Grand Theft Theory: Vice City

Grand Theft Theory: Vice City

Both Cote and Khan said it's up to parents to decide whether their teens should be allowed to play Vice City. "Parents should be informed of what this game is about," said Khan. "I would definitely warn kids of the violence." Cote said when his mother first discovered that he and his brother played Grand Theft Auto III, she was "mortified."[1]

Patriarchal formations of familial angst and romance included, Vice City has been received again and again in the several orifices of the public body. Each time new techniques, purposes, and functions may be discovered in the rubble evidencing the occurrence, but the repeated encounter itself symptomatically mythologizes a special strain of the back, bearing out a stigmata proving again and again the omnipresence of Vice City in the spaces of media outlets, and thus collection and reflection. Back pain in the very dens and living rooms of America! The back is just the end of the issue, where it starts is in the hands, a twitching organism tied by lines of fluid, flesh, force, and faith to the human configuration. If what is violent in the game is the mode of interaction by which the protagonist’s narrative transgressions can be rendered progeny of a sick mind (akin to the Japanese Otaku), the hand is a thing of the psychological measurement of the central nervous system and the behavior of the favorite allopathic object. Gameplay is feedback, hand to computer to display to eye, and, like any such idealized circuitry, crossover is categorically denied. Honestly, hands are not their own and not even ‘yours’ in any romantic sense, but yours-insofar-as-you-are-humanized, and thus schematized into matrices of humanist pluralism of the population. A population of its instances. Aside these detachments in analysis, Vice City offers an anarchic confusion with implications for media theory by a methodological engagement of gameplay.

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Democratic debate in mass public forums (newspapers and major websites mostly) permit and breed a stirring violence of dialogue always with its own purposes clearly ahead of itself, like the cartoon donkey’s dangling carrot – always just out of reach but enough to keep things going for the time being.