I just flew home from California, but I didn’t land it on Dan. Would you believe they wouldn’t even let me fly the plane? I can totally fly one in video games, which is our theme for this month (the definition of the word flying may have been stretched in this sentence). Throughout August, Dan and I will be talking about some of our favourite games and the things they push us to think about while also encouraging us to build things, fight monsters, and cause wanton mayhem. This week, Saints Row the Third and how to sneak up on a friend in a jet.
The Saints Row series features crime games set in a sandbox city, like Grand Theft Auto only with shark guns and giant dildos. You play the leader of the Third Street Saints and stomp all over your competition as you conquer the streets by driving fast cars, selling drugs, and occasionally taking out the competition with an assault helicopter. I’ve always been a Grand Theft Auto fan because I love sandbox settings that encourage me to wreak havoc, but what captured me about Saints Row was that you can explore the storyline and missions with a friend. Cooperative multiplayer makes everything better. Halfway through any session the story and missions are usually thrown out the window in favour of daring stunts, car chases, and rocket launcher duels.
What it makes me think about though, is permissibility and comfort. I’m fine with a game that has me perpetrating acts of carnage on unsuspecting citizenry with tanks, machine guns, and fighter jets. Stealing cars, assassinating targets, and crushing Belgian crime lords under giant pieces of sculpture are all in a day’s work. But when Zimos, a pimp with a tracheotomy that autotunes his voice, suggests that we take back the town by kidnapping prostitutes from the “Stable” of our enemies, I wince. A lot. I’ll find anything to do but those missions, usually under the guise of them being a bit of a pain, but the reality is that they make me uncomfortable. It’s like those women are objects that can just be transferred into my possession, and the game presents this as a really good thing. We’re the good pimps.
The strange thing about it is that these are the same sex workers I have no trouble shooting to draw out a target for assassination. There’s something about the act of essentially enslaving people that really gets to me. Acts of violence have been a mechanic in video games since the days of Space Invaders and Gauntlet, an easy way of presenting challenges that people understand and can overcome. But Saints Row makes a game out of what’s essentially slavery. It’s one thing to treat representations of people like targets, but treating them like sexual possessions? Pimping them out? That’s a relationship with digital characters that I’m not comfortable with at all.
It’s a weird distinction, I know. Saints Row is hardly the only series that treats women as possessions, quest items, or sexual objects. Presented against a backdrop of drug dealing, villainy, and over the top violence, I find that it pushes me to ask “Why that?” Why does that one thing bother me when I’m fine with all kinds of other game mechanics which would, in real life, be morally monstrous. I have no illusions about the heroes of Saints Row. They may believe in brotherhood and be the best of friends, but they’re villains with a callous disregard for human life, and the player character most of all. The games make it a lot of fun to play the bad guy, and I love that. But not that one part.
So instead of doing those missions, we fight our way across the city, are merciless to our foes and helpful to our friends, battling cyberpunk gangs, Luchadores, and genetically engineered brutes. And I hit Dan with cars. A lot. I love the driving controls, so I do a fair amount of it. And the secret to landing a plane on your friend is making sure they’re deeply embroiled in something else and flying a plane that has vertical takeoff and landing. It’s more like squashing than landing, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
