ban these evil games

Rhetoric, as Corbett says, is ‘the discipline that deals with the use of discourse, either spoken or written, to inform or persuade or motivate’ (1965) and it is used to influence the thoughts and beliefs of an audience. Rhetoric can be used subtly as well as obviously depending on who the encoder and decoder are.

The way Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3) was marketed was the ability to do anything, good or evil, in a vast place called Liberty city. You are an up and coming criminal who has to work his way up the criminal hierarchy and gain power and trust from fellow crime bosses. The game takes you through three ‘levels’ where you are introduced to new gangs which include the Mafia, Triads and Yakuza. As you complete missions you are slowly dragged deeper into this underworld and end up doing all kind of jobs such as stealing cars, disposing of evidence and blowing up a rival gangs ship. But there are also side missions which are a lot less violent which don’t play any part in the story line. These missions include finding and executing hidden car jumps, being a taxi man and collecting special packages.

Because of GTA 3s freedom and the ability to do anything you want, the way it was represented by the media was that it was evil. They used rhetoric language to persuade readers that this game was evil by focusing on the ‘darker’ side of the game. Sleeping with prostitutes and beating up old grannies for cash to buy an Uzi are some aspects of the games freedom that can be abused but the media decided to solely focus on this. It is hard to argue that GTA 3 doesn’t have any fundamentally wrong themes in it but to the games makers defence, there are positive themes such as trust and teamwork contained within the game.

The game has its own values which are contained within GTA 3. Liberty city is essentially a very violent place. It has a collection of very small Police stations and is basically run by criminals from the sleazy to the sophisticated. But this does not mean that everybody playing this game will turn into a small time criminal because it is extremely easy to make the distinction between Liberty City and real life. The game merely allows players to explore all aspects of city life, whether they be good or bad.