Video games have the power to make you feel. Your position as an active participant in the story, not just a passive observer, means they can create potent emotions within players. That being said, I still know they’re not real, unlike Elon Musk, apparently.
In what is a truly unhinged tweet, Musk wrote that he’d never completed GTA 5 because it “required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just couldn’t do it.” I don’t care about cops at the best of times, but least of all in a video game. The implication here that somehow, shooting police in a video game is any indication of real-world character is just baffling. Video games are not real life. The police officers you kill in-game don’t have a family, dreams, or anything else that makes you a bad person for killing them.
Musk said he “didn’t like doing crime,” which is at odds with the persona he seems to be trying to curate as some maverick who doesn’t care about the silly rules of society. This is the man who smoked a doobie on the Joe Rogan podcast.
The tweet, obviously, led to lots of ridicule. Hard Drive went for the witty, “thank you for your service, mr GTA police officer sir.” The managing editor of GameSpot Tamoor Hussain wrote, “This dude just finds new and innovative ways to look like a loser on the internet.”
No one likes it when people try to go against the grain and talk about how much they don’t like the thing everyone else is excited about, especially not when it’s for a reason as stupid as not liking the fact you have to do crimes in the game that is literally named a crime: grand theft auto.
