WE LIVE in an amoral and violent world: human trafficking, gang warfare, beheadings, rape - oh wait, that's just the video game Grand Theft Auto IV.
Commercial movie theaters are expecting slow sales this weekend because the new edition of the addictive video game, released Tuesday, is expected to keep millions of youngish American males encased in their bedrooms, gleefully blasting people's heads off. The Entertainment Software Ratings Board, a voluntary industry group, has given GTA's new edition an M rating: "not suitable for players under 17." But there is little monitoring of video game sales, and few believe that a determined 14-year-old couldn't get his hands on the game.
This poses a dilemma: No defender of free expression, such as a newspaper editorial page, can easily support censorship. And unlike cigarettes, guns, or alcohol, the danger even to minors of possessing debased video games is a murkier science to prove. Ultimately, parents must be the gatekeepers of the media their children consume.
Still, the GTA-IV experience is particularly insidious. The very features its fans love - high-quality graphics that immerse the player in a convincingly realistic world - raise the stakes. The targets are not space aliens or cartoon characters but police officers, taxi drivers, strippers, and the occasional innocent bystander. The violence, especially toward women, is unusually gratuitous. There is nothing about GTA-IV that can be considered remotely "socially redeeming" - one of the tests the courts use to judge whether material is obscene.
The other familiar obscenity test is whether something violates "community standards," and here the game may already be lost. Every time another rap song or video game pushes the envelope, it becomes the new standard.
We wouldn't ban Grand Theft Auto. But the death and maiming in Liberty City are too close to the real lives of too many children. To package that for profit and entertainment is the real crime.
