Critical Analysis of Grand Theft Auto V

This essay provides a critical analysis of the popular video game Grand Theft Auto V, including its storyline, gameplay, and impact on society. It discusses the game's violence, gender representation, and the controversy surrounding it. The essay concludes that despite the criticism, Grand Theft Auto V was a successful game in the industry.

Running head: INTRODUCTION TO VIDEO GAMES
Introduction to Video Games
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1INTRODUCTION TO VIDEO GAMES
Introduction:
In the history of the Grand Theft Auto line-up by Rockstar Games the Grand Theft
Auto V is the most diverse, popular and energetic game. This game has a deep mark on the
gaming industry because it is one of the fastest selling product ever in the gaming market.
This game was able to reach to the mark of $1 billion earning in just first three days. This
game is based on a continuous storyline which are progressed through completing various
types of missions. For the utmost of enjoyment of this game the developers has also
integrated several of cheat codes and mods in the game which makes the game more
attractive to the players.
In the first paragraph of this essay a brief description of the game has been shared
which includes the developers and the genre of the game. Following that, in the next
paragraph of this, the main plot of this game has been shared. Why the selected game is one
of the most important game is also shared in this context. In the further, the media studies of
the game have been critically analysed. Following that the gender representation of the GTA
V has been shared and discussed critically. The further section of this essay contains the high
violence related discussion of this game and how this game is impacting the society due to its
high violence. In this section of this essay the game has been also evaluated critically.
Critical Analysis of the Grand Theft Auto V:
The Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure video game. This game is published
by Rockstar Games and developed by Rockstar North. This video game is the most recent
continuation of the of the Grand Theft Auto series of the Rockstar Games (North 2013). This
game is an open world game based on the state of San Andreas. This is a single player
storyline game which consists of three criminals and their efforts to commit heists while they
are under pressure from a governmental agency. This game can be played in both the

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perspective of the first and third-person and the whole game can be navigated by vehicle or
foot using any of the three characters. These three characters can be interchanged as per the
requirement of the player. These three characters are the Trevor Philips, Michael De Santa
and Franklin Clinton.
The main plot of this game is started from a bank robbery which was conducted nine
years ago from the current scenario of the game where Michael and Trevor were involved
from the above three charterers. After nine years of the bank robbery, Michael was living in
the San Andreas and was out from the illegal works. In the following storyline of the game
Michael meets with Franklin, and they become friends but somehow Michael goes under a
huge debt, and he was unable to pay that amount of money. To gather the money Michael
again decided to jump into the illegal works and this time he partners Franklin with him. In
the further storyline of the game both of them meets with Trevor Philips who was the old
partner of Michael and they again started their illegal jobs by performing several terrific
heists to become rich.
While considering the other open world mission-related video games, this Grand
Theft Auto series has remained an all-time favourite for the gamers. The latest addition in this
series which is the Grand Theft Auto V has been praised by the lots of individual gamers. The
main reason behind that this game is a lot more versatile than the other open world games
(ROUSE III 2014) where the player has the freedom to do a variety of activities.
Summarising the whole game it can be stated that Grand Theft Auto V is M rated game
which is obviously not recommended to the children to play. This game contains extreme
coarse language, nudity, gang violence and the drug and alcohol abuse. In this game the
player plays as a hardened criminals and due to that they not only kills the fellow gang
members but also they kills police officers and the innocent civilians while they are
performing several criminal activities. Women mainly depicted as the sexual object in this

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game. Players can also take alcohols and marijuana. None of the main characters makes the
decent role model. This game actually targets the market of the adult audience.
In the critical analysis of the Grand Theft Auto V, while considering the media
studies, it is actually having a vast impact on the audiences as the game is an open world
game and may many users will try to relate this game with their everyday life. This game is
involving various types of criminal activities and third-person shooting experience. Also, the
players can drive the vehicle pretty much rashly (El-Nasr, Drachen and Canossa 2016). As
per the many video game experts, this activities of the Grand Theft Auto can create violence
in the real world situation (Polasek 2014). If this video game was an impractical game with
some different kind of storyline then this game might not be a problem but this game relates
itself with a real world situation where the individuals of the San Andreas city will find this
game more related with their daily life as this game is totally based on the city of the San
Andreas (Lee et al. 2013). This video game might not affect the matured persons more, but it
can heavily affect the mentality of the children who are playing this game. As these
characters are the hero for them, they might also consider doing an illegal type of works. In
many of the cases, it has been seen that the matured persons also tried to copy some activity
which they have done in the video games (Schell 2014). So, it is possible that the individuals
might copy the rough type of driving and shooting in real life which can create a really bad
situation due to the violence.
While considering the gender representation of the GTA V, I argue that in this game
the player has a hyper-masculine role. This is because the game has the female pedestrians
who only either just act like normal peoples or act as the character which is only used for
only pleasing the male character player in this game. In such a way GTA V sends the
message to its player of heteronormative ideas of sexuality and gender. So, I like to state my
opinion that the gender representation in the GTA V is presented well. Comparing with some

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other games, it is confirmed by me that other than some preprogrammed activity women
within this game only plays to role of a sexual object to the main male characters in this
game. Thus the female characters of the game do not play a big role in the main plot of the
game. So, the female character of the game failed to mark any impact on the game as an
important character.
As this game is almost like a real-world game, this is having a vast impact on society.
It has been assessed that more games become realistic, the more peoples got addicted to it
(Brunborg, Mentzoni and Frøyland 2014). If the peoples got more addicted to the game, then
it can reflect a negative impact on the society as peoples will always try to find free time to
play the game. For the students, it will harm their studies, and for the employees, it will
reduce their productivity as that particular game always is in their mind. A recent example of
this type of heavily addicted game is the ‘Player Unknown's Battle Grounds.’ The Chinese
government banned this game in their country due to its high addiction. Luckily, being a real-
world game GTA V was not too much addictive for the players who were actually good for
the society. The main bad impact of this game in society is that due to this game many
peoples performed many unethical activities to society just because they were following the
game in real life.
Gamification has been implemented in the GTA V to design the principle of the non-
game contexts. This gamification has been used by the development team to employ the
game design elements that improved organizational productivity, user engagement, learning,
flow and crowdsourcing (Tulloch 2014). This gamification is also considered as some special
type of recruitment tool. This actually benefitted the developer team, and from the
organizational perspective, this game was really successful.

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Though the Grand Theft Auto V received various criticism due to its high violence
and criminal activities within the game, it was a real success within the gaming industry
(Vong and Wong 2013). This game was critically acclaimed in the gaming community which
assigned the game a high rating. The main encouraging factor of this game was that the
players could engage with three different types of characters which were rare for this type of
games. The heist type of missions in this game introduced a new type of experience to the
gamers from the same series of boring mission structures. Also, in the gamer community, this
game was also praised due to its graphics design considering the time it was released.
Weather and the lighting system in the game were excellent. Sound engineering of this game
was up to the mark, and the storyline of the game was excellent (Collins 2013). So, from the
critical analysis as a video game only, the Grand Theft Auto V was a total success in the
gaming industry.
Conclusion:
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that within the gaming industry this
Grand Theft Auto was a real hit and one of the best video game till the date. In this essay, the
game, Grand Theft Auto has been analysed critically. In this critical analysis media studies
and the game studies of the game has been performed. Form, the media study of the game it
has been found that this game has some negative effects on the society as this game contains
high violence such as gun firing, robbery even murdering people. This all violence can have a
negative impact on the mentality of the peoples as the peoples might be influenced by these
scenarios. From, the game studies it is assessed that it is quite related to normal society, that
people can gather knowledge from the game about a society. While this game is considered
within the gaming industry only as a game, it is assessed that the game was really successful
due to its unique type of gameplay which was also the main reason of the huge benefit of the

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developing company. Thus this game was a real success in the gaming industry and will have
a huge mark in the future of the video games.

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Brittain, I., 2016. The paralympic games explained. Routledge.
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addiction, associated with depression, academic achievement, heavy episodic drinking, or
conduct problems?. Journal of behavioral addictions, 3(1), pp.27-32.
Collins, K., 2013. Playing with sound: a theory of interacting with sound and music in video
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El-Nasr, M.S., Drachen, A. and Canossa, A., 2016. Game analytics. Springer London
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Lee, J.J., Ceyhan, P., Jordan-Cooley, W. and Sung, W., 2013. GREENIFY: A real-world
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Schell, J., 2014. The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. AK Peters/CRC Press.
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