Grand Theft Auto is easily one of the most well known and profitable game series in the AAA market and has become a company defining title for Rockstar Studios over the last decade. However when people point to issues of misogyny and going too far, it’s also the series that is brought up a lot. For today’s post I want to look at this further as the problem isn’t that Grand Theft Auto has changed, but that it has remained the same.

Top and Out:

Grand Theft Auto originally started as a top down, very cartoonesque type experience as the player drove and shot their way around a virtual city and to the UK in an expansion. The same structure of going from a nobody to a big player has remained the same along with having unrealistic or one dimensional characters to deal with.

The turning point for the series and Rockstar was Grand Theft Auto 3 which was a major jump in performance and cinematic feel. This was for the first time on the consoles where you had a completely open world to explore and do whatever you wanted to within the confines of the game. This type of presentation also lent itself to telling grand stories and as the series grew with later installments, celebrities and huge licensed soundtracks became the norm.

Besides the grander stories and cost, so came Rockstar pushing boundaries and the Grand Theft Auto series grew bolder in the stories and themes the developers wanted to explore — From being an immigrant in GTA 4, racial tensions in San Andreas and of course all the extreme violence and situations. A few years ago Rockstar got in trouble when it was revealed that they were working on the sex minigame “Hot Coffee” in San Andreas and the recent GTA 5 had people questioning sexist and misogynistic views which have continued since GTA 3.

Men’s Club:

One of the defining attributes of GTA has been their focus on a playground, specifically a playground for men. Every title featured cars, shooting, explosions, hookers, violence and so on all aimed at the male’s perspective. But one thing that hasn’t been featured in a GTA game is a strong female character, most women in the series are both evil and killed, poorly fleshed out or only feature has something to do with sex. And despite all the games in the series and side stories, there has yet to be any main characters who are women.

This has also been a part of the controversy of the treatment of women that has stuck with the series since GTA 3. One of the many side options the player has is to pick up prostitutes and have sex with them for money to recover health, then kill them to get the money back and there is no long term consequence for this action.

Critics say that having women being used as a health recovery system that you can kill is very demeaning and misogynistic while supporters claim that the developers should get a free pass because the action is optional and that having it in the game should not be used as a point to criticize Rockstar as a studio.

The problem in my opinion is that this is something that should reflect on Rockstar as even though the action is optional, it’s still explicitly in the game.

Explicit vs. Implicit Actions:

A major talking point over the last few years has been the treatment of women in the Game Industry and I’m pretty sure if you’re reading this you know all the major people and issues going on.

One of the problems with talking about these issues has been the defense and attack of sensationalizing situations where women are being attacked or harmed in video games. Critics say that women shouldn’t be hurt like this while defenders say that if the women are treated the same exact way as the male NPCs then its fine.

This would be a point where I would have to give it to the defenders only when we’re talking about games where both genders are being represented the same way: IE if the women aren’t being overtly sexualized and dressed normally like the men. And this is why I’m not going to defend the act of killing prostitutes in the GTA series because this is something that is 100% skewed towards the male demographic with no counterbalance for women which again goes back to the series’ focus on the male perspective.

Let’s go back to what I said earlier about explicit design as I have an example to talk about what I mean and why you can’t say that optional content in GTA is immune to criticism. Imagine two first person shooters where the player runs around killing people with rag-doll physics. Both titles allow you to drag bodies which react with the same physics model.

Now let’s say that someone decides to spend a lot of time and position these dead bodies in positions that they find humorous and post them online and people complain to the developer saying that the developers have poor taste.

In this case, in my opinion the developers should not be penalized because they did not design the game to reward or even acknowledge that act and this was simply a byproduct of the rules of the game.

As a quick aside this is also where I have to raise a critique on one of Tropes vs. Women video episodes where Anita Sarkessian tried to use the fact that NPCs disappear after death as something against women. Because this is simply a byproduct of the engine limitations and not mutually exclusive to either gender.

Back to the example, let’s say Game B does the same exact thing with its ragdolls but this time the developers put in the option that having dead bodies in certain positions would give the player extra resources or even count as an achievement. With Game B, this would be where criticizing the developers would be fair because even though this was optional, it still was explicitly designed, included and thought about by the development staff.

Taking this back to GTA, this is why I can’t defend the use of prostitutes as optional content and serves to highlight the series’ issue with tone.

Tonal Shifts:

Despite all the star power, scope, soundtracks and huge cost, Grand Theft Auto from a storytelling and tone standpoint still remains the same as an unrealistic skewing of real life and pop culture. Where the controversy comes in and why people point to it as a bad example is that the game’s tone doesn’t match its content. In an earlier post I talked about how acceptable certain content is based on the tone of the game, the more violent and disturbing, the less realistic you want the game to look to not offend people.

With GTA, the series has grown more and more realistic in style and graphics but still tries to play off the hardcore violence and disturbing actions of its characters as cartoons. You have highly realistic looking characters in a very detailed city, running around and blowing stuff up as if it was still the top down cartoon game of previous series. This conflict in tone is why GTA is a target whereas Saint’s Row has been able to stay out of it for the most part.

While yes, there are a lot of crazy situations and people dying in Saint’s Row, however the series has moved away from trying to tell a serious story and instead goes for complete unrealism both in gameplay and tone.

Or another example would be Sleeping Dogs which had a very mature story paired with realistic graphics and violence.

So again, using prostitutes as impromptu health packs could possibly be defended if the game was still based on the old cartoon style and aesthetic while not being realistic, but when you’re trying to have this fully fleshed out and detailed world, having something so off kilter is a conflict in tone and design.

Where to Push Boundaries:

If you’re trying to make polarizing or controversial content, then having these tone conflicts aren’t a problem as you are explicitly trying to push against social norms. However as evident with GTA, this can lead to people saying that you’ve gone too far and is something you don’t want to hear when trying to create a mass market AAA product.

At this point regarding the use of prostitutes in the GTA world, the mechanic has been included in all the ones I’ve played and it can’t be written off anymore as something optional when it has been thought about and explicitly put into the game so many times. And that sort of is the nail on the head over the tone problems with GTA and why they can’t have their cake and eat it too in a sense — If you want to tell a mature story while dealing with disturbing or violent imagery, having elements that are cartoony or unrealistic will cause a clash in the same way that having a completely off the wall story with super realistic graphics.

This is almost like the uncanny valley but when it comes to game storytelling and what happens when developers don’t go far enough with trying to set either a serious or not so serious tone.