One of the three protagonists of GTA V, Franklin
This is what I learned in my first hour of gameplay: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is not a game for beginners. Playing GTA V made me feel out of control, confused, inadequate, and nauseous. While the game is celebrated for the freedom it supposedly provides players, my experience felt extremely limited. GTA may set you loose within a new world but you, the player, have no control over the world. You have no option to change or grow as a character, to radically alter your path, or to develop new relationships (at least that I saw). The game forces you to engage with a world in which you are trapped and over which you have no lasting impact. It also forces you to engage with and embody a set self, one which is ruled by rigidly consistent programming. You may have minimal control over some immediate actions, but nothing you do can change the rules which dictate what is possible.
The free play sections of the game allow you to experiment with possibilities. In this section you are Franklin. Here is a short list of what you (Franklin) can do: you can bump into people on the street, you can follow women, making them scream and run, you can jump off of tall things, and injure yourself, you can get in physical fights, you can drive messily in the wrong direction, over sidewalks, and into houses, you can break streets signs but not fire hydrants, you can smoke weed, you can get a haircut, you can make small talk with strangers. Do anything a few times and you begin to expect the outcome. If you are interested in learning about the relationship of your character to the other characters, you can command them to interact but you don’t have any control over what they say. More constricted even than the character Carrie in Black Museum, whose consciousness is locked within a teddy bear, the GTA player has no agency over how they interact with and are perceived by others. You are stuck in place with a controller in hand, repeatedly pressing →, sometimes without response, sometimes with reciprocated anger expressed by other characters.
This lack of control clearly reveals that this world communicates, what Brooker calls, a “mediated truth.” It gives the experience of walking, driving, and shooting within an extremely limited imagination of a black life. It limits choices for action and for self, suggesting that black life lacks agency. It has none of the expansiveness of choice, even in what language players use or what they communicates with others. The language used by the characters clearly marks them racially and by class. In-game speech then serves not as a form of self-expression but as an iterative lesson in who the characters are and can be. This allows for what Leonard calls “sampling the other” which then allows for the development of “good gaming skills” (5). Players are rewarded for learning not only how to control the main character’s body but also what is possible within this imagination of black life. Though I can’t say I derived any pleasure from my gaming experience, I have to admit that there was a satisfaction in learning, after half an hour of failing the prologue sequence, how to aim the on-screen gun. Learning the rules which govern the world of GTA V, including the rules for how raced characters can and will behave and how to manipulate their bodies with the controller, allows for players to engage with the most control available to them: it equips them with a toolbox of possibilities, albeit one that is nearly empty.
Once I reluctantly accepted that interactions with pedestrians were extremely limited, I returned to the mission-focused path of the game. GTA V wore me down. It showed me again and again what was possible until I accepted that I had no power to change the world or my options within the world. I was frustrated as I played and disturbed that female characters ran from me, from CJ. As a small white femme, I have never experienced this kind of response to my presence. I found myself deeply uncomfortable being perceived, even by programmed characters, as predatory. And so I need to admit that, while I know that the lack of options, agency, and control in the game presents a limited, racist imagination of black life, I also know that part of the reason that I felt the wrongness of this so poignantly was due to my own discomfort with being responded to in the ways that the game presents as normative responses to black men. I want options. I want to be in control of my presentation and how others perceive me. That I expect these things in my in-game and out-of-game experiences is clearly a result of my white femmeness, and the privileges which come along with these identities.