LOS ANGELES — Local police officer Connor Todd recently sampled the immensely popular Grand Theft Auto 5 and was very disturbed at the depiction of prompt responses by law enforcement officials.
“Oh geez, kids are gonna play this and get a really warped idea of reality,” said Todd as he played the game. “Look at that, I just pointed a gun at a woman on the street and a cop showed up almost instantly. That’s ridiculous. Unless a few hours went by in-game that I didn’t realize, this is one of the most unrealistic video games on the market.”
Representatives from Rockstar Games said that they often have to bend reality to make their games play a little more dynamically.
“Of course we aim for realism in many ways, but we have to distort the truth here and there just to make sure the game plays like we’d like it to,” said Tracy Lyons, a lead designer that worked on Grand Theft Auto 5. “Like allowing your player to carry a dozen weapons at once, making every car easy to hotwire, and yeah, making the police department at large respond with anything resembling urgency when a poor person is in trouble.”
Still, others found the portrayal of police to be entirely accurate to their experiences.
“Look, there’s just too many police officers in the world to paint them all with the same brush,” said Zac Moreno, a gamer that defended Rockstar’s portrayal of police. “I used to think they were all a bunch of corrupt and ineffective assholes that would never show up in my neighborhood. But then one time I lit a joint outside of a bar and the immediacy that the cops beat, tased, and arrested me with is something I haven’t seen represented in media until I played GTA5.”
As of press time, Officer Todd said he had to give credit where it was due and applauded the Rockstar developers for how quickly the Liberty City police were to fire their guns.
