Editor's note: I couldn't stand Grand Theft Auto 4. I thought the game was a complete tonal mess. On the one hand, Rockstar tried to get you to care about their take on the immigrant story, but on the other, they battled the legacy of their sophmoric humor. While Red Dead Redemption is a bit more cohesive, the issue is still present. Cameron argues that this problem is becoming a hallmark of Rockstar products. -James
One of the most obvious areas in which games are experiencing growing pains is the morality of the situations and characters that they ask players to inhabit. While Nathan Drake’s borderline split personality in Uncharted 2 recently brought this problem to light, it’s an issue that’s been dogging Rockstar for years.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas's "hot coffee" sex mini-game got the mainstream media’s attention despite being relatively tame. But Grand Theft Auto 4 managed to raise even gamers’ eyebrows, with a scripted scene in which the player, in the role of the supposedly repentant Niko Bellic, kidnaps and beats a woman in order to progress the story. And now, Red Dead Redemption continues the tradition with an achievement called “Dastardly,” which the game awards the player for tying a woman to some train tracks and watching as an oncoming locomotive crushes her. At this point, it seems ridiculous to go on pretending that video games never have moral implications. — especially Rockstar’s games.
Whenever a potential controversy in games comes to light, a chorus of defensive gamers always leap to their feet and cry “Don’t take it so seriously. It’s just a game!” Normally, I think this is one of those uniquely terrible arguments that actually devalues what it sets out to defend. But in this case, it may be slightly less awful than usual. Media that tell stories inevitably develop their own storytelling conventions. Like action movies, comic books, and pulp novels before them, games have developed a convention that their characters resort to violence far more quickly than people in the real world.
The fact that a game lets you kill nearly anyone you want isn’t necessarily a sign that it has a broken moral compass. While I still take issue with the “it's just a game” defense, it's not a completely misguided sentiment here. Nevertheless, I think the Dastardly Achievement is one of the clearest cases yet of a mainstream game making an immoral statement.
Now before you tell me I have a stick up my ass, let me plead my case. I don’t necessarily have a problem with players being rewarded for senseless acts of violence. And I get that the reason the victim in Dastardly has to be a woman is because Rockstar is playing with a specific silent-film cliché. But there are two major reasons Dastardly still bothers me. First, it’s inconsistent with how Red Dead Redemption wants us to view its protagonist, John Marston. Quite simply, Rockstar throws Marston's character and the game’s main plotline under the bus for the sake of a sophomoric laugh. An outlaw trying to reform for the sake of his family wouldn’t do this sort of thing. Worse, it’s a continuation of Rockstar’s obnoxious, binary portrayal of women: They are either manly stereotypes or helpless victims.
I’m sure Rockstar’s defenders will be glad to offer all the usual excuses: The developer is showing the world as it is, not as as it should be. It’s meant as satire. They want to give players as much freedom as possible. Writers don’t endorse everything their characters do. And these all might be legitimate arguments, except as I said above, Dastardly is only the most recent example of what looks more and more like a virgin/whore complex with each game Rockstar puts out.
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OK, so the hero can’t sleep with prostitutes to regain health this time around, but that's kind of a hollow victory when he can treat women like animals before murdering them for an Achievement. Even if Rockstar is just giving their audience what they want (and the fact that Dastardly is only a five point achievement suggests that the developer isn’t really sure if that’s the case), it hardly justifies them. It simply indicates that they’re willing to pander to the lowest common denominator in order to sell a few more games.
For the most part, Red Dead Redemption is a good game. And on the whole, Rockstar’s games have some of the best writing on the market. But I think it’s impossible at this point to argue that their portrayal of women doesn’t point to misogynistic tendencies among at least some of their writers. It's more than just an aesthetic issue: It’s a moral issue. And it’s all the more depressing because Rockstar has the potential to be one of the developers whose games we could be proud to compare to any other mainstream media. But until gamers start holding them accountable for their offensive treatment of women, Rockstar will never shed their reputation as childish provocateurs.
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