Australian Target Stores Ban GTA V For Depictions of Violence Against Women

MojoKid writes "There's no such thing as an official Grand Theft Auto game until there's been a bit of controversy leading to its removal from at least one set of store shelves. It's a right of passage for the GTA series, if you will, and GTA V just earned its place among the franchise's previous titles by ruffling feathers in Australia, leading to its ousting from Target stores. At issue this time around is the "game's depictions of violence against women." Jim Cooper, general manager of corporate affairs for Target, explained that customers have voiced a "significant level of concern about the game's content." Separate reports say Target Australia received a petition with nearly 40,000 signatures demanding the game be removed. According to the petition, the game gives players plenty of "incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get 'health' points."

Comments

Removed after Initial sales spike

[Anonymous Coward]

I note that this cheap media stunt was done over a year after it was released. I doubt the loss of sales is worth more than the free press they're getting.

Re:Removed after Initial sales spike

[TapeCutter]

Kmart announced today they were also withdrawing GTAV from Aussie stores. All it demonstrates is their sales executives don't understand their average customer to the point a tiny but well organised minority can convince them that they represent the majority of customers.

Re:Removed after Initial sales spike

[squiggleslash]

Largely agree though I'm not sure about the "stupid" thing.

I haven't played V yet, but have played 3/VC/SA/4, and wouldn't describe any in the series as "stupid". They're biting depictions of US pop "crime culture" as seen from 3,000 miles away, and they belong on the shelves in any store that sells games but also sells TV box sets from The Sopranos to Miami Vice.

I'm not arguing it's perfect, that it's the funniest, that if all games were like the GTA series there wouldn't be a problem, but standalone, marketed and sold only to adults, there should be no problem with the game being sold. We see a backlash against it largely because of a combination of politicians raising its profile as some kind of embodiment of evil in video gaming, and because of the background issue of there being so many games that persist sharing GTA's social flaws, something that's becoming a prominant concern now inside and outside the industry.

Stupid? No. each game in the series I've seen does what it sets out to do, does it with wit and insight, and tries its very best to present a provoking look at an artificial world that's a little twisted to begin with.

Re:Removed after Initial sales spike

[Xest]

No, the Xbox One / PS4 versions were recently released and have quite a boost in terms of graphics and content since the 360/PS3 versions came out and so they're currently in heavy sales territory again as it's been a well received and well selling re-release of the game.

But you're right regardless, a handful of stores in a country with a population of only 20 million have stopped selling it? Seriously who cares. Anyone in Australia that wants it will just buy it elsewhere and Australia isn't exactly a very big market anyway.

Re:Removed after Initial sales spike

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't the same controversy. If you haven't been paying attention (and can't blame you if you haven't) there's a new wave of Jack Thompsons. It's not a think-of-the-children thing, it's accusations of racism and misogyny. Basically, same shit, different idiots from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Instead of wacky conservatives, now its loony pseudo-feminists ranting about how video games (which they totally play, but don't) are this that and the other thing, gamers are bad (seriously), pay attention to me, ect. Only when I called Jack Thompson a dumb asshole, no one cared, but now pointing out the poor arguments and outright lies of these new assholes gets you accused of being misogynist. To b honest I'd rather deal with ol' Jack was though; these new people are downright toxic, and causing all sorts of drama everywhere they go, and more seriously, making light of actual social issues. Lots of people are really getting the wrong idea of what feminism really means thanks to these boneheads who define feminism as 'that thing I can use as a cudgel for my own selfish agenda.'

Anyway, yes, GTA and apparently video games in general for that matter are still controversial, and really, while the justifications have changed, the real root reason is still the same: pompous, self righteous, holier than thou busybodies who really need to find another claim to fame and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

Re:Removed after Initial sales spike

[gl4ss]

they're actually pretty good games that have much more to them than many other games.

the open world nature enables you to do many things though.

I mean, I played THROUGH gta V and .. well. I don't remember where killing some bitches happened. is it that you can go to the strip club and shoot people there? or on the street? like you can shoot the men there as well?

I do remember going to the fucking psychiatrist in the game with the family and the fucking yoga minigame.

are they going to ban all open world games from now on? skyrim too, since you can murder women in it?

the problem really is that the people making decisions to ban games don't play them. and the people complaining about the violence don't play them either. like a certain femi troll who picks pieces from games and mispresents them totally - even mispresenting the moral choices given to the player! like, a game has a choice to do bad or good and then saying that it rewards and forces the bad behavior. ...saddest thing is that those fucks aren't even trying to censor the games for the sake of children, they're just making careers out of bitching about them. maybe it's just because unemployment is such a problem.

if anything it's less controversial than gta1. gta1 rewarded driving over monks.

Re:Removed after Initial sales spike

[mrchaotica]

I mean, I played THROUGH gta V and .. well. I don't remember where killing some bitches happened. is it that you can go to the strip club and shoot people there? or on the street? like you can shoot the men there as well?

I think they're talking about the "pick up a prostitute to regain health, and then run her over afterward to get your money back" game mechanic that's existed since GTA 3. I assume said mechanic still exists in GTA 5 (which I haven't gotten around to playing).

Meanwhile

[Rik Sweeney]

Disgruntled GTA V fans have called upon Target to withdraw the Bible from sale, for exactly the same reason.

https://www.change.org/p/targe...

Re:Meanwhile

[Tom]

The above is a fantastic example of just how arbitrary our ethics are. It's not just the bible - things ten times worse than what any game or movie show happen in real life and we accept them as "collateral damage". The same as 50,000 years ago, our attitude depends a lot more on who does to whom than it does on what is being done.

Grammar Nazi to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

Right of passage? Rite of passage!

Re:Grammar Nazi to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

they should of checked there dictionary.

Re:Grammar Nazi to the rescue

[thegarbz]

Couldn't find one. Went to Target to buy one but apparently it was removed from the shelves due to containing bad language.

Re: Grammar Nazi to the rescue

[mrchaotica]

Grammar Nazis are like the dog from "Up": as soon as they see an error they forget to finish reading the com-- SQUIRREL!

Re: Grammar Nazi to the rescue

[NotDrWho]

A grammar Nazi could read "War and Peace" and come away from it only with a list of misspellings and grammatical mistakes.

Huh

[koan]

But still for sale in US stores?

Re:Huh

[dcw3]

Shhhhh!!! We like our violence against women. Ask anyone in the NFL.

Why only women?

[TheDarkMaster]

Why only violence against women is unacceptable, when any type of violence should be unacceptable?

Re:Why only women?

[rikkards]

It always irks me when domestic violence is attributed to violence against just women. There are estimates that it is pretty much 50/50 for both genders but men don't report it. Also usually if it is against men and the assailant is a woman there will be weapons usually leading to more severe damage

Re:Why only women?

[MRe_nl]

http://domesticviolencestatist...

Re:Why only women?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please link to the actual study. Your link is to a blog, which links to an opinion site dedicated to battered men which cites the original study.

Here is the original study for anyone interested in the method and actual conclusions: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf

Here is the actual statistic from the article summary, which has a lot of other statistics.

About 1 in 4 women (24.3%) and 1 in 7 men (13.8%) have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner (e.g., hit with a fist or something hard, beaten, slammed against something) at some point in their lifetime

Re:Why only women?

[91degrees]

Should possibly take that with a pinch of salt.

Re:Why only women?

[Shadow of Eternity]

Actually it's 70% of non-reciprocal violence committed by women, and 50/50 of reciprocal violence. Furthermore that study is heavily affected by methodological problems such as their gender restricted definition of rape (male victims are classified as "other").

Re:Why only women?

[anagama]

The police seem very reluctant to prosecute women, and men are reluctant to apear weak.

I can speak to the second part. I've been punched in the face exactly one time in my life -- saw stars even -- by my then girlfriend. At a different point in our relationship, she choked me and by the time I realized she was serious, I was getting dizzy and my ability to stop it was compromised. Lucky for me she quit on her own. That was well over 20 years ago -- back then I said nothing. Even today, despite the passage of time and the consequent ability to chalk up my reticence about the incident to the ignorance of youth, I feel embarrassed by it -- so much so that it is a struggle to not post this as AC.

Innaccurate

[guises]

I haven't played GTA 5, but I've played all the others and this: "incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get 'health' points." is bullshit unless things have changed dramatically. Violence, yes. Plenty of violence, but the player never commits sexual violence. That would be thematically way out of line with the series. And you don't get 'health' points by abusing or killing women either. You can certainly rob them of their money... Is that supposed to be the same thing?

Re:Innaccurate

[Anonymous Coward]

I played through GTA 5 on launch and then a year later, this past month, I played the next gen version.

I don't think I killed a single hooker or stripper in either play through. That's about 70 hours worth of play. I think I had a total of two lap dances. I never had sex with anyone. The only women that I killed were those that happened to also be in the crowds of men (that is, they were just "people" in the crowd when I accidentally took a corner wrong in my car at high speeds).

In fact, if you play through the game, the story is actually kind of touching. While it plays on generic 80s/90s films and tropes and cliches, the gangster angry family man learns some lessons and becomes more family oriented and reconsiders his ways (because men always have to rethink their interests and careers and give them up for their wives and children, of course). The stupid shithole vapid daughter actually has some rather mature moments of realization and appreciation. A part where she is caught up in wanting to be an "american idle" style star/joke and is taken advantage of by men in hollywood has a really amusing and sweet moment where her father and "uncle trevor" come to defend her against those creeps. Even the wife who is a shrill bitch turns out to be more dimensional than the first part of the game portrays.

The game has some meat if you bother to give it a chance.

There are also some horrifying moments. Moments that are hard to stomach. They are not targeting women in those moments and they serve to the greater commentary on american society, which is the whole point of the GTA series. There's a gruesome drawn out scene where you torture a *man* on the command of your government. There's a scene where a couple (part of the story) are murdered in their apartment by the one of these three main characters who is totally psycho. You don't actually see it happen. You just see the character go into an apartment. Then awhile later, he comes out and has blood spatter on his clothes. That's it. No commentary about what happened.

Of course, why let that stop a "good bit of activism"? These are the same idiots who support people like Anita Sarkessian who portrays games like Hit Man as being games where you are forced to and rewarded for murdering strippers in a mission (you don't have to kill them, I DO NOT KNOW ANYONE WHO HAS DONE THAT... and you are PENALIZED for it). But nobody gives a shit. Even game developers eat the shit right out of her ass and don't question her bullshit.

The funny thing is whenever anyone in gaming speaks up and says they don't appreciate their hobby or interest being taken over by "social justice warriors" capitalizing on the opportunity to push their agendas on people and degrade the audience and shame them, the response is "oh shut the fuck up, neckbeard, Anita isn't going to take your games away".

Well....

Re:Innaccurate

[Xest]

"As to if it is acceptable... Well, I'd just question why it is there at all."

You could ask the same question of any scene in any book or movie involving sex or violence.

Why is it there? Because it's not meant to be acting as a beacon of how the world should be but instead is fictional commentary on how the world is.

Setting the world to rights isn't GTA's job anymore than it's the job of Hostel, or 50 shades of grey.

"Movies make an effort to censor themselves. War films don't show the real horrors of war because it would give the audience PTSD."

Absolute and categorically incorrect bullshit. Movies show stuff that video games can't even come close to showing, if you put anything like Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes, or the Human Centipede in a video game it's an instant ban for that game. Manhunt was far far tamer than all those films yet it was banned. War movies show far worse graphic violence and far greater impacts of war than any Call of Duty or Battlefield game ever has.

"They could, for example, make the prostitute disappear after the act off-camera so she can't be murdered"

Yes, and 50 shades of grey could be a book that says "A women has fantasies about being dominated, but the man respects her too much so refuses to. The End." but it's not, because some forms of entertainment like to explore the reality of the world, or our fears, our thoughts and so forth in a bit more depth than that.

The fact is there are parts of the world, even in Western countries like the US where the sort of shit as in GTA happens. Why should video games be held up as some medium cannot explore the reality of the world in which we live in like movies and books can? Why hold them to different standards and suggest video games may only be used for the purpose of advertising the ethics and morals of an ideal world rather than as an exploration of the real world?

Nothing in GTA says "You should go and do this for real".

Re:Innaccurate

[guises]

What you've described is sex (for which you gain health) followed by violence. I'm familiar with both of those things, they've been in previous GTA games, but the point is that they're unrelated. For the sake of the video the player has chosen to do one right after the other, but they could have just walked away after the sex or committed the violence without the sex.

Your suggestion that sex should render the NPC invulnerable is... odd. Before the sex she's an NPC just like any other, after the sex she's an NPC just like any other.

All right, lets look at this another way: in Halo players have the ability to crouch, this serves a functional purpose. There's a rather juvenile tradition in Halo of killing another player in a multiplayer match and then standing over their corpse and crouching. The existence of the corpse and the ability to crouch are entirely separate from one another, each there for a good reason, but when the player decides to combine them in this way they do so with the intent to suggest a humiliating sexual act. There are ways that Bungie could prevent this one particular act if they chose to do so - they could eliminate corpses, they could make the areas around corpses impossible to crouch in, they could remove the ability to crouch entirely - but the act exists because the players wanted it and created it themselves. So in other words: 1) The fact that people use the game as a medium for their expression, and that expression in undesirable, does not mean that there's anything wrong with the game. 2) Any attempt to censor this sort of thing is likely to get worked around. 3) Free expression isn't always nice, it doesn't always make you feel good about humanity, but it is always valuable.

So how does that relate to a single player game like GTA? Ultimately what I'm saying here is that the player makes the game what they want it to be.

So if it were violence against white men

[ruir]

It would not be a problem, would it?

Re:So if it were violence against white men

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying that violence committed against a guy is not because of his gender, but in case of a woman it somehow magically is? This is just a restatement of "violence against men is ok, violence against women is not" with added sexist justification of why violence against men is acceptable. It is a double standard. Either violence against any sex is wrong or it isn't. Regardless of motives. You can't know what will be the motives of potential gamers. Maybe they will be man-hating misandrists? I say ban all games depicting violence against anyone, Jack Thompson style :)

Selective media censoring

[MindPrison]

What are we going to censor today? Please make a selection:

1) Video games.
2) Movies.
3) Opinions.
4) Drawings.
5) Retro (back censoring things that aren't politically correct today).

So what will it be tomorrow? It's like we target popular items for "insert won't anyone think of the chil...feminists" reasons here. Any idiot out there with at least half a brain knows that violence in unacceptable whether it's children, females, shemales, hemales, dogs, cats, horses (insert your preference here). If you censor ONE thing in ONE media, you have to go for the other medias as well.

We're SO close to arresting people for thought crimes!

Re:Selective media censoring

[Xest]

And yet levels of violence have been drastically declining despite sales of violent video games drastically increasing making it almost impossible to claim violent video games have any kind of measurable impact on increasing violent crime levels.

Re:Selective media censoring

[Xest]

Well murders, manslaughters, and violence caused A&E admissions have been declining too which comes with the implication that the violence that is happening is less likely to result in death or hospital treatment which means that the violence in question is probably actually less violent too (unless people engaging in physical violence have all become well disciplined marshal artists who all know how to attack only to stun). What exactly is your point? that although less people are punching each other they might be punching a little bit harder because they've played GTA?

Get a grip and stop talking nonsense. You've turned into a Jack Thompson like nutjob on this issue, there's nothing more to it than that. Video games don't cause violence, we've got an entire generation brought up in an era of violent video games now and guess what? they're the least criminal generation of young folks possibly ever:

http://www.independent.co.uk/v...

So if video games are turning people into prostitute murderers as you're suggesting where is the evidence of this? where is this actually happening? Why has an entire generation brought up on ever more violent video games become more placid than ever?

Your narrative on video games, violence, and women bears no semblance to reality. You seem to have got yourself so tangled up in that childish gamergate thing which is from what I can tell fundamentally just a battle between two different groups of Twitter attention whores and has fuck all to do with the many other millions of people who actually play video games in practice and are actually normal decent human beings that you've lost all sense of perspective on this issue.

Misinformed mistake

[Hashead]

Their line of logic is as follows:
Since men and women are equal, any measurement that shows any imbalance can only be attributed to society treating men and women differently. If we had a fair society, we would be seeing 50/50 splits across the board, so until we see this, we need to continue adjusting society.

It's obvious where the mistake is, it's good old Tabula Rasa again. If we want to end this kind of foolishness we need to push the debate towards their erroneous assumptions, instead of debating them on their own merits. Weather or not men are more violent than women, or women are more often victims of domestic abuse is irrelevant when these differences cannot be attributed to an unfair society. If it's not society's fault, then the assumption that this being a product of "patriarchy" is no longer valid, and 98% percent of their "evidence" is no longer admissible.

Re:Confusing San Andreas with V

[sudon't]

I mean, I played THROUGH gta V and .. well. I don't remember where killing some bitches happened.

Perhaps they're confusing San Andreas with V. In San Andreas, hiring a prostitute would bring your health up a bit. Not so in V where, correct me if I'm wrong, it just takes your money. Certainly you can kill female NPCs in V, just as you can kill male NPCs, but there's no particular incentive to do so. That said, aside from the other points of sexism already noted, female NPCs, unlike male NPCs, will not fight back when you jack their car. Only rarely will a female NPC pedestrian will fight back. Or, perhaps that's realism rather than sexism?
*smack*
Ow, just asking...