orichalcum

I think the responsibility of the reviewer is to give the target audience a sense of how much they will like the game. What bothers me here is that apparently the reviewer didn't feel the gender issues were relevant to his enjoyment of the game, nor does he think that it's relevant to the target audience's enjoyment.

Though there's probably also a fundamental issue of "it's GTA, everyone already knows it's gross and misogynist, why waste my column issues on the obvious?" going on.

I think a simple statement reminding readers that this game is for mature players might be in order, in case you've been living under a rock and did not know that already. To use your example, I would not necessarily expect a review of the second season of Deadwood to remind me of the foul language - it's already pretty much out there as cultural knowledge.

I also think that within the context of a game review, a discussing its morality would not be out of place, but it's also not required. Again, partly because that has been discussed to death already, and partly because the purpose of a review IS to discuss whether it's fun to play, not whether a player should be doing so.

To begin by blandly answering your question, I think game review should mention a game's rating, as a matter of consumer information if nothing else. I think it would be reasonable for a reviewer to comment on whether she thought the rating was accurate, but I don't think it's obligatory.

To wrestle with the more troubling issues, though, GTA has always squicked me a bit, for much the same reasons you discuss. However, I feel like the phrase "hire prostitutes, have sex with them, and then kill them" really ought to be prefaced with the word "can". No one tells you to go kill prostitutes (or at least they didn't in GTA3; I haven't seen 4), and I think the implication that this is what one is supposed to do in the game obscures a situation that has enough sketchy stuff going on already.

It's sort of implicit in sandbox design that if you're going to make a sandbox game about sleazy dirtbag criminals in a sleazy dirtbag city, you're not really doing your job if you don't allow players to hire prostitutes, and you're not really doing your job if you don't allow players to kill people and take their money. The fact that this readily facilitates doing horrifying serial-killer shit is very creepy to me, but that's the price of interactivity. Back in the day, there was a disturbing amount of rape in D&D campaigns run by lonely teenage boys with rage issues. To some extent, these possibilities are indeed what an M rating is for. (It's also worth noting that you can, if you want, make GTA a game about driving around listening to the radio, or about ludicrous stunt driving, or about hiring prostitutes and then not killing them.)

The general absence of females other than in a sex worker context is less defensible to me, and the M rating doesn't help with that in my mind. One could, I suppose, appeal to the genre conventions, but I'm not terribly impressed by that.

For me, there are two different aspects of GTA that make me never want to play it -- the violence, and the pervasive misogyny.

I don't have much of a problem with GTA's violence going unmentioned in a review, because it is rated, and because it's so well known at this point that very few people would be surprised to see its violence. (And in theory you can't buy it unless you're over 17 years old.)

But the fact that there was no reference whatsoever to the fact that women are objects -- objects designed to pander to stereotypical male desires? I think that deserves mention. This may be partially because I think misogyny is more insidious than violence: it is less visible and more likely to go uncommented on.

And now that I think about it, it's not the violence of GTA that makes me not play it: it's the fact that women are so completely non-people in GTA that bothers me so much. And GTA isn't alone: there are so incredibly few video games in which women are actually treated like people rather than sex objects that might potentially be playable characters or eye candy.

Having not yet unwrapped the game, I'm given to understand from reviews I've read that GTA IV is actually much less appalling than GTA III. The Slate review indicates that there is a much greater moral dimension to your actions, and other reviews I've read have highlighted the "dating sim" aspects of the game as something far different from GTA III.

Not to say, of course, that some teenager won't go on a killing spree or the GTA III classic hire prostitute/kill prostitute and take her money. But there does seem to be a whole different level of morality and (based again purely on reviews) less misogyny than GTA III.

Also, to follow up on the carding thing, I bought the game at a Best Buy, where they were IDing everyone who wanted to buy it.

My feeling is that any reviewer, movie, book, game, whatever, should give some form of plot synopsis or at least a feel for what the piece is about. I hate reviews that give away the ending and secrets, but I do like to know "this is a game where you play fluffy bunnies", versus "this is a game where you play skateboarding teens".

That said, I may be the only female in existence who finds GTA just fine and actually kind of amusing. Perhaps because it's so amazingly over the top and tongue in cheek that I find it very hard to believe that anyone could take it seriously.

Would I let my child play it? No. Do I think it deserves an M rating if only because the sarcasm and sillyness of it require maturity to detect? Hell yes. But I guess I've never understood the fuss.

The attention people play to GTA and other violent games, is a little like a game of telephone. With each person who repeats the violent aspects, you get further removed from the sarcasm, and closer to taking the damn thing seriously, which I think was never the creators' intent.