Grand Theft Auto 5, a high-octane video game based on quick cash, ultra-violence, drugs, booze and sleaze, brought its creators at Take-Two Interactive a billion dollars in the first three days of its release. And it brings unbridled violence into countless homes.
GTA5 encourages players to spend cash on cars, clothes, guns and properties rapidly accumulated through profitable activities such as knocking over armoured cars, winning street races, doing stick-ups, murdering the competition and a host of other quick cash-making endeavours.
As socio-politically muddled and profoundly misogynistic as it is, GTA5 is populated with graphically attractive role models such as Michael, Franklin and Trevor, whose lives are guided by a kind of dark chaotic dystopia, but who are living large anyway.
Michael is a former criminal who’s dissatisfied with his current life of privilege and relaxation. He has two kids: daughter Tracey, who dreams of making it big in either porn flicks or reality TV, and son Jimmy, who spends most of his time spouting hate-filled trash talk while, ironically, endlessly playing video games online.
Franklin is a talented young driver and repo man who, after a chance meeting with Michael, is ushered into a life of big-time violent crime.
Then there’s Trevor, a former friend and business associate of Michael’s who is now a methamphetamine entrepreneur living in the virtual desert town north of Los Santos.
Trevor is a truly horrible, terrifying, psychotic human being. He possesses a chilling combination of intelligence and insanity.
Monstrously violent and frightening at times, he makes the other two protagonists seem well-adjusted by comparison.
Who wouldn’t want, in some quiet private place, to assume these virtual identities and sort out a few of life’s problems, even if only in imagination?
Hopefully, nobody either you or your kids know personally.
Not everybody wants to play ultra-violent interactive video games. The virtual world of quick cash, over-the-top violence, stabbings, head stompings, drugs, booze and sleaze apparently offends some people to the point that they turn to network television.
But what they find there doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement.
Big Brother completed 15 wildly successful seasons and by now the intricacies of the CBS reality stalwart should be pretty well known to its dedicated viewers.
Here we have strangers in a house under 24/7 live TV coverage, battling each other to win money and notoriety. Contestants included people who had been heard making racist and homophobic rants and joking about enjoying child pornography.
Contestants also made the show notorious this past summer by churning out racist rage and not-infrequent obscenities.
Treachery, scheming, ego and avarice: Big Brother has it all, but at least it does not require that you spend hours with your game box fully engrossed with pounding adversaries, murdering others and generally acting out gratuitous fantasies.
Breaking Bad was another ratings blockbuster this year. It didn’t have clearly defined “good guys” and “bad guys.”
The main character on Breaking Bad destroys his family and countless other lives during his metamorphosis from a likable high-school chemistry teacher into a depraved meth kingpin. It happens.
You could even watch carefully and figure out most of what you need to know about manufacturing meth at home and what to do when people obstruct that.
Breaking Bad moved well beyond the kind of moral horizon that previously was the limiting outer edge of television shows with morally ambiguous characters: The Wire, House of Cards, Lost and Dexter, all shows that lead us to root for violent antihero protagonists.
Who has access to all this? Recent studies found that at least 70 per cent of households have more than one television, and almost 50 per cent of children have television, home video-game equipment or a personal computer in their rooms.
By age 18, according to the same studies, a child may have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence.
That alone is worth thinking about. That and the billion-dollar profit from video violence.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
