Grand Theft Auto Lawsuit

In the article “Can a Video Game Lead to Murder?,” Ed Bradley reports on an incident in Fayette, Alabama involving the shooting of three police officers by a teenager and a multi-million dollar lawsuit against both the makers and sellers of the Grand Theft Auto video game. In his report Bradley uses inflammatory words, skewed facts, and quotes of prominent public figures to try and agitate uninformed parents and make them more conscious of games and the effects they may have on their children.

Bradley starts off his report with asking the reader to imagine a game that would let them “decapitate police officers, kill them with a sniper rifle, massacre them with a chainsaw, and set them on fire” (Bradley). This use of extremely graphic and inflammatory diction is used for only one purpose, to prime the reader’s mind with a sense of anger by putting forth an affront to their morality and sense of decency. Bradley describes the game to parents as brutally as possible to leave no room for questioning the possibility of any redeeming aspects present. Being told that the game is governed by “the laws of depravity” and that the entire reason for playing the game is to kill police officers would instantly change any parent’s thoughts to anger towards this game (Bradley). Bradley’s goal is to immediately horrify parents and frighten them with the possibility that their own children might be playing such a game. This would immediately grab the reader’s attention and keep them reading the article which is exactly what any good journalist would want, but what price does attention grabbing pay with regards to the truth of the subject?

The article does have merit when Bradley reports on the lawsuit being brought against the makers of the ga...

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...niversity of Alabama who’s only contribution to the article is a statement about how he plays the game by eliminating all resistance (Bradley). The significance of this source is negligible because it only shows how one person chooses to play instead of how the game is meant to be played. Bradley’s report, however, does consider the reactions of the police force and the general public. An unnamed police officer tells Bradley that he worries that kids now have the “preconceived notions of ‘let’s kill an officer’.” This emotional appeal to the parents of children playing this game is almost a hit below the belt. The use of an officer of the law to further strengthen his argument that this game is the cause of the killings of other officers is a clever manipulation of the emotions that Bradley has crafted for the readers to feel up to this point in his article.