Gama Analysis — GTA 5

Gama Analysis — GTA 5

Order Description

This essay 2, you will provide a detailed game description (a summary of the game’s premise, its gameplay, its virtual environment, music, characters) in addition to outlining of its studio history and reception. The emphasis of the essay, however, is ANALYZING the game (linking its major themes and gameplay to an argument on what you think the game is about with respect to larger social or cultural categories such as gender, race, geopolitical economy, etc.). Like the essay 1 (the previous essay of this course ), you’ll be required to research, write. This essay will be 2000-2500 words and will also require 8 sources (3 academic sources required), 2 of which must deal with the game directly. This is an in-depth game analysis, conducted as an extension of the work you did in the first essay. See following for what I did on previous essay and detailed description of this essay 2.

The first essay you finished was a historical survey on Rockstar Games and GTA series (especially GTA 5). You were able to research your game company’s history and to evaluate responses to it. The nice thing about this approach is that while you were relieved from having to produce a detailed argument, you were also guided toward the central preoccupations of those who have begun to think critically about the game. So you can really think of essay 2 as an extension of this piece (1), where you take up significant thematic strands within the game (plot, objectives, character, gameplay, soundtrack, etc.) and rebind them to the concerns identified in essay 1. Essentially, this means that you’ll be finding ways to relate what takes place within the world of the game to events taking place outside of it in a “real” world of social, political, and economic upheaval.

The relationship between “real” and “virtual” behavior seems to be a key issue in your assessment of the GTA series. So you might proceed by detailing the reasons that the game was deemed controversial, and then go on to explore what’s behind these attacks. Do conservative critics imagine that what a gamer does in a simulated environment conditions his/her behavior in the real world? Why do they make an assumption that there is a direct link between these two worlds? What about their criticism is valid? Invalid? At stake here seem to be (1) how mainstream politics has attacked/treated “controversial” games like GTA but also a bigger issue (2) which is how the virtual relates to the real.

You might need more than 3 academic resources. I can provide you some, such as “Grove Street Grimm: Grand Theft Auto and Digital Folklore” by Kiri Miller, “HIGH ART/LOW LIFE The Art of Playing Grand Theft Auto” by Soraya Murray, “Grand Theft Architecture: Architecture works in video games” by David Stark. Email me if you need those. [email protected]