“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” - Chuck Palahniuk’s infamous Tyler Durden in the movie Fight Club
In case you managed to miss out on the news, Grand Theft Auto 5 dropped last week on September 17th and it seems to me like everyone on the internet has a polarizing opinion. Some people out there are rightly emphasizing how simply fun the game is, and how its innovative use of multiple characters make its climactic heist scenes some of the best-paced moments in gaming. Others are also rightly decrying the game as shockingly misogynist, even for a game in the Grand Theft Auto series, and bringing forth very valid concerns about the use of torture, massacre and outright brutality as gameplay elements. With all of these polarizing concerns flying around, I would like to make one thing clear
This article is not intended to review Grand Theft Auto 5. It has no intention to directly discuss any moments or instances in the game for their own sake, and neither is its purpose to evaluate any part of the game itself. I have, I think, a much better question to ask.
Why did I buy this game, and why did you?
This is perhaps a little misleading outright. I bought it under the pretense of reviewing it, but I really wanted to play this game. So, apparently, did a lot of other people. Similar, if less impressive sales figures attended the recent Saint’s Row IV, which is itself an outgrowth of an entire genre of game based on the Grand Theft Auto series.
From the success of the GTA series and the similar success of those games which seek to outright copy, parallel or satirize GTA, and furthermore given the distinct reputation the series and its imitators have for being violent and in some way distasteful in relation to general gaming, one may draw a very clear conclusion:
Gamers as a group of people specifically enjoy open-world games that feature either immoral or amoral plots and that furthermore feature either the direct fact or potential presence of indiscriminate violence.
I don’t intend to linger too long here, because even if you don’t like these games, the sales numbers, the vast popularity (stated and unstated), and the unique accessibility and media presence of games like Grand Theft Auto 5 all testify to my premise. These games are popular, people like them, and the features listed in my conclusion are not ancillary or secondary to some greater, nobler purpose that these games serve. You play GTA to commit crime in a virtual world and get away with it, and to experience a plot and a gameplay experience that often glorifies or at least heavily features organized and unorganized criminal activity.
Of course, despite what those in the media would have us believe, more or less all of the people who play games like this, myself included, are quite specifically not criminals and are rarely of an even vaguely disobedient temperament. It’s not altogether uncommon in gaming to see people who would never even dream of running a stop sign pop into a GTA session and go on a series of murderous rampages with civilian death tolls in the triple digits.
On the ground level, this is easy to dismiss as escapism, probably because it really does function as escapism, but that pushes back our earlier question, why do these games sell, and it almost completely ignores the particularity of the question; why do these games sell. What is it about participating in (virtual) organized crime and mass genocide that attracts the attention and the money of something like 13 million people?
The reason this is an important question is that escapism was not always, is not fundamentally and has only recently become something that heavily involved violence.
For persons living in the early 20th century, reading fantasy novels (or fairy stories as they were more likely to be called then) was a major mode of escapism. As a matter of fact, two of the greatest proponents of escapism in the same era were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, men who were famous for their orthodox Christian doctrinal positions and their fantastic imaginations. It’s hard to imagine that when Lewis or Tolkien defended escapism they would have envisioned GTA.
My point here is that for most of history myths and fantastic stories about gods, kings, heroes, warriors, princesses and holy men and women were the primary mode of escapism for most of human culture. The idea essentially was, “Yeah, I live a hard life as a medieval peasant, grinding myself into the ground to keep a small crop of carrots, but it sure is exciting to forget about that and listen to stories of just, fair King Arthur.”
These stories which make up the escapism of generations long past tended to be generally uplifting, moralizing, perhaps funny, and often inspiring. Take for instance the Bhagavad Gita, in which a noble prince has a lengthy talk with Krishna and finds a way to justify to himself the things he must do because they are his duty. Although the Gita was written for a society and a culture with significantly fewer comforts and pleasures than our own, one is hard-pressed to find any kind of cynicism. You never see any ancient stories where the good guy goes crazy and racks up a civilian body count in the triple digits.
So why do you see it now? Why is one of our most popular forms of entertainment an escapist fantasy of unpunished crime and mass murder, where the good guy is the one who does whatever he wants without regard or ties to anyone else?
I’m not sure that I know, but I think Karl Marx of all people has some good insights.
More or less everyone knows how Marx thought ownership would eventually work out, and in some sense it could be said that the politics of the 20th century were mostly footnotes to Marx’s economic ideas. Fewer people, however, know what Marx said about alienation.
For Marx, alienation is in essence the thing that makes Capitalism bad to begin with. To explore his theory quickly, we’ll work with the classic example of the burger-flipper at your local McDonalds, who we will call Elaine for the sake of brevity.
1. The worker is alienated from the product
Elaine does not decide where, how, when, or in what quantity the burgers are to be made. The end product of her labor, the burger patty, is in no real sense her creation: it was delivered, pre-formed, and frozen, and it must be prepared in certain way at a certain time, with no real input from Elaine or anyone that she knows. In short, when you receive a burger it is not a meal that has been made by a person, it is a pre-formed product whose preparation, not creation, was overseen by a person.
2. The worker is alienated from work itself, the act of producing
All people have an innate drive to think, act, and work. Elaine does not fulfill her need to think, her need to act, or ultimately her need to work, because she has been removed from the process of her work as much as is possible. Her grill is pre-set at a certain temperature, she uses company mandated tools to produce company mandated items at a company mandated standard of production. She is not, in the context of her work, a person who is exercising her human faculties, she is a thing who cannot quite yet be replaced by a machine that would not require a salary.
3. The worker is alienated from herself
Fundamental human nature, according to Marx, engages life and seeks to better the self in one way or another through the dynamic action of the will. Elaine, however, has no real opportunity to exercise her dynamic will: she must work her job so that she can have a (minimum) wage and manage to survive, but the job which occupies most of her time provides her with no fulfillment of her human faculties. At every point in the process, her ability to choose for herself is removed. She cannot choose the shape of the burger or the seasonings that accompany it. She cannot choose the hours that she works or the wage that she earns, and the work itself is menial and repetitive, which likely removes any sense of personal fulfillment she could find in the production of delicious food for large numbers of people.
4. The worker is alienated from other people
The cruel realities of capitalism are such that Elaine, like millions of others in similar positions, is an interchangeable cog in a machine that could, more or less, function just as well without her. Another person can be taught her trade with relative ease and they can in turn fill her position. This makes it so that ultimately she and everyone she works with is in a sense robbed of her or his humanity, her manager and coworkers could, without much going wrong, be replaced on almost a moment’s notice.
Now, I’ll admit that the burger-flipper is perhaps an extreme case, and obviously many people live happy lives in fulfilling jobs. But let’s be frank, most don’t. Most people work low-level jobs that are more or less analogous to Elaine’s unfortunate circumstance, and most people who don’t share Elaine’s unfortunate circumstance are the kind of people who dictate Elaine’s unfortunate circumstance to people like Elaine.
What’s important here is that this whole system of alienation, which is very present in the modern world, the existence of which I think it is difficult, if not impossible to ignore, creates angst and resentment. No one likes being dehumanized, and no one likes menial, meaningless work. That is more or less the root of the great American college myth: you work hard in high school so you can get into a good college where you work hard so you can get a good (i.e. managerial or otherwise influential and non-menial) job.
However, the unfortunate, grim reality is that most people in our society (even those with the “good” jobs) feel depressed, lonely, unproductive, replaceable and ultimately subject to the will of another person or group of persons.
It is my theory then, as aided by the insights of Marx, that GTA and other games which are similar to it are a popular form of escapism because the life that we live in the West in the 21st century creates a feeling of helplessness and antagonism within us.
Why do I love crime and mayhem in GTA? Because we live in a society that (if Marx is right) engenders feelings of anger and helplessness on the part of persons who are not in control of large amounts of money. It’s fun because it satisfies the antagonism and the helplessness I feel by letting me express that antagonism and by furthermore letting me do so whenever, wherever and with whatever choice of artillery I choose.
Why did I buy GTA V? Why did you?
I bought it (and don’t be offended, I think you did too) because “the man” is bringing us down and “the system” has made us want a whole mess of things like meaning and independence that the very same man and the very same system have contrived to take away from us for the extra dimes they can squeeze out of the paychecks that they begrudgingly give us when we’re good little boys and good little girls.
GTA and games like it are mini-universes in which the antagonism of modern life can be sated and the feeling of free will can be realized without any consequences.
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