GTAIII: Do you have it in you?

             Earlier this week, I was dodging the cops in liberty city while fighting gang members. When I was younger, I would never have even dreamed of playing a video game of this nature. I"m older now, and games with violent content are flooding the market. The game that I was playing was entitled Grand Theft Auto III, and may quite possibly be the most controversial video game ever released. Never before has violence been as prevalent in a video game until now. The player goes through the game as an ex-convict who escaped from jail and needs a place to lay low for awhile. Your player gets an "in" with the mob and receives missions from them throughout the game. Some of the missions are not as bad as the rest: picking up hookers and taking them to buy drugs, but some missions include going on a rampage with grenades. For one reason or another, Grand Theft Auto III is the best selling game in the country. The main reason the game appealed to me was actually the violence in the game. It made the game interesting to me to be able to go out and do things that are not allowed in our society, such as the killing, picking up hookers, and stealing cars. The game is so controversial, that the sale of it was banned in Australia (Sievers 1). I"m starting to wonder if people here in America should be concerned with the sale of this game here in the states.
             The violence in this game is truly problematic for a kid who perceives it in a negative way. It rewards violence by giving the player extra points for killing people, and in essence glorifies the killing. The amount of money the gamer makes throughout certain missions is directly related to how many people they kill. The main reason that this is the number one criterion for deciding if the games violence is problematic is because children with impressionable minds may take the game too seriously and go out and shoot someone because they thought it was ok since they did it on their video game.