What The Grand Theft Auto Franchise Can Teach Us About Incentives
What are the incentives present within the Grand Theft Auto franchise?
The player is incentivized to do things within the game that is considered a crime if done in reality. The things that players can do in the game are as follows:
Players can:
Steal vehicles ( cars, boats, helicopters, etc. )
Injure civilians
Kill civilians
Jump off buildings
Conceal and carry weapons such as firearms, explosives, etc.
The list goes on and on.
The first incentive present within the Grand Theft Auto franchise
The first incentive is given to the player. When the player knows that they can't get into legal trouble, because it's a video game. So which explains why anything they do in-game such stealing a vehicle will not have them prosecuted in the reality that they live in because of the fact that the players activities only reside within a video game. Now let's have a thought experiment, if there's a law that states that anything you do in-game that would be considered a crime if committed in reality would be a crime committed. The players would be incentivized to follow the rules when in-game as they were following the rules within their reality.
Incentives do in fact influence a person's decision making. It's not guaranteed that they'll do whatever they're incentivized to do, but merely a probability.
The second incentive present within the Grand Theft Auto franchise
The second incentive is provided to the player. When the player knows that they can simply undo all their actions in-game by reloading a saved game. For those who don't know what a 'saved game' is. A saved game is a checkpoint in time of a video game, where the player saves in order to keep their status and their progress in-game. Simply when a player reloads a saved game, they will be allowed to resume where they left off. Think of it as your were to click on a certain point in time on a timeline and from there you can do as you please.
Imagine a scenario, you are a student who attends high school and you have a upcoming project that is due on April 15th, 2018. You wanted to make sure that you'll be able to learn from past mistakes and that you able to have more time to spend. So you saved at a particular point in time by snapping your fingers. The date you saved at was January 1st, 2018. At any point from now on when you snap your fingers, you'll wake up in bed on January 1st, 2018 as if anything you did from that point on never happened. But, in this scenario you would be able to keep those experiences you had before you snapped your fingers to revert back to January 1st, 2018.
Now time went on, you made the decision to slack off and managed to not get the project completed on April 15th, 2018. The teacher states that you will not pass 10th grade. You smiled, knowing that you have the ability to revert to the last checkpoint, you snapped your fingers and woke up in bed on January 1st, 2018. From this point on, you will realize that you can explore alternative paths such as having sex with every single woman you wanted to have sex with to see what the experience would be like to have sex with each one of them. To doing activities ranging from stealing a car, to stealing food, to sneak into other peoples houses, etc. to see what will the unforeseen consequences will be. Unfortunately, there is no such option that exist within our reality, only within in a video game.
The third and final incentive present within the Grand Theft Auto franchise
The third and final incentive is present to the player. What the player can do is use what are referred to as 'cheat codes' that will do or give the player a specific something within a game that would be impossible to do or have without using 'cheat codes'. For example, in GTA: San Andreas, the player can activate a cheat code that will give them $250,000 in-game. Now, imagine if there's a cheat code like that present in our reality. You would be incentivized to activate that cheat code in order to purchase you always wanted. Now when it comes to reality, new money that is created will have an effect on market prices, since it all comes back to supply and demand. The law of demand states the more of a certain good is present such as $, the less valuable it becomes.
A video game may not mirror any of the economic codes of this reality that we are living in. The unforeseen consequences of activating a cheat code are present in a video game and in reality. Unfortunately, there are no cheat codes available to activate in this reality. We can only predict what will happen if cheat codes did exist in this reality and some of these predictions come true. Other predictions will not come true. We can only experiment the incentives present within the Grand Theft Auto franchise through thoughts and programming simulations. Anyways, thanks for reading my article.
