I hate to break it to you, but souls don't exist.
GTA is a satire. However outlandish the game seems to be, it parodies and depicts modern society with reasonable accuracy.
No; it was and has always been made tongue-in-cheek, but it isn't satire. It's just a video game, like cmp says. The developers aren't making the GTA games as political commentary. Just because it contains humor does not make it "a satire."
People with wisdom and empathy(let's just pretend the crpg community has some for a second) will see its correlations to real life.
A cute attempt at poisoning-the-well, but fortunately it's utterly irrelevant here: yes, everyone can see what the game is poking fun at, that is the point. If it was poking fun at something nobody understood, it wouldn't be funny.
Believe it or not, Rockstar actually wants us to be human beings and try to make change and reason with this fucked up world we live in.
And how do you know this? How do you know what their real motives are? Maybe the mission designer was high and thought it'd be funny.
I hate to sound like some hippy/conspiracy theorist/hipster my old friend but with the way that we currently let the media scare us, social networking prostitute our social beings, and the massive amount of senseless and unjust violence in our culture desensitize us, we are becoming more and more like these characters in this game that we laugh at.
"Prostitute our social beings"? Utter bullshit. Taboo the words "prositute", "social" and "beings" and try again. You can't replace those words with synonyms, either. I think you'll find that it sounds a lot less dramatic once you replace the symbol with the substance.
As for massive amount of senseless and unjust violence in our culture, which century do you live in? Things have never been as good as they are now and most (Western) people never have to come face to face with violence. You might be becoming more and more like these characters in GTA V that we laugh at, but humanity as a whole is fast moving in another direction. Never before in history has there been so much global altruism.
You turn on any news channel and here is what you get: " terrible accident/terrorist attack/school shooting/international genocide" What do I do? Probably the same as you. Laugh at it and switch channels.
You need to learn to distinguish between "X is happening more" and "X is being reported more." Violence is not on the rise, on the contrary, but as a headline it sells.
Oh look it's kim kardashian and her huge butt. Man I would like to tap that. You know, I could probably get more ass if I worked out more and went to the gym or bought the supplement they are advertising on this commercial.(no that's not actually what you or I are thinking. But it's what they want us to think, because it will make them money.)
Your sexual fantasies about Kim Kardashian don't seem to have any relevance to this conversation. And if there is a grand conspiracy to get more people to go to the gym, well, good. Of course there isn't one, but it's amusing you should use that as an example. New news: businesses are out to make money and advertising is to help them advertise their product. Alas, there is no Kim Kardashian gym-and-supplements conspiracy. It's, to put it mildly, far-fetched to assume that Kim Kardashian's butt on the TV is to make you buy a specific supplement to get more ass, unless it's an ad. And if it is, then well, that's what ads are and I'm not sure what the epiphany here is supposed to be.
All of this shit, when drawn out into the open, is really fucked up.
Nope, nothing fucked up so far...
What's worse, hundreds of children starving and getting forced into child soldiering and murdered senselessly, or the millions of people that watch it and are not just apathetic, they laugh at it.
Uh-huh. And what are you doing about it? I love the hypocrisy. Solving an issue like children being forced to become soldiers is far from simple... what do you suggest these millions of Average Joes and Janes do about it? Grab their guns and kill the child soldiers to get to the ones pulling the strings to help the child soldiers?
We come on here and we make "memes" and jokes and we laugh our asses off at how fucked up the media is.
Yeah, deity forbid we have fun.
We play crpg, which is at the end of the day just a medieval murder simulator. "oh but we have objectives and things to strive for" Yeah, like killing as many fucktards as we can so our team can win and get that "x5." And for what? So we can get more gold and xp. So I can buy myself plate and a large two handed sword. So I can make my guy swing harder to kill you quicker so I can move onto the next unlucky son of a bitch who happens to cross me. So I can make my team win.
So I can get an x5. See where this is going?
Um, it's a video game, not a murder simulator. Nobody really dies. This paragraph is the silliest one yet. You're trying too hard and it's making you look bad. Also a straw man: no one aside from you would go through that particular chain of logic. Nobody here thinks x5 has any intrinsic value. Except you, that is.
You enjoy beating that guy who killed you last round. You enjoy having a high score so you can gloat about it later. You enjoy watching your enemies crumble before you.
Sadly, it's human nature.
Yes, competitiveness is in human nature. Nothing sad about it.
We are all so fucked up and we will never do anything about it. We could. But we choose not to. It's easier, and if you did, it wouldn't make a difference anyway so why try?
No, we aren't all so fucked up.
Let's say you live in or near a major city. Chances are, there is more than one guy within a handful of miles being shot or stabbed.
You actually don't care. No matter how much you wish you did, you don't.
A lot of people actually do care. But the rational thing to do is not to care, if you can't do anything about it. Being depressed doesn't help anyone.
Our faces are our best masks. We express all of this bullshit about how we care. We don't.
Our masks are our best masks, actually. And I was thinking about marking your post with "
[citation needed]" as necessary but I realized it'd be more economical to just say
[citation needed] instead of marking every other sentence with it. So here it is:
[citation needed]. The amount of arguments-by-assertion you make is out of this world and all your arguments are based on previous arguments-by-assertion. Known also as
begging the question fallacy.
I for one actually dress up in color coordinated jogging clothes with a facemask and carry around multiple weapons on me. I patrol my streets.
No matter how hard I try to be some comic book vigilante hero, or even just that sweetheart who holds the door open for you, I honestly don't care. I don't know why I do it. I could stab you in an alleyway just as easily, and it would benefit me more.
Um... okay... well.. there ought to be some psychiatrists near you that can help you with your issue(s)....
You can play a thousand games about saving the world from aliens and evil men.(anders come join my anti-alien militia irl) You can kill millions of people and creatures. That's okay. They were bad. They would do it to you and worse, in a heartbeat.
No, they weren't bad and they wouldn't have done it to me. It's a video game. They don't exist. Repeat after me: they don't exist.
But the second we are put on the other end of what we personally view as right, when we cross that microscopically thin and transparent line, then all of a sudden there is outrage.
What you are essentially saying is: we think something that isn't right is wrong. How outrageous.
We remember WW2 and the holocaust because some dickhead teacher forced it into our heads, because they wanted to see a better world tomorrow.
This is actually a perfect example of the sort of mistake you make all the time. That "dickhead teacher" is teaching you about the holocaust because that's his job and it's what he's paid to do. Rockstar is making games because that's what they're paid to do, and black humor has worked well for them in the past. Not because they are trying to "better the world."
You seem to have a very hard time separating fact from fiction, reality from fantasy. In addition to that, it's clear that your empathy isn't functioning properly.
