(Photo: Gamescenes)

The issue of gun violence in America has been the topic of intense conversation lately. And sometimes video games are roped into said conversation as one of the causes for not just gun violence, but violence in general.

But rather than try to link video games to violence or disapprove the faulty association, one professor is using a video game -- specifically one of the most controversial games ever, Grand Theft Auto V -- to demonstrate gun violence in the United States of America.

Watch live video from josephdelappe on www.twitch.tv

Joseph Delappe, an American professor at Albertay University in Scotland and an artist, launched earlier this week "Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides."

Being developed in collaboration with Albert Elwin and James Wood, Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides is a self-playing version of GTA V that represents and visualizes the entire body count of gun violence from January 1, 2018 in-game. In other words, the project takes the victims of gun homicides in the United States, and represents their dead bodies in a one-for-one fashion.

Each day the game resets and uses new data that is updated on Gun Violence Archive, meaning each day new data will be added increasing the total number of people killed and represented in the game.

The program began on July 4, 2018, and the plan is to run it until July 4, 2019.

In terms of data visualizations, this is a pretty neat way to filter a real-life issue, one that is hard to visualize otherwise. That said, it has unsurprisingly been the target of criticism from virtually every direction.

You can view Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides via Joseph Delappe's Twitch page. Though, I will warn you that it should only be viewed by mature audiences, and is a bit unsettling in a really strange way.

At the moment of writing this, there is 80 concurrent viewers, 11,516 total viewers, and 4,178 deaths since January 1st. Now, 4,182.

Grand Theft Auto V is not only the third best-selling game of all time, but it has a history of being at the center of the "games lead to violence" debate, so it's pretty fitting that Delappe opted to use it for the data visualization, though I reckon Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive aren't very happy about it.

Now, 4,208.

Source: Gamescenes