Characters in GTA V
I got asked a little while ago what my absolutely favorite single player experience was.
It is Grand Theft Auto: V, hands down! And as opposed to what a lot of players would say, it's not because of how much I enjoy the violence I can cause in the game or how cool the missions are.
My way of playing Grand Theft Auto largely parallels things I enjoy in life – I drive around a lot and explore places while listening to the radio. I also like flying planes, which is in line with my interest in aviation, and I take the time to enjoy the landscape below in doing so. With a large, realistic world containing lots of elements the player can interact with, GTA almost seems like a shortcut to do worldly things that would otherwise come at a cost of time or money. This further translates to the fact that I and other players who share my view (I know there are quite a few) play the game as ourselves, and either of the three playable characters - Michael, Franklin or Trevor - equally blend in with this feeling.
The power of a player avatar is, a lot of times, measured by how much a player feels like they have blended with the avatar to form a single entity - in other words, they are the avatar and the avatar is them. The qualities of an avatar should resonate with the player in order to achieve this state of mind. This is certainly not true of either of the three playable characters in GTA: V. Michael is a criminal who pulled off several heists in the past living under witness protection and is at complete odds with the rest of his family. Franklin is a low-status figure, finding himself in the organized crime scene solely by chance yet tries very hard to impress the people around him. And Trevor - there is just simply no perfect way to describe him. He has suffered physical and mental abuse in his childhood, which turned into a severe anger problem from his teenage years and onwards. He is completely lacking in manners and is only able to survive thanks to his cunning criminal ways and his ability to boss around his helpless sidekicks.
Despite the three playable characters having little in common with the majority of the game's audience, people do feel like they are the character they are playing. While this seems like a contradiction, it makes sense upon looking from a different perspective. The traits that make the characters the peculiar people they are, in fact, only come to light to a significant degree during missions, through the numerous cut scenes the characters are involved in and the action sequences the missions dictate. Outside the missions - let's call this the sandbox phase of the game - these traits only appear a little in occasional voiceovers triggered upon bumping into someone or meeting a freak on the street, and to an even lesser degree in the special abilities of the characters. During the sandbox phase, all three characters come as templates with rather bland personalities and only minimal differences between each other. The player sculpts whichever character they pick from their templates through the actions the player performs with the character or the clothing the character wears. Each of the three characters, therefore, can be divided into two sub-characters: one character during the missions and another character during the sandbox phase. It is the characters in the sandbox phase that players identify with well, and it is the sandbox phase itself that gives players the chance to do the everyday worldly things I mentioned in the beginning of this post. This parallelism is why there are players like me - playing the game almost as if they are living life.
One Major Problem
Speaking about characters in GTA: V, t is impossible to go without mentioning the game’s lack of major female characters – only Michael’s wife, Amanda, a non-playable character, arguably plays a major role in the storyline. The game also fails Bechdel’s test horribly – not only is there no meaningful visible relationship between female characters, but also almost every female character in the story fulfills the function of a man’s wife, mistress or sexual interest. While the prevalence of male characters in the game is understandable as the story is set around organized crime, an area that is dominated by males, this does not mean female characters have to be omitted. Rockstar, please do better.
If I were in the writers’ shoes, I would have written the storyline with a greater focus on female characters from the ground up, in addition to making at least one of the three playable characters female. This is possible even without changing the current storyline; for example, there is no reason why Trevor cannot be replaced with an equally powerful female character. Trevor has a couple of personality quirks that enhance his criminal and detached-from-life image, the most striking of which is perhaps his severe anger problem, as exemplified in his brutal murder of Johnny. None of his essential traits are there because they are specific to males, unless we want to keep perpetuating the vicious stereotype that males are violent and females are tender. His character is rather tied a lot to his background – he grew up in an abusive family environment and lived as a drifter for a long time without any meaningful relationships with people around him. Moreover, among the three playable characters in the game, Trevor’s social environment is the most isolated from the rest – his sidekicks, sexual interests and the people he feuds with usually have no relation whatsoever to the other two playable characters or the people they are involved with. This means that even if the change in Trevor’s biological sex would have affected the nature of his relationships, those relationships could be redesigned easily from the ground up, perhaps even in an analogous fashion.
