u/cthdrls

Replaying GTA V at the moment and just got past the Mr K torture mission - I remember this making me feel kind of weird when the game first came out and I had the same reaction just now. Essentially making torture into a minigame, I can't decide if it's genius for forcing you to face directly into being complicit in something that we usually would rather ignore the existence of, or whether making it "fun" undermines the message completely.

What are others' thoughts? Obviously be curious to see if GTA VI goes even further down this road, too.

So I've been replaying GTA V in preparation for VI coming soon, and was struck by the torture sequence where Trevor interrogates Mr K after you kidnap him from the rival intelligence agency. I remember feeling uncomfortable with this sequence when I first played the game, but that reaction has definitely increased in the intervening years.

Back when I first played it I mostly remember it feeling edgy and excessive in the way GTA often does, if a little "too far". But replaying it now, what struck me was how tonally jarring it is to have something so brutal turned into essentially a series of minigames / quicktime prompts with achievements linked to keeping your victim from passing out.

I rewatched American Psycho recently too and my reaction to GTA V quite reminds me of my reaction when I first read that novel. 

Both of these works made me feel queasy (an understatement: I'd quite like to permanently remove the memory of some passages from AP from my brain), but in very different ways. American Psycho is obviously horrific at points, and disturbing because you're trapped inside Bateman’s first-person perspective, but there's still an element of objective distance in reading. GTA V feels different because instead of observing the violence, you're actively performing it.

There's a lot of other parallels and in a sense both are doing the same essential thing: satirising late capitalism, consumerism, superficiality, violence as spectacle, etc. Both depict worlds where nothing seems to have depth or lasting consequence and where hyperconsumption and extreme violence exist as part of the same system and reflect back on each other.

But the medium, to me, makes a huge difference. American Psycho implicates the reader, but you're still ultimately a passive observer held at a distance and so able to make a moral judgement as you read. GTA V collapses that distance entirely by making the violence entertaining and interactive.

But what I genuinely can’t decide is whether that makes GTA V’s satire more effective or less effective. I know games like Hotline Miami very explicitly ask you to reflect on the violence and your own enjoyment of it, but is this what GTA V is doing too, with the added, AP-style layer of consumption as a juxtaposition?

Does your participation deepen the critique because it takes the extremity to a new level, and in its endless repetition allow you to experience its emptiness firsthand? Or does making violence into a fun gameplay loop basically undermine the point?

Curious what other people think.