open letters to Rockstar & the LGBTA community

Dear Rockstar Games:

What's up?  Long time player, first time complainer.

Seriously, though, I like you.  Hell, when Grand Theft Auto 4 came out, I took week off from work so I wouldn't have any distractions.  I've been a fan since I was playing the very first top-down GTA back in the dorms some *mumble* years ago.  Your irreverence towards life is funny to me.

Anyway, when I finally got around to playing Bully, I was pretty pumped.  This is the game that Jack Thompson got disbarred over.  This is the game that you used to troll everyone, and I mean everyone--nobody had any idea what the game was like before it came out, and you filled us all with images of horrible high school violence ... only to give us a main character who, while kind of a punk, is actually a good kid, standing up for the bullied, et cetera.  A little bit of a psychopath, yeah, but his heart's in the right place.  Plus, this horrible teen sexuality that everyone was screaming about turned out to be ... kisses.  And you even included the ability to kiss boys!  You really won a lot of hearts in the LGBTA community with that one.

So ... here's my thing.  All of a sudden, in, what, Chapter 4, there's some really disturbing sexuality in the game, and all at once.  We're going to set aside the slut-shaming with Lola for the purposes of this letter, because while it made me a little bit uncomfortable, it was no more unrealistic than the images of fat nerds being stuffed in lockers, and the guy who throws that word around the most is one of the bad guys, who good Jimmy gets to beat up every so often.  So, yeah, we'll ignore that for the moment.

We're going to ignore, too, that beast of a gym teacher hiring Jimmy to steal used underwear from the girl's dorm for him.  That was ... really creepy, Rockstar, I won't lie.  If this were a college game, a panty raid would be classic to the point of being cliché, and significantly less repulsive.  But we're talking about, what, girls age 14-18?  Maybe younger?  There's never really a firm explanation of the age ranges at the school, but some of these kids are awfully short.  Still, I realize you were probably going for the creepy gym teacher thing on purpose, and there's no actual violence being visited upon anyone ... so while that was really pretty gross, I'd be willing to overlook it ... except.

Except, see, for that mission where Jimmy becomes complicit in a rape.  Oh, you don't remember that?  That's funny, because you even set it up in the mission before.  Let's see: First, he goes out and finds sedatives for the cook, then gives the sedatives to the cook, then the cook uses those sedatives to drug the chemistry teacher and haul said chemistry teacher into a nearby motel for a night  of sex.  I left out the genders of the characters there because in my opinion they're not relevant, but someone is probably going to tell me that since it was a female cook and a male teacher, that was just funny.  Except, not so much.

Rockstar, you like to push the envelope.  I'm hip.  Hot Coffee was hilarious, and Hilary can bite me if she really disagrees.  But even you, Rockstar, would not have given us a mission in which the protagonist of a game keeps people from disrupting the event where the ancient and repulsive male cook drugs the coffee of the hapless spinster chemistry teacher so he could rape her repeatedly in a sleazy motel, would you?  I really don't think you would ... so why would you do the exact same thing with the genders reversed?

Not to talk about your competition, Rockstar, but one of the things I loved most about Fable 3 was the mission where one older horrible person--married to a young, monied, attractive spouse--dates you, then asks you to kill the younger person and marry them in their stead.  The reason I love it is because the genders of the participants change based on your character's gender, but the dialogue stays exactly the same.  The older woman comes across as manipulative and mean, but her (rich, attractive, young) husband seems weak.  Conversely, the older man seems slimy and evil, while his (still rich, still attractive, still young) wife is somehow pure, perhaps naive, and utterly innocent of all wrongdoing.  It's a powerful illustration of how switching gender roles, without changing any other variables, can change our perception of a situation.

... which I bring up to illustrate exactly what you've done: You've created a situation like that, where the action is utterly evil, and switched the traditional gender roles to make a crappy joke out of it.

It's still rape.  It's rape, no "still" about it.  You created a video game wherein a 15-year-old helps one party rape another.

That's pretty messed up, Rockstar.  I don't love this about you.  I don't know how I feel about you anymore.

You should think about this.

Quite sincerely,
Patrick

--

Dear LGBTA community:

Where the hell were you on this one when it was relevant?  You played this game; don't tell me you didn't.  GayGamer.net was all over this sucker when they found out you could kiss boys with your male character; it was big news at the time.  This, not so much.  Did nobody finish the game, or did nobody care?  I've been operating under the assumption that gender issues and gay issues went hand in hand; that equality for gender identity and equality for sexual orientation were things we all wanted.  You have a responsibility to point out something as egregious as this despite the minute catering to same-sex relationships--and let's not overlook that those are comprised entirely of, once you've completely humiliated an entire faction in the game, one of the members who happens to share your gender swapping spit with you.  Please don't get bogged down by petty victories and allow something this dehumanizing is allowed to slip through.  It's not going to do anyone any favors.

With respect (and some serious disappointment),
Patrick