ALC215 Week 7: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is, in my humble opinion one of the greatest games of all time, however upon critical reflection, I start to realise the intriguing ways that race is represented in the gameplay and storyline. Using Hall's work on encoding and decoding messages and the construction of meaning I'll attempt to analyse these representations, and responses to them.

Shoot 'em up! www.g-unleashed.com

Big Smoke, Sweet and Ryder. Eerily similar to rappers Notorious BIG and Eazy-E. Via www.gtax.webz.cz

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 a riot which mirrors the real life events of 1992's race riots in Los Angeles. 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 interraction with Caucasian characters, however the ones we do see are represented as typical country 'rednecks'.


 

 

 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, even though the creators didn't necessarily encode the narrative of the game to portray these stereotypes in a negative light. 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). However it is important to note that the encoded meaning is not necessarily the decoded meaning. 

The racial representations 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 'agree' with them.

- 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 the text, in this context, audiences of the game would reject all racial representations contained in the game.

References

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<