Week 09: Othering

For the reading this week I chose “White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I mainly chose this article because I was a video game reviewer for 5 years. I have worked with several magazines as well as several websites, and have an thorough knowledge of the Rockstar development studio (the studio that designed GTA: SA) as well as a good understanding of the GTA series and its satirical intentions.

P. Barrett makes some good arguments as to the objectification of African Americans in GTA: SA, however the writer fails to point out that all of the GTA games are based off complex, and specific sub-culture satire.
For instance, the first GTA game of the San Andreas generation was GTA 3, a game that set out to recreate New York City as fictional “Liberty City”, In the game you play a voiceless italian Mafioso, and spend most of your time conversing with other typical Italian Mafioso types. This leads to complex genre satire including missions that are recreations of scenes from movie's, characters that a direct homage to their film originals.

The follow-up game GTA: Vice City was pretty much, just a video game re-creation of the 1983 film Scarface. As you can see from the screenshot above, taken during a game-mission that re-creates the infamous bathroom-chainsaw scene. The chracters in Vice City are direct re-creations of many Scarface as well as other famous miami-drug themed media (for instance, the game is littered with Miami-Vice reference’s)

(Real life rapper 'Biggie Smalls' and video-game gangster 'Big Smoke')

GTA SA, is no different, Barret hints at this as describing SA as a interactive 'Boyz n the Hood' (a popular 90's film about African American youths living in South Central Los Angeles), however what I feel the writer fails to grasp is that the entire game is pop-culture satire. From the very first mission, the mission names and scenarios are constantly references to moves and even popular rap music. The main characters 2 main friends are direct re-creations of 2 famous deceased rappers, 'Biggie Smalls', and 'Eazy-E' as you can see from the photo comparisons above and below.

(Real life rapper 'Eazy-E' and video game gangster 'Ryder')

In conclusion, I agree that the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas may objectify African Americans and negatively portray them as living in a culture of materialism and violence, but this is only because this is how popular rap-culture portrays itself, the characters are re-creations of real-life people, and the characters retain their personalities and viewpoints. I find, to isolate GTA SA as portraying negative racial/cultural stereotypes, as racist, the games that preceded it stared white main characters, living in white cultures, but are just as violent and objectifying. However, because the players are predominately white, and the playable-character is white, it is seen as 'ok', I find that more offensive than anything.