White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

In the videogame Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the player is invited to step into the world of Carl Johnson, CJ, as he returns to his hometown of San Andreas. Modeled after South Central Los Angeles and set in the early 1990s, San Andreas might be described as an interactive ‘Boyz n the Hood.’ It offers the player the opportunity to act out popular-culture fantasies of middle-class youths through the representation of poor, inner city, African-American existence. While the intentions of the game are primarily to offer a fun experience, which it undoubtedly does, there is a great deal of learning that goes on in playing the game. Both in the very structure of the game and within the subtext of San Andreas, there is a glamorizing, and even spectacularization of violence, a marking of young black bodies as disposable, an insistence on a culture of cynicism as well as a particular formation of African-American experience that is extremely problematic. Furthermore, there is a sense of the public sphere as a site of danger and a withdrawal from any commitment to political or collective social agency that runs throughout the game. Taken together, these undercurrents in the game’s environment and narrative serve to naturalize and reinforce (as well as justify) neoliberal policies that divest power from politics and collapse public concerns into private worries. Similarly, the ideology of the game provides, and operates in tandem with, the necessary ideological conditions for both the U.S. ‘‘war on terror’’ and the war against Iraq. In his text on the pedagogy of video games, Jim Gee argues, amongst other things, that video games offer an opportunity for players to be involved in very sophisticated role playing, allowing