortable. Perhaps people are starting to realize that taking the very worse of blaxploitation and mexploitation, grinding them into a fine powder, sifting it together with a liberal sprinkling of italian mob cliches and snorting them off the thighs of a ten dollar hooker who's got kids to feed is perhaps just a little fucked up.
But no, that would imply the maturation of the consumer base, and that can go fuck all kinds of duck.
