The game “Grand Theft Auto V” became a presence on my residence hall floor fairly late in the “GTA V” phenomenon, about a year and a half after its initial release. But when it hit, it hit hard.
People spent hours in the game going on murderous rampages, breaking the laws of physics, violating traffic laws and trying to steal military jets from the Air Force base. It was a fun time, and as a floor, we pulled in millions of (fake) dollars.
Clearly the game bears little to no resemblance to reality. You can’t hot-wire every single car you find in three seconds or less. You can’t get shot five times and still walk normally. And you certainly cannot successfully steal a military jet from an Air Force base, nor should anyone take that as a challenge.
However, a YouTube channel, the Game Theorists, analyzed the game and found one realistic caveat to the absurd unrealism of the game, and that is the cops either reacted violently or arrested the player at disproportionate rates, depending on which of the three characters was used and the geographical location within ?the game.
Drawing from an admittedly small sample size, they found that Franklin, a black man, was accosted by police a disproportionate number of times in the geographical location simulated after Compton, an area known for disproportionately high percentage of arrests of ?black men.
Similarly, the character Trevor, modeled after the stereotypical notion of “white trash,” was accosted by police a disproportionate ?number of times in Paletto Bay, a town based on areas in California with high arrest rates of white males.
There is something interesting about a video game choosing to model reality in these broad senses, grafting statistical data from censuses and studies into the behavior of the AIs. Certainly, the Game Theorists could not show unequivocally that these cops racially profiled these characters, given the small sample size, but they presented a compelling case.
Though I wouldn’t go so far to say this represents some sort of commentary on the state of police-citizen relations, what does it say about certain sectors of society that video games have started being representative of them?
I never thought racial profiling would get so virulent that the designers of a game, whose goal was to create a setting that felt real, felt compelled to include that within its code.
I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times again in the debates about the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and most recently, Walter Scott. But the inclusion of racial profiling in “GTA V” identifies it as a very real part of our world and an unfortunate facet of our culture. If “GTA V” is trying to look like us, how much do we look ?like it?
allenjo@indiana.edu
