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Devs Weigh In On Playing The Bad Guy
Gamecloud has an article that goes into detail about the good, bad, and fun of playing a villain in a game. The article refers to several psychological studies, and has developer commentary from across the game design board. From CliffyB's comments: "Video games are a playable fantasy and there are few things more alluring than living out the fantasy of being evil and doing bad or illegal actions without any real world repercussions. As a designer, the best thing I can do when I allow the user to indulge in that fantasy is to show that there are ramifications for those actions. In GTA the more police you attack the harder the game gets, ultimately resulting in capture or death."
Players became the badguy to finally see the good guy fail.
As for being harmful, you kill the bad guy when you are good... you kill the good guy when you're bad. There are other aspects of the game that affect the harmfulness much more than whether you are the good guy or bad guy.
In the real world, attacking even one police officer, even in a minor way, is going to do far more than making life more difficult. You're likely to end up captured or dead very shortly -- and in either case, you can't just hit reload.
Granted, GTA is a game and you play by game rules, but by adding ramifications to `bad' actions, you're not really teaching morality or anything else like that. You're just making the game more fun. (Which is a good thing, don't get me wrong.)
Video games are a playable fantasy and there are few things more alluring than living out the fantasy of being evil and doing bad or illegal actions without any real world repercussions.
Without any real world repercussions?
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
If GTA had realistic repercussions you'd spend 90% of the game inside a jail cell. Games are meant to be fantasy. If you're relying on videogames to teach your kids morals you probably shouldn't have any. I was playing doom when i was 5 and i managed not to shoot all my classmates. Blaming the media for an individuals crimes is just lazy. It makes it easier for us to accept what they did if we believe computer games made them do it rather than the fact they could be mentally ill, immoral or just plain retarded. The mainstream media needs to get off the whole "Video games are evil and if you play them you're evil and so are all your friends" bandwagon and tackle some bigger/real issues.