I entered the GTA world for the very first time in the past week and I have to admit that I was very apprehensive in playing a daunting 3 hours on the PS4 console. I’ve only ever played on a Wii and I basically only played Super Smash Bros and Just Dance.
I actually started by playing some version of GTA on the PS3 console and literally could not get past the first intro sequences. After a few failed missions, the game would let me choose to move past a single introductory sequence. When I finally started playing the right version, I had a similar time following my in-game friends and escaping the police. It was fun though, I have to admit.
In playing this game, I would project the target audience to be folks who’d like to assume the character of a mafioso/gangbanger, but can’t perform this type of characterization in real life. Despite being able to play characters of different races, it is evident that these characters are performing Blackness or at least how Blackness exists in the white imagination. Based on who I’ve generally seen play this game, the target audience could be any male-identifying person from ages 9 to 25. This doesn’t mean that this online performance is limited to this demographic, I’m just speaking from experience.
By the way of conversation surrounding performance, I thought the ability to switch between characters of different races (and play as a dog, woof!) was an interesting gaming option, especially given that the game is single player and first-person. Through this mode of play, strict delineations of race and racialization are ambiguated. In a sense, when you play as Michael, you’re the supreme wigga with an *actual* Black man inside of you. Further, external characters help to draw race/class differences between neighborhoods. For instance, Franklin’s neighborhood is indicated not only by the housing, but by the racialization of people in the street, who tend to be more aggressive, more likely to indulge in vices, and often Black/Brown. As we’ve come to understand in this course, racialization escapes physical characteristics; the joining of Blackness and poverty/criminality/aggression is made clear in the casual depictions of the GTA universe.
Despite the ambiguation of race in GTA–which effectively permits players to embody a white-imagined Blackness– and the muddied audience, there is a clear crafting of this game around and for whiteness. As Leonard writes, this game functions in accordance with “longstanding practices of whites generating pleasure through the exploitation and consumption of the racialized other” (2003, 4). Even when white folks in the game participate in crime, it is because they have been touched and therefore tainted by Black and Brown intrusions into their life. The types of problems (i.e. missions) that Franklin is faced with are racially coded in a way that Michael’s are not. As such, we witness the flatness of the GTA representation; while critics have run the gamut on the violence and poor representation of women in GTA, the purely racialized aspect of the game cannot be overlooked.