Royal St. George’s College in Toronto is an elite private school, an all boys school with an Anglican-liberal tradition (and a very good choir). With annual fees of around $30,000, it's a bastion of wealth and influence.

The school recently undertook an experimental educational exercise that sought to address its students' privilege. It tasked senior students to play Grand Theft Auto 5, to come together in group sessions to discuss how the game frames and expresses their own lives in comparison to the lives of people less wealthy, less white, less male.

Los Santos is a long way from Royal St. George’s College.

Grand Theft Auto 5 is set in a fictional U.S. city of Los Santos in which crime and violence are central. Many of the characters in the game are self-mocking stereotypes of the urban American fictional landscape. GTA5 is a celebration of a glamorized criminal class living in a moral vacuum.

The game’s development was overseen by the Houser brothers, who come from an upper middle class white background and who attended a highly rated private school in London.

Los Santos is a long way from Royal St. George's College. A well-regarded 2009 documentary chronicled the lives of some of RCSG's students. As one reviewer put it, the film "reveals the pangs of adolescence in the context of social privilege."

RSGC students are not unaware of their own advantages. In the documentary, a local politician addresses the student body. "You're among the most privileged people in the world … What you do with that privilege will define you as a person."

A DOMINANT SOCIAL GROUP

Paul Darvasi is an educator with a keen interest in how games can be used as teaching tools. He runs a website called Ludic Learning. He penned a report for the United Nations cultural arm UNESCO on the usefulness of games.

He's also a teacher at RSGC, where he specializes in media literacy. He pitched the idea of a course based on GTA5 to the school's administration, and to the boys' parents.

"These students are upper middle class white males, a very dominant social group in Northern American society," he says. "These are the individuals who go on and obtain high powered positions in society, in governments, in politics and industry."

Wikipedia lists more than 50 "Old Georgian" alumni who have achieved notable careers in politics, the arts, media, medicine, industry and professional sports.

"It's a group I think that has to be sensitized to other realities," says Darvasi. "The way they typically encounter these other realities are through mitigated experiences like video games.

"Playing this game under normal conditions can be compared to a colonial experience. They are exercising their privilege playing around with race, playing around with gender."

"Playing this game can be compared to a colonial experience.”

Darvasi made his pitch to parents and faculty. Somewhat to his surprise, they all agreed it would be a worthwhile endeavor. Most of the boys already owned a console and a copy of GTA5. Those who did not, including a boy who had never previously been allowed a console at home, managed to borrow what they needed.

Darvasi's preferred format was open collaboration. The students played the game at home and then wrote about their experiences, or created videos, photo essays and comics. In class, they sat together, shared their work and spoke about how they played and how they interacted with other characters.

He is keen to stress that this lesson was particular to its own time and place, to the outlook of these students. He says his group is "down to earth, pleasant and communicative, and they each battle with their own struggles and demons."

He adds that the students are smart, liberal, idealistic. They understand that art and culture — including video games — carry significant biases that ought to be understood.

"Problematic games can provide valid and relevant fields from which to have constructive discussions," says Darvasi. "They open up conversations on violence, misogyny, body image and racism. It's very important to think critically about our relationship to all these issues."

RACE TOURISM

One of GTA5's main characters is a likable young African American man called Franklin. Raised in poverty, he spends his time in the game as a violent criminal and murderer.

Darvasi says one of his students' projects sought to change Franklin's arc. "In the game Franklin tries to leave the gang life, immediately fails and is forced to return to a life of crime. The message is that the gravitational pull of the criminal lifestyle is so strong that you're never going to escape it.

"So the student used the in-game filming software to tell a story about how Franklin totally leaves crime behind and becomes a successful developer. By retelling that story, he was thinking about the material in different ways.

"The students were creating counter-hegemonic media, which challenged some of the power structures in the game. It's a methodology of how to have students think about media that could be potentially damaging to certain groups and to re-mediate that representation."

Darvasi adds that he saw his own role as guiding the students through the issues they were confronting. His job was to show how games are political, not in a sense of partisan dogma, but in how they depict and exploit societal divisions and economic disparities.

"There's a whole web of social issues and nuances about being a black person that [the students] really hadn't realized are not present in the game, and it perpetuates a certain stereotype.

"They explored the idea of identity tourism and how they enter these spaces, and how they enter black bodies. It becomes a commodity. They're adopting blackness as a temporary style."

“They explored the idea of identity tourism and how they enter these spaces.”

A pair of students created a video in which a white man tours Franklin's neighborhood in a pickup truck. They pitched it as a critique of middle-class players entering the game's stereotypical representations of economically challenged areas as theme park tourists, ignorant of the real lives they were witnessing.

Darvasi notes that GTA5 uses heavy irony to critique American culture, but that this irony is often missed by younger players who assume that they are playing something that documents class divisions, rather than skewers them.

"Some of the students opened their eyes to this not being a face value game where violence is just violence and stereotypes are just stereotypes. For the first time, they began to access the irony of the text."

For Darvasi and for his students, GTA5's ironic veneer was something to be recognized and more thoroughly explored.

"Even while the game is a satire on gangster movies and hip-hop videos, it's also a very deliberate assembly of stereotypes," he says. "[The developers are] covering themselves by saying 'we're making fun of these stereotypes'. But for a lot of people, including some of these students, video games and entertainment media are the only way they access these neighborhoods, and so they think it's realistic.

"GTA is a point of concentration for many ills in our midst. You can't pick up a paper today without reading about the collision between police and minorities, and that's one of the core mechanics in GTA: having confrontations with the police. So they are playing a black character and they're entering his body and performing this ritual collision between authority and race."

GENDER AND SEX

For many, Grand Theft Auto 5's portrayal of women is problematic, with a number of the game's reviewers pointing out its misogynist tendencies. The game allows players to engage and then murder sex workers. Its main female characters are shrews or sex objects.

"Media literacy classes and digital literacy classes are not rare," says Darvasi. "Every school has an opportunity to do that, and many are rightly addressing the representation of women in media through film, television, comic books and other platforms.

"But instead of the teacher saying 'here's how women are represented in this film', I'm asking the students to play this game, to think about how women are objectified and come present it to the class."

In class discussions, students talked about the absence of positive female role models in the game. A few suggested that the single-player portion of the game should offer an option to play a female character, as the online portion does.

“They're developing ideas about women and they are being influenced by GTA5.”

One noted that the sex workers were bruised and cut, marking their bodies as sites of violence, and perhaps inviting more damage. The students also identified and discussed the damsel in distress trope in a mission where crime boss Michael saves his daughter from a yacht where she parties with alleged porn producers.

"The representation of women and of men is really important because of their conceptions of themselves as males and of masculinity. This can often be presented in a very narrow way which informs their own sense of self identity which can be harmful not just to themselves but to society at large."

The students focused on how men and women are depicted in the game, and at how masculinity is defined on the streets of Los Santos, and in its private spaces.

GTA5 has sold more than 100 million copies. Most boys in Western countries have either played it, or are aware of its general shape.

"There is certainly 100 percent awareness among the students that the depictions are negative. They are completely aware of that, but that doesn't stop them from participating in activities within the game, like the killing of prostitutes and touching strippers for prizes.

"During the formative years of their sexuality, they're developing ideas about women and they are being influenced by GTA5. Meanwhile, schools are outright ignoring these games. We're setting these kids adrift and not really giving them the support that they need in order to process these problematic representations in a healthy way."

VIOLENCE AND MASCULINITY

Darvasi did not choose Grand Theft Auto because he's a huge fan of the game, nor because he particularly despises it. It just happens to work well as a cultural learning tool.

"I played GTA5 for the study, and it often felt laborious. I admire it as a technical accomplishment, but riding around in cars and shooting people is simply not my bag.

"As a cultural force, I believe it can be damaging, but that is based on instinct, not evidence. I felt it was a means to dialogue with the students about the most pressing social issues of our time."

Many games played by boys and young men involve some form of violence, and GTA5 is no exception.

Darvasi found that some of the boys used the game to relieve some of the aggression and stress in their lives. Others prefered to explore or to play with vehicles in a non-violent way.

One student built a pink smart-car to ride around in, because he wanted to challenge masculine stereotypes.

Another student created a comic in which he wrote two parallel stories, one where the main character adheres to hyper-masculine stereotypes while a second mirror image character takes a more reflective and communicative approach. The two characters were confronted by the same situations, but each dealt with them in different ways.

Many GTA5 players talk about the game being an open world where they can 'do anything,' and Darvasi's students were no exception. He decided to address the issue.

“Lack of communication is a huge problem with men.”

"The game really doesn't allow for a great range of communication. When you hit a pedestrian on the street the pedestrian usually says something negative and you have the option to either run, punch them, shoot them, stab them, or use a flamethrower or something.

"What it doesn't allow you to do is open up a dialogue tree where you can say, 'hey I apologize for having bumped into you,' or 'why are you being so mean to me'.

"That lack of communication is a huge problem with men who are often unable to articulate and resolve problems in an unaggressive way. It's a prevalent issue.

"By the end of the course, the students started using words like 'hegemonic masculinity' in our daily conversations and they started understanding how these representations of men might be problematic."

SCHOOLS AND GAMES

For Darvasi and other progressive educators, the use of video games in classrooms is the future. Games are at the center of our culture. Students understand games. They enjoy interacting with them and talking about them.

"Schools cannot ignore these games," he says. "You can't just access the ludic systems of a game without thinking about the content beyond its surface value, which is what many players do, especially the millions of children who play these games when they are under the recommended age limit.

“This will perhaps help them better contextualize their place in the world.”

"Obviously, we can't ask schools to bring GTA in. It's not realistic. It's not going to happen. This experiment was more a probe than model. I don't expect other schools to do it in this way, or to actively incentivise their students to play violent or sexist games.

"But there are ways of addressing existing gameplay in healthy and positive ways. This experience provided a rich outlet for meaningful dialogue, which I hope to see in other schools and classes according to what suits their unique cultures."

He says that this course of lessons was completely particular to the group of students he is working with, and should not be seen as demonstrative of anything at a wider level. He'd also love to see similar experiments with students who come from different backgrounds.

For these boys, he believes they learned something valuable.

"I'm teaching them how to become media literate and to become better citizens, to become better people. This isn't the end of the journey for many of them. This is the start of the journey. What I'm hoping is to plant seeds about race, about gender and about political ideology and to think about the operations of power, and about interrogating these things. When they go off to their next level of their lives, this will perhaps help them better contextualize their place in the world."