Late to the party but never without the sort of stuff that makes it interesting, we've sort of come full circle on the GTA stuff where enough gamers have had time to play the game for themselves and see if it lives up to all the hype, and carries the candor and the violence one would expect from a franchise known for pushing the limits. However, has the limit been pushed too far in GTA V?
A number of articles have gone live over the weekend – after gaming pundits had time to actually finish the game – decrying, questioning, bemoaning, sniveling, arguing and complaining about the graphic content of Grand Theft Auto V. The main question is – as posed by Polygon – is the game too violent?
The thing that really put the discussion into top gear was a certain torture scene; a scene that I suppose you could label as a spoiler, though it's GTA and the torture isn't happening to any of the main characters so there's nothing gained or lost by watching it. You can check it out below (it's completely isolated and contains no context outside of the torture itself so if you haven't reached this part you don't have to worry about it spoiling anything specific.)
Some people felt the scene went too far, some people felt it was just typical Rockstar satire on the inclusion of torture in the game just the way it's usually glorified in Hollywood blockbusters. Some people felt that the Illuminati had gone and ruined the game... but I have no idea what the last part has to do with anything whatsoever.
Anyway, the torture is sort of graphic but it's far less disturbing than half the stuff in Max Payne 3.
**Major Spoiler Warning** The major plot twist was that a lot of innocent people were killed in Max Payne 3 because the Brazilian special forces were rounding them up and slicing them open to harvest their organs, and they were doing so out of one of the most derelict looking buildings ever featured in a game. It was the kind of stuff you would have expected from a Hostel movie.
The only thing that makes GTA V's torture seem more graphic than the violence depicted in Max Payne 3 is because it's interactive, similar to how the sex appeared more pornographic in GTA: SA's “Hot Coffee” compared to Assassin's Creed because it was interactive.
In fact, it was the aforementioned interactivity that led New Zealand writer Murray Williams from iol, to flee from the game store with his young son when they found out that GTA V had anal sex, oral sex and interactive torture. It was like a Puritan parent's nightmare game come true or a Pagan parent's dream game come true.
So far, there hasn't been any reports of GTA V forcing any real life FBI or CIA agents to torture a Middle-Easterner or cause kids to engage in the sexual acts mentioned above... yet (though in an unrelated bit, Minecraft was blamed for causing a kid to reenact the 8-bit violence from the game at his school, as reported by Digital Journal).
But what do you think about GTA V? Do you think Rockstar pushed graphic torture and extreme violence too far?
