Grand
Theft Auto: San Andreas is, in my humble opinion one of the greatest games of
all time. The critically acclaimed platform game has been hailed for it’s large
playable world, its rich and diverse in game soundtrack, as well as its diverse
array of characters. However upon critical reflection, I start to realize the
intriguing ways that race is represented in the gameplay and storyline. It
could be argued that the vast majority of the character representations are
nothing more than simple racial or gender stereotypes, which of course, are not
salient and accurate representations of these racial or gender groups. Using
Hall's work on encoding and decoding messages, and the concept of the ‘active’
audience as well as other commentaries on representations of race and gender
inside and outside the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas universe, racial
representations and reactions to them will be analysed and reflected upon.
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The game's storyline revolves around
Carl 'CJ' Johnson, a young, African American male who returns to his home
neighborhood in Los Santos (modeled on Los Angeles) after the death of his
mother, the game follows his journey to find his mother's killer, but also
encompasses Los Santos' extensive problems with gang violence, police
corruption and even concludes with a riot which mirrors the real life events of
1992's race riots in Los Angeles. You follow CJ on his journey to take out
enemy gang members, run errands for corrupt police, evade law enforcement, and
‘take back the streets’ with his friends and fellow members of his gang ‘Grove
Street Families’. All sorts of semi automatic and hand-held weapons are commonplace;
as are drug deals, drive by shootings, hit and run driving and police
shootouts. Within the game Asians are represented as Triad members who drive
fast cars and wear clean cut black suits, Latin Americans are represented as
'gangbangers' who drive low rider cars, have tattoos and wear baggy 'gangster'
clothing. There is limited interaction with Caucasian characters, however a one
prominent supporting cast member is represented as the prototypical flowerchild
hippie with long hair and anti-establishment beliefs.
Gee (2005) states that ‘games are play
spaces where players can experience an economy of pleasure’, keeping this in
mind, then it would be fair to assume that the dominant reading of Grand Theft
Auto as a text would be that it is nothing more than a fictitious game, even
with it’s real world grounding in very real American gang culture. A dominant
reading of the game would also involve the acceptance of racial portrayals of
the aforementioned racial groups by its audience.
DeVane and Squire have analyzed the
potential effects these readings of racial portrayals, in particular on youth
audiences, stating that ‘young Black males who live on the margins of American
society, their viewpoints shaped and informed by poverty and institutionalized
racism’ (DeVane and Squire, 2008, p.10) are more likely to read the game as
something more than just a work of fiction. They read the Grand Theft Auto
franchise as some form of extrapolated real world (which it is), and therefore
something that they could conceivably emulate. This is because of the real
world parallels mentioned above, the emulation of the Los Angeles riots, the
visual setting very much mirroring real life Los Angeles and the relatable
racial representations and storylines.
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Devane and Squire further analysed this
by surveying and studying Grand Theft Auto players, with one stating that they
felt the game had numbed him to the kind of violence the game portrays, and
others stating that they felt as if the games influence (both in terms of race
and violence) was very much heightened when exposed to an audience of children
or young adults. Another gamer interviewed stated that he thought that ‘They’re
looking for, like, to find out who they are’ (Devane and Squire, 2008, p.11),
in other words looking for self-identity. African American advocate Richard
Jones comments on the way in which racial representations in GTA are read by
African American audiences, stating that the game ‘reinforces poor self-image
in black youth’, as well as the fact that playing for long periods ‘mentally implants anti-productive images’ (Jones, 2007). This
essentially means that for an African American audience, they are likely to
adopt the dominant or preferred reading of the text, which is that of the
violent African American gang and drug culture seen in the game. This is
somewhat backed by real world crime figures taken from the United States, where
African Americans account for more than 50% of murders in the United States,
while only accounting for less than 20% of the American populous (Cooper, 2012,
p.3). While it is almost impossible to establish causation between the two (and
even then, it would be one of a sea of contributing factors), video game
violence and how it translates to the real world is a growing issue.
The representation of not only CJ
and his African American counterparts, but also the East Asia, Mexican and
Caucasian characters was (and still is) a massive talking point when discussing
this game. This is despite the creators of the game stating on numerous
occasions that these characters were created and styled with entertainment and
humour in mind and was not written with malicious intent. Hall's concept of
encoding and decoding delves into the ways in which the producers of content
encode their stories with meaning, and then the ways in which the consumers
then deduct and decode meaning from that encoded narrative (Hall, 1980,
pp.55-58).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH74hUhggJc
The racial representations of Grand
Theft Auto: San Andreas can be decoded and read in 3 ways:
- Dominant/Preferred
reading - The audience agrees with
the text, in this context, players of the game would accept the racial
representations of the characters, as they find them true to life and be in
agreement with all aspects of these racial representations.
- Negotiated reading - The audience agrees with aspects of the text, in this context, players of the game would accept the racial representations of the characters however would disagree or reject certain aspects. For example if the audience was of Asian descent, they may reject the portrayal of Asians, but accept all other meaning.
- Oppositional reading - The
audience disagrees with all aspects of the text, and are hostile towards what
it offers the audience, in this context; audiences of the game would reject all
racial representations contained in the game.
However it is important to note that
the encoded meaning is not necessarily the decoded meaning. In this case
as mentioned above, the meanings of GTA can be read in different ways, and
often these ways that meaning is made by audiences are dependent on their
situation and personal experiences. For example the oppositional way that Jones
reads Grand Theft Auto as a text is very much reliant on Jones’ own personal
experience. His place as an African American author and advocate puts him in a
position to read the African American representations in an oppositional
manner, but not necessarily the entire text. As is probably the case with all
racial groups in this setting, they will read different aspects of the text in
different ways, often rejecting representations of their own race as they consider
them offensive for themselves, but might not be as sensitive to possibly off
colour representations of other genders, ages, demographics and races in this
case.
In conclusion, racial representations
in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas have been seen as controversial in the past,
with the fictional building of a gang empire, speeding, thieving, prostitution
and murder also causing their fair share of discontent coming from certain
areas of the community (often non gamers). As a general rule, it is
unreasonable to think that audiences will adopt a dominant/preferred reading of
any text, as they rarely agree with every aspect of a story or narrative. And
almost as rarely will viewers adopt a completely oppositional view. As with Grand Theft Auto, the likely reading
of any complex, multi-layered text will mostly produce some sort of negotiated
reading of the text, with individual viewers finding as many points they agree
with as they do aspects that they do not. In this instance it could be said
that how audiences read GTA would be dependent on their own race and personal
circumstances, and this is the case with most (if not all) media texts. Hall’s analysis
provides a useful framework for decoding how audiences read and interact with
stories and characters. This is because Hall sees audiences as ‘active’
participants in a two way dialogue between the creators of a text and
individual viewers, it is this individual dialogue that gives rise to the
concept that not all viewers will read a narrative in the same way, as their
reading will depend on their differing personal circumstances and experiences,
as has been illustrated here.
References
Cooper, A 2012, Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008. p. 3.
Games and Culture, Volume 3 Number 3-4 July 2008, Sage Publications, accessed, 11 Sept, 2013, pp.10-12. http://www.bendevane.com/VTA2012/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/264.full_.pdf
Hall,
S 1980, ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, Centre for
Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, England, pp. 55-58,
accessed 12 Sept 2013, http://visualstudies.buffalo.edu/coursenotes/art250/250A/_assets/_readings/encoding_decoding_hall.pdf
Games and Culture, Volume 3 Number 3-4 July 2008, Sage Publications, accessed, 11 Sept, 2013, pp.10-12. http://www.bendevane.com/VTA2012/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/264.full_.pdf
QuickJump Gaming Network, 2007, Writer says GTA is racist; Gamers React, accessed 4 Sept, 2013, http://www.qj.net/psp/titles/writer-says-gta-is-racist-gamers-react.html
