Have you ever expressed to someone who is a close friend a thought you have? A momentary desire formed in anger or frustration from the dark recesses of your mind, and their reaction is to say that isn't normal or it is weird. First let's start with a little story so you know what my dark, evil thoughts look like.
It is a common thing in this area for parents to wait for their children to get home from school. They also do this in the morning but the arrival is more scattered so not as bad, because the morning largely depends on children getting ready. The parents that have been at home all day or are coming home in time to pick up their children aren't on any time crunch and therefor gather early and in mass. The worst part of this is because they are waiting for their children they believe laws don't apply to them and will park their cars at a stop sign. This is especially bad on roads where there isn't normally street parking and because these roads aren't made for street parking more of the road is taken up.
It was on this type of road that this story comes from. There was a car parked at the stop sign. The kind person that broke this law did try to keep their car off the road as much as possible so only 1/4 of the road was taken up but there was a car on the other side of the road doing the exact same thing so half the road is gone, and then there are the parents themselves standing in the middle of the road sometimes stacked three deep. So here I am, in a car, attempting to use the road for its purpose, driving, and there are all these obstacles and they are all right in front of a stop sign.
While approaching the stop sign I slow down significantly to around five MPH as I have to weave through all these people who have conscripted the road as the neighborhood meeting place. It is kind of hard to believe what happens next. No it isn't I've live in Northern Virginia my entire life, entitlement is a living organism. As I approach not one person attempts to move. To step to the side so a few hundred pounds of rolling steel can approach the stop sign. I go fully to the left hand lane and here I am breaking a law because someone else is breaking a law by being stopped at a stop sign, and standing in the middle of the road.
I pull as far back over to the right as I can when I get to the stop sign, look left, look right, and see the school bus coming, flashing its yellow lights. I had wanted to turn right but instead decide to go straight so I go after I've fully stopped, made sure no one else is coming, and why the bus is still flashing yellow. As I pull off I look in my review and catch the woman standing furthest into the road flapping her arms at me as if I had just done something terrible. I try and reconsider what I did and can't quite figure it out. I wasn't the one who created the blockade in the road and I wove through it as slowly and safely as possible.
Either way this brings me to GTAV and my dark thoughts. My response to this situation was to drive off and go about my life, but what I wanted to do was turn back around, get out of my car, and strangle this woman. Her anger at me when I did nothing wrong angered me, and the only mature response on my end was to ignore her, and that is what I did, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. Now someone may say it isn't normal to want to strangle someone to death for flapping their arms like a chicken in the middle of the road, but I think it is perfectly normal to want to do it. The difference between a normal person and a psychopath is a normal person understands right from wrong and doesn't act on their malevolent thoughts.
This is where GTAV comes in. It is through this that we can express our inner darkness. You do not play as good people in Grand Theft Auto games, and that is the point. There is a bit of darkness in all of us, and expressing it is healthy as long as it is done in a non-destructive manner. Some people workout, some write, and others do it through video games. It is all the same thing. We are working out the frustrations from the day. I can't tell you how many times I've been at the gym hitting a punching bag imagining a certain face on it. GTAV allows me to take all those frustrations and act on them. If a person cuts me off in the real world I can't chase them down and slaughter them in cold blood, but trust me I want to, but I won't because I have this strange thing called morals and I couldn't live with myself as a murderer. I feel bad about squashing bugs sometimes.
Now in GTAV someone can cut me off and be murdered or if someone is in front of me in line and taking too long I can take them out. There is no limit to the amount of mayhem that can be caused and because it is a game no one is getting hurt and I don't have to feel bad about expressing my inner darkness. It is a perfectly healthy and useful way to blow off some steam as the saying goes, and I have been enjoying this return to Grand Theft Auto. The last one I played was Vice City. San Andres was too close to normal life with the having to eat and workout thing and I heard that IV was too realistic in much of the physics of the game.
We are all humans, we all have anger and frustrations that rise to the surface, and controlling them is the difference between us and psychopaths, but it is still healthy to express those dark thoughts and feelings, and GTAV provides a nice little outlet for all of that. Also if you are a parent that picks up or drops off their child at a school bus stop in Northern Virginia please stop parking at the stop sign. Is an extra ten feet really going to kill you? It may actually take care of two or three calories from that Big Mac and hold off that massive coronary for a couple hours.
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