The Ghetto as a Playground:
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and the Urban Action/Adventure Game

By Dave Jesteadt (davejesteadt@gmail.com)

On June 9, 2006, Take-Two Interactive Software and Rockstar Studios reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for the hidden virtual sex mini-game that could be accessed within their popular videogame, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, by downloading a modification patch off the Internet. The agreement to better police what their programmers included, and to accurately report what future videogames included, was the final outcome of over a year of politicking by the likes of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT), as well as individual lawsuits filed by numerous cities, states and individuals throughout the United States.¹

This has not been the first controversy for the Grand Theft Auto series of videogames, which have long been the subject of debates on violent content, even as they continue to receive exceedingly positive reviews from game critics for their innovative gameplay and cinematic presentation. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the game in the series released a year before San Andreas, was protested by Haitian groups in Miami after they discovered one mission within the game, in which the player's character is sent to participate in a gang war, gives a simple shorthand command to "Kill the Haitians!" Take-Two and Rockstar apologized, and sent new copies of the game to store shelves with a less explicit command substituted.² Before the "Hot Coffee" sex patch was discovered, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was also the subject of a call to boycott in February 2006 by Sex Workers Project-USA, who said the game "encourages the denigration and destruction of prostitutes" and "accrues points for the rape and murder of prostitutes."³ (One of the more notorious aspects of the game franchise is that players can recharge their energy by picking up prostitutes, and if so inclined, kill them later to get their money back.)

One part of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that has received much less attention in the press is the storyline's use of a black protagonist for the first time in the series' history. Previous Grand Theft Auto games have told the stories of Italian-American men stuck in the mid-level of their local mob, looking to advance their careers with violently entrepreneurial brashness. These games drew from the Mafia lore firmly established in popular culture, such as The Godfather, Goodfellas and The Sopranos. In the case of San Andreas' immediate predecessor, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the mix of 1980s Miami and the cocaine business took numerous cues from the movie Scarface, even though that film's title character was a Cuban immigrant, and Vice City's Tommy Vercetti was another Italian mob henchman.

Vice City's protagonist demonstrates the series' focus and style pre-San Andreas

Players in San Andreas control Carl "CJ" Johnson, a young African-American man who returns to his California neighborhood of Los Santos, San Andreas (closely modeled on South Central Los Angeles circa 1992) after he learns his mother has been murdered. He finds his friends and family spiraling into drugs and violence, and he is also framed by corrupt cops for a murder he didn't commit, so they can blackmail him into re-enforcing their extralegal policies. At this point, he decides to join his childhood friends as a fellow gangbanger, and take over the city's streets, punishing the crooked cops and the rival gangs responsible for his mother's death through a lifestyle he once tried to escape.

There is a fine line between the ethnic and cultural stereotypes of Italians in previous Grand Theft Auto games, and the racialization of crime and mayhem that San Andreas offers, in which blacks and Latinos now make up the vast majority of the characters central to the storyline (but still a minority of the overall digital denizens in the fictional cities). By treating Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a case study, closely examining the game's place within the larger history of ethnic and racial representations in the videogame industry, as well as observing the discourse created around the game by fans and the press, San Andreas can be seen as a major and problematic force within the industry, as copycat attempts at repeating the game's runaway success have led to the increasing "ghettoization" of the adventure/action videogame. The progressive potential of increased minority representation in an emerging form of popular media, or the possibility of a political commentary on the effects of government policies in the creation of violence and an underground drug economy in poverty-stricken communities, have now been almost completely ignored in an effort to provide the most competitive form of entertainment.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas offers visuals and gameplay on a level of sophistication unimaginable when videogames first started being released commercially four decades ago. In the very earliest games, like Spacewar!, Space Invaders and Pong, the game graphics were too simplistic to suggest anything but the most basic variation between characters on a screen, say, the difference between a square and a circle. The storylines and gameplay setups for most of the titles were militaristic in nature, owing to the industry's initial funding in the early 1960s by the American military, which looked to MIT students to create combat strategy simulators.⁴ With crude technology and even cruder storylines, racial and ethnic stereotypes in videogames have not been in place since the very beginning; they have evolved as the visual technology and marketing apparatuses allowed distinctions to gain importance. A brief history of the treatment of race and ethnicity in videogames will be valuable in placing San Andreas within a context that explains its ability to impact the industry.

One of the earliest recorded controversies occurred in 1983, when feminist and Native American activist groups protested an adult game on the Atari 2600 called Custer's Revenge. In that game, players controlled a little pink man with a cowboy hat, whose only goal was to rape a tied-up Native American woman. When pressed, the publisher of the game issued a small apology and promised to stop producing the game (which they didn't). Soon after, they created a spin-off company specifically to re-release Custer's Revenge, which sold over 75,000 copies, and the game has since gone on to achieve some notoriety among videogame enthusiasts as a politically incorrect curiosity.⁵

Japanese developers throughout the 1980s, most famously Sega, used generic black-skinned character models to denote enemies, who would then be attacked and mowed down by the white hero. The actual storylines to these games (insofar as earlier videogames even had developed storylines) did not justify this design choice with any particularly racist rhetoric, but the constant use of white vs. black has its own connotations, whether intentional or not. This practice stopped when the games began to get imported into the lucrative North American market by their new American branches, and the companies had to spend time and money re-designing the villains in order to avoid protest.⁶ But one game series, Streets of Rage, continued to provide a mix of enemy designs that included various black thugs and homosexuals (denoted by their pink pairs of hot pants or leather "bear" outfits), in addition to more generic white villains. This tradition lasted up to the game's final entry, Streets of Rage III, in 1994.

Screenshot from Streets of Rage III, see more on Wikipedia's page on LGBT characters in videogames.

Perhaps the most famous ethnic stereotype is embodied by Nintendo's mascot Mario, the mustachioed Italian-American plumber from Brooklyn whose catchphrase, "It's-a me, Mario!" has survived over two decades intact. Mario and his brother Luigi are the only human mascots for a major videogame franchise that can be placed within a specific ethnic culture, and even then, the most flagrant stereotypes of their Italian background come in the movie and children's television show--products spun-off from the videogames. The costs of developing and advertising a franchise that can boost or sustain videogame system sales, as well as provide valuable fodder for ancillary licensing of the brand, are high enough that most companies are reluctant to base these flagship titles on any representations that could be taken as insulting.

Racial and ethnic stereotypes in videogames have actually been relatively few, due to historic design trends within the industry. The large reliance on fantasy settings or anthropomorphic animals--following the idea that videogame worlds should be far from reality--means that a large number of videogames don't even use human characters to start with, or place their videogames within the context of planet Earth. The popular computer game Everquest for instance, which has millions of players exploring its online worlds and interacting with each other, takes place on a fantasy world and features "races" like Elf, Dwarf, Human and Ogre. The use of fantasy races doesn't place the game totally outside the realm of critique. The Dark Elves, who have skin looking the most African, are one of the evil races in the game, since they are skilled at dark magic. In her influential book Play Between Worlds, sociologist E.L. Taylor notes that players tend to choose either white-looking characters or the purely fantastic ones like Ogre, but largely stayed away from black-looking characters like the Dark Elves. She attributes this partially to racism and partially to the deep bond players feel with their avatars, which makes them want to choose characters that reflect who they are.⁷

The larger problem in videogames industry is not necessarily racist or ethnically insensitive portrayals of characters within the games, but the almost total absence of minority characters outside of their genre ghettos. Asians, for example, can count on being seen in videogames as ninjas, kung fu masters or enemies in World War II-era combat games. An honors thesis by Robert Parungao points out that the many nationalities of Southeast Asia are often conflated into an ahistorical, monolithic category of "Asian," wherein a hero might have a Chinese name but reference the devastation of Hiroshima.⁸ African-Americans get the sports genre as the primary space of representation, which although often based on the actual makeup of the various professional sports leagues, also reflects long-standing stereotypes about where African-Americans are allowed to participate in popular culture. When the organization Children Now surveyed videogames looking for African-American male representation, out of the 1,500 character sample, they found only 288 were African-American males, and 83 percent of these were athletes in sports games.⁹ Latinos, apart from perhaps a few roles as deadly natives in Indiana Jones-style adventure games taking place in Central and South America, have been completely ignored.

CJ and fellow gang members in the middle of a drive-by (screenshot from TeamXbox).

This was the atmosphere in which Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas arrived. Some political commentators were cautiously optimistic, calling it "progress--with an asterisk."¹⁰ As one of the biggest franchises in videogame history, the new chapter of San Andreas was guaranteed to place a black male lead character into the home of millions of videogame users around the world. Critical acclaim quickly piled up for the game's "digital sandbox" format, which is a term used to describe an open-system world in which CJ is free to roam and do hundreds of different activities, including side jobs, gambling, street races, dating and plenty of bonus missions, all while driving one of numerous makes of cars that can play a dozen radio stations. An aggregator of online and offline press reviews calculates that San Andreas is the third-best reviewed game on the PlayStation 2 system, with 36 reviews giving the game a perfect score. The overall average of all 101 reviews of the game came out at a stunningly high 95%.¹¹ Building on the positive reviews and already well-known brand, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sold a record two million copies in the first five days of its release.¹² The game went on to sell over 5.1 million copies in 2005, sustaining popularity up to a year after its release in November 2004.¹³

So what does taking on the role of a black male, particularly one who is a gang member from a bad neighborhood in a fictionalized Los Angeles, feel like? The question is largely ignored in all the rave reviews, save for comments like the one from John Davison at Official U.S. Playstation Magazine that "CJ is possibly one of the best developed and most believable videogame characters ever made."¹⁴ The kind of subjectivity gamers from various backgrounds experience playing through the eyes of CJ, and the socio-political implications of this happening in a hugely-popular videogame, is an interesting concept to study. In the two years since the game was released, the fan culture and press debate around the game have produced message boards and a handful of newspaper articles that help address this question from different racial, geographical and financial angles.

Close to a year after the game came out, an article in the Washington Post compared the experiences of two teenagers from different backgrounds, Robert "Tito" Ortiz and Brendan Golden, playing San Andreas. Although both played the game to "escape," the differences between the two were largely where they lived and what they were escaping from. For Ortiz, who lived in South Central Los Angeles and attended one of the most dangerous high schools in the state, the gang violence in San Andreas was a virtual and controllable example of what went on outside his house, while for Golden, who lived in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, the game was a tourist-style vacation to a place in reality he'll probably never go--a place depicted as far more exciting than suburbia. Ortiz identifies with the game's realism in depicting the ghetto, noting how the absence of white people in the Los Santos neighborhood of San Andreas mirrors the white flight in his own neighborhood, and how the game gets Latino gang members "even down to the choppy Spanglish, the 'Orale, homes,' that some of the gangstas say... it's all realistic."¹⁵ Although he cares about what happens to CJ and deeply identifies with the character, Ortiz carries no delusions about the people who developed San Andreas, or the stereotypes that drove them to want to recreate the West Coast ghettos of the early-1990s. "Don't we gotta be some sort of gang-bangin', PCP-sellin' Mexicans who like to shoot? Isn't that what people think?"¹⁶

San Andreas continues the series' viewpoint on women (screenshot from Absolute Playstation).

What's intriguing in the article is how Ortiz focuses on how his own culture is represented in the game, drifting away from the primary identifier of CJ. In a game where Chinese, Italian and Latino gangs play a large part in the game's storyline, the willingness to focus exclusively on the big addition of CJ and his African-American counterparts may be complicated by the actual experience of who gamers relate to. Ortiz also criticizes the developers, who he assumes are predominantly white, for creating a product that reflects predominate middle- and upper-class stereotypes--even as he professes to be obsessed with the game. (Rockstar North is predominantly white, and based in Edinburgh, Scotland.)

The experience of Brendan Golden is largely glossed over as the article focuses on Ortiz, the counterpoint to the assumed upper-middle-class and white audience that mostly plays the game. Scholars throughout the article disparage the game's depiction of the ghetto as a playground, and decry the storyline as little more than modern-day minstrelsy, allowing whites to "try on" blackness as they've come to know it through rap music and movies.¹⁷ While these descriptions of the gameplay are useful and perhaps in many cases accurate, a vocal minority of white gamers posting on Internet message boards devoted to San Andreas have brought up the issue of race and expressed discomfort over the game's use of CJ.

On one of the biggest online message boards for the game, posts calling attention to the game's racial construction are often labeled as "trolling," or deliberately looking to start a fight, and are therefore quickly attacked or closed down. A few still manage to get posted, and draw heated debate for several days before the website's moderator closes the thread (often due to the overwhelming number of personal attacks). The content of these posts are primary accounts of how gamers identify themselves and what they take away from the experience of playing as a black gangsta. One user actually complained about being forced to play as a black character, saying:

The game is supposed to let you 'customize your character', but you can't change him to be white. They developed this game making some black guy all 'ghetto' and 'hip-hop' or whatever it is he's supposed to be... only black guys can be like that? I mean, almost everyone in this game is black, or close to it. What was wrong with the guy in GTA3 or even [Vice City's] Tommy?¹⁸

While there were plenty of one-sentence responses calling the person racist, other users were surprisingly sympathetic to the post, agreeing that CJ "speaks like a tool," "sounds immature" or "like an Ice-Cube wannabe." Responses that complained about the use of African-American English were some of the most frequently repeated gripes, but at least one person disagreed with those who took issue at the game's use of racial epithets, swearing and Ebonics and gave a reason similar to Brendan Golden's escape from suburbia: "I like the fact that for a few hours, I can put myself in someone else's shoes and pretend to be something I can't possibly be."¹⁹ This escape from suburban etiquette into lawlessness, however, can be problematically conflated with an escape from whiteness.

In another post, a user questioned the stereotypes San Andreas projected about all black people being hoodlums, and wondered how the game would go over in Rockstar's native Scotland, "where there are no black people." That the videogame inaccurately represented the potential of African-Americans was of no doubt: "Just look at Colin Powell, he's very smart. So is Bill Cosby."²⁰ Those two pieces of a longer entry were immediately jumped on and discredited as foolish, but the larger question of what role race (and specifically racism) plays within San Andreas was dismissed as irrelevant. Many message board users doubted that blacks would mind, either citing that the game reflected reality ("it's not racism, it's more of a lifestyle"), or that the portrayal of gang culture was all in good fun. One person summed up the general mood when they said, "If Rockstar wanted to offend black people they would have done it in a different way. Not by making [CJ] the main character of one of the best games in the world."²¹

The claims from fans that San Andreas is apolitical, and that Rockstar intended to make nothing more than an entertaining game, are troublingly simplistic and deserve closer analysis. In his excellent essay for the journal Popular Communication on ideological frameworks within videogames, Ian Bogost devotes a section to discussing San Andreas. He sees both progressive and conservative potential in the game's oft-mentioned sense of realism, the "digital sandbox" of a recreated West Coast circa 1992, which unlike its historical fiction predecessors, means that San Andreas automatically "takes on a cultural moment steeped in racial and economic politics."²² To Bogost, the game represents an ideological ambiguity that could be read as either liberal or conservative depending on the personal emphasis of each player.

First, Bogost notes that the continuing drive for more realism has introduced new social critiques into the game franchise. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the first game in the series to demand that players make their character eat food to stay energized, and the character changes from skinny to fat if too much is consumed. This in turn affects their ability to run fast or gain respect, which makes the game harder to win. So eating and maintaining a dietary balance is now another concern the player needs to juggle, but the various neighborhoods in the game only offer a series of comically named fast food chains to dine at.

This subtle restriction actually mirrors the economics debate surrounding the fast food industry, in which low-income communities have higher rates of obesity and malnutrition partially due to the ready availability and comparatively low cost of the fattiest and highest-calorie fast food meals. One new challenge in San Andreas thus becomes keeping CJ healthy and muscular in a society where salad meals are the most expensive, and anything else will make the character fat if eaten regularly. However, CJ can lose the weight by visiting gyms located throughout the city (which conveniently are free to visit in the videogame, but a luxury to most in reality); the game therefore creates a dialectic wherein impoverished neighborhoods are plagued by poor-quality food, but this can still be overcome with relative ease through individual action. The responsibility thus seems to shift from fast food corporations to the laziness of the individual, depending on how the text is read, and a relatively minor aspect of San Andreas can therefore be seen to inhabit both ideological points of view.²³

Bogost claims the same ambiguity expressed in the role of nutrition in San Andreas also applies to the larger question of CJ's agency in deciding his role as a gun-toting gangbanger anti-hero. Although CJ is set up by corrupt cops in the opening cutscene of the videogame, which explains why he can't flee the city in the same fashion he supposedly did many years ago, the game betrays its inner-city focus by making these cutscenes--which are pre-planned and cannot be altered by the player's actions--the only time CJ's race actually seems to impact the gameplay experience. The example Bogost gives for this is the videogame's artificial intelligence, which dictates what non-playable characters (better understood as the model humans that wander around the digital city waiting to be acted on) do when they are attacked, carjacked or just in the presence of CJ. Although San Andreas offers three different cities, closely modeled on Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, CJ receives exactly the same attention regardless of location, "so that bumping into a leggy blonde on the equivalent of Beverly Hills' Rodeo Drive elicits the same anonymous cry as jostling a drug dealer on Compton's Atlantic Drive."²⁴

The gang hangs out in front of their neighborhood.

To take this further than his brief aside, being black in the world of San Andreas is given a kind of fixed and neutral meaning, so that CJ's interactions in communities of extremely different socioeconomic standing are made exactly the same. He can be customized with many different clothes, tattoos and hairstyles by visiting different stores, but it does not matter to the non-playable characters if CJ is wearing a snappy business suit or no shirt and a do-rag. He can even openly carry a gun, so long as he doesn't fire it at anyone when a police officer is around. In a game where police attention makes missions harder to complete successfully (the game screen has a series of "wanted stars" that fill up as more police backup and eventually even the FBI or the Army get called in), CJ is not pulled over for "driving while black," or even thought to be more suspicious and hence more closely monitored if he's wandering around in a swanky neighborhood full of mansions. Yet the game is supposed to be set during an era when harassment and profiling were so bad that two of the most popular rap songs were NWA's "Fuck Tha Police" and Ice-T's "Cop Killer." (Ice-T even provides one of the character voices in the game.) What does this lack of imposed realism mean in the larger argument over the political impact of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas?

If CJ is not treated any differently throughout the game world because he is black, or because he comes from a poor or violent neighborhood, the life of crime he leads is self-chosen and a sign of personal--not societal--weakness. There are no barriers for employment or menacing outward influences would make robbery and running in a gang more enticing as a means to be protected and get by; in fact, the game makes available side jobs like taxi driving, ambulance driving and even taking the role of police officer as ways to earn extra money. Getting these jobs is easy: you just steal the required vehicle and press a button! While it is possible to spend hours working in these side jobs, if the player wishes to continue the game's storyline and achieve the ending, they must continue to do missions that require a return to criminal activity. While San Andreas' societal conditions don't mandate CJ's criminality, the actual structure of the game does.

Many of these missions also progress a rags-to-riches storyline that takes CJ from humble beginnings to the top of the power structure, turning him into the kingpin of an illegal empire with the same clout as politicians and movie stars. This focus on the individual overcoming market regulations, drawing power from the respect of his underlings, and embracing the competitive spirit of capitalism, would make CJ a conservative icon if his chosen business wasn't in the underground drug economy.

Towards the end of his essay, Bogost briefly returns to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, considering the possibility of the game acting as a parody of this common capitalist narrative, where representations of violence and moral excess often attributed to inner city communities by the media have at the same time been excused and perhaps even encouraged in the upper echelons of white collar business. The game's refusal to seriously consider social and political hierarchies of power in its gameplay weakens the potential of this satirical reading, and conservatives could equally claim the game as a pro-business tale of individual responsibility. This ambivalence reads San Andreas against the grain commonly ascribed to the series by other videogame theorists, which tend to follow the reviewer and fan base notions that the games are little more than harmless fun.

The common narrative within the fledging field of Games Studies, like one provided by Ben Hourigan in The Institute of Public Affairs, claims that videogames as a whole are conservative, but that the Grand Theft Auto series is "atypical" of that trend. The violence and mayhem directed towards society in these games defy the overall push towards preservation of societal values, but the lack of anarchic politics behind the violence renders them inert. As Hourigan explains, "They revel in rebellion not out of any political radicalism or desire to corrupt, but rather because playing the bad guy is a novel and welcome change for players more frequently involved in world-saving heroics."²⁶

This so-called anomaly in videogame culture might not have mattered, if Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas wasn't one of the most popular and economically successful videogames in the history of the medium. The success of the franchise, and San Andreas in particular, provided powerful evidence to other videogame publishers that a formula for success had been found. Coupled with the current "browning" of mainstream culture through the popularity of hip-hop, the open-world format offered by San Andreas would be frequently repeated by a slew of competing action/adventure games, such as 25 to Life, 50 Cent: Bulletproof, Saints Row, Crackdown, 187: Ride or Die, True Crime: Streets of LA and True Crime: New York City.

Carjacking is the quickest and easiest way to get a ride in Grand Theft Auto.

These games all feature minorities in the lead role as the violent antiheroes, significantly increasing their visible representation within the typically whitewashed industry. However, by relying on the heavy repetition of urban images similar to those found in San Andreas, this crop of games have simultaneously led to the "ghettoization" of the action/adventure genre, in which minority youth--particularly African-Americans and Latinos--are depicted as nothing more than lawless hoodlums who must be stopped by any means necessary.

Some of these means are themselves tragically ironic, as in True Crime: New York City, where players take control of Marcus Reed, a young black man from the ghetto who goes from being a criminal to being a cop, and then tries to clean up the streets through extralegal means while tracking down the gangs and drug lords who want him killed for his past. One of the key techniques used by players in their dispersal of justice is the ability to randomly pat down citizens walking down the street. If nothing incriminating is found, Reed can plant drugs or weapons on them for a frame-up, and then their arrest will go towards his quota, which allows him to advance in the department. A notorious method of police harassment inflicted upon minorities and inner-city residents is now used by a virtual member of this very community in a celebrated and well-advertised gameplay twist. Some of the ideological damage from these games comes not from San Andreas' template, then, but the competition's cynical and continual attempt to one-up the formula and drag the genre further into the racialization of violence and corruption.

These popular games that continue to re-enforce the idea that young African-American and Latino men primarily interact in the world as vicious felons can create a deadly cycle of representation. For example, a brief look at how New Orleans was portrayed during Hurricane Katrina reveals cultural perceptions underlying decisions to label survivors within the city as looters, murderers and general lawless citizens who shoot at helicopters and create mayhem. This is not to suggest that videogames like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and its variety of knockoffs are directly responsible for the tone of this media coverage, but the evidence should suggest that these games actively contribute to a popular culture in ways far beyond their accepted status as harmless entertainment. In a time when the desire to dress in baggy clothes is often conflated with the potential of committing crimes, games such as San Andreas take weak stands on the existence of societal discrimination based on racism and frequently work within ideological frameworks that actually promote the reasoning behind this discrimination.

To give a final example of this trend impacting videogames and culture in unforeseen ways, UbiSoft recently released Rayman Raving Rabbids. This game is marketed as a family-friendly game, in which Rayman--who somewhat resembles a person, except that he has disembodied hands and feet--competes in a variety of humorous minigames, and has been well received by the gaming press. By progressing through the game, players can add extra costumes to Rayman's wardrobe, dressing him up in silly attire to look like a grandma or a DJ. One of these extra costume options is "Gangsta," and besides adding sunglasses, a do-rag and baggy pants, it is the only costume that changes Rayman's normally cream-colored skin color... to black. If black children want to play as a character that looks even a bit more like them, they are forced to self-identify as a "gangsta." Subtle changes like this can be found throughout the videogame industry in the wake of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and that's one reason racial and ethnic representations in modern videogames deserve a more critical look.


References:
¹ "Settlement by Game Maker," New York Times 9 June 2006: C6.
² Gary Younge, "'Kill the Haitians' game in the dock: Legal action seeks a ban on best-selling US computer adventure which encourages players to go on a deadly spree of drug-related mayhem," The Guardian 2 Jan. 2004: 17.
³ Tom Zeller Jr., "Defending Cruelty: It's Only a Game," New York Times 20 Feb. 2006: C3.
⁴ Stephen Kline, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).
⁵ Jennifer Skurnik, "X rated videogames multiply: 'Custer's revenge' removed," Off Our Backs 31 Mar. 1983: 27.
⁶ Kline.
⁷ E.L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Massachusetts: MIT Press).
⁸ Gamespot.com, "Student thesis pegs games as racist," Jul. 24, 2006.
⁹ Michel Marriott, "The Color of Mayhem," New York Times 12 Aug. 2004: G1.
¹⁰ Eric Gwinn, "If you play 'San Andreas' you'll be a black male--does it matter?" Chicago Tribune 1 Nov. 2004: 1.
¹¹ GameRankings.com, "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," 18 Nov. 2006. ¹² "Go beyond the hub and spoke model," Businessline 27 Mar. 2006: 1.
¹³ Betsy Cummings, "Praise the Lord and Pass the Joystick," New York Times 2 Mar. 2006: C5.
¹⁴ John Davison, "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; Is it really the best game ever made?" Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine 1 Dec. 2004: 89.
¹⁵ Jose Antonio Vargas, "Gamers' Intersection: 'Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' Plays To a Generation From the Streets to Suburbia," Washington Post 27 Sep. 2005: C1.
¹⁶ Vargas C1.
¹⁷ Vargas C1.
¹⁸ GameFAQs.com, "I don't understand why the main character has to be black," 14 Nov. 2006.
¹⁹ GameFAQs.com, "I don't understand why the main character has to be black."
²⁰ GameFAQs.com, "This game is racist," 17 Nov. 2006.
²¹ GameFAQs.com, "This game is racist."
²² Ian Bogost, "Videogames and Ideological Frames," Popular Communication 4:3 (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006): 176.
²³ Bogost 176.
²⁴ Bogost 178.
²⁵ Bogost 180-182.
²⁶ Ben Hourigan, "Are video games conservative?" Institute of Public Affairs Review 57.3 (2005): 14-16.