Grand Theft Research Articles

End-to-End Self-Driving Using Deep Neural Networks with Multi-auxiliary Tasks

End-to-end self-driving is a method that directly maps raw visual images to vehicle control signals using deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Although prediction of steering angle has achieved good result in single task, the current approach does not effectively simultaneously predict the steering angle and the speed. In this paper, various end-to-end multi-task deep learning networks using deep convolutional neural network combined with long short-term memory recurrent neural network (CNN-LSTM) are designed and compared, which could obtain not only the visual spatial information but also the dynamic temporal information in the driving scenarios, and improve steering angle and speed predictions. Furthermore, two auxiliary tasks based on semantic segmentation and object detection are proposed to improve the understanding of driving scenarios. Experiments are conducted on the public Udacity dataset and a newly collected Guangzhou Automotive Cooperate dataset. The results show that the proposed network architecture could predict steering angles and vehicle speed accurately. In addition, the impact of multi-auxiliary tasks on the network performance is analyzed by visualization method, which shows the salient map of network. Finally, the proposed network architecture has been well verified on the autonomous driving simulation platform Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) and experimental road with an average takeover rate of two times per 10 km.

Grand Theft Terra Firma

Grand Theft Terra Firma is an exhibition that blends history, gaming, and performance with contemporary art practice to challenge audiences to reconsider the benevolent narratives of settlement to which Canadians are accustomed. The work premiered at the Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford, British Columbia, as part of a year-long series of exhibitions that considered notions of decolonization during Canada’s 150th year of confederation. The exhibition is the creation of David Campion and Sandra Shields, an artist couple who have made a practice of appropriating pop literary forms as a means of sharing uncomfortable knowledge. The mechanics of colonization have been a compelling and ongoing theme for them as white artists with personal histories rooted in European expansion. Grand Theft takes a pointed and critical look at the colonization of S’ólh Téméxw, now more commonly known as British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. Since its debut, the exhibition has shown at St. Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 2019, it will travel to the Diefenbaker Canada Centre in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; the Art Gallery of Peterborough, Ontario; and Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, British Columbia. The curator of the exhibition, Laura Schneider, sat down with the artists to reflect on the work and consider its relationship to gaming, performance, and audiences.

It's Double Edged: The Positive and Negative Relationships Between the Development of Moral Reasoning and Video Game Play Among Adolescents.

Due to the concerns over the effects of video game play, this study investigated adolescents’ moral development and their video game play. 166 adolescents aged 11–18 years (M = 13.08, SD = 1.91) attending an English school completed an online survey, which included a measure of moral development and questions regarding video game play. In contrast to previous research, male participants were found to have significantly (p = 0.02) higher moral reasoning scores than females. The results also suggested a transition in moral development, which takes place between the ages of 12–14. The results of moral development and video game played suggested both positive and negative relationships. Regression analysis suggested that there was a significant positive relationship between the more types of game genres played and higher moral scores. Although not significant, the results suggested a trend for the following variables; years playing video games, mature content, engagement, moral narrative, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, and length of time playing video games which all had a negative relationship with moral scores. The implications of these results are discussed with regards to moral education and the variables involved in video game play, including the role of video game content.

Ideology and the virtual city: Social critique and conformity in video game power fantasies

Abstract This article analyses three video games based in modern urban settings, Saints Row IV, Grand Theft Auto V and No More Heroes, to consider how they convey different ideological responses to modern consumer societies in their structural and narrative elements. Using Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts, I consider how expectations surrounding work, leisure, property and relationships create antagonisms that individuals must reconcile with life experience. I then show how the three games exemplify different forms of ideology, in the shape of ‘power fantasies’ that manifest these antagonisms and attempt to resolve them. Throughout the article, I reference social theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Herbert Marcuse to define the ‘neo-liberal’ cultural background from which these ideologies emerge, and outline their features. Such perspectives help evaluate the games as cultural products of today’s neo-liberalized social order, which, I argue, struggle to interrogate systemic issues, but nonetheless contain hints of deeper social critique.

Being Jacob: Young Children, Automedial Subjectivity, and Child Social Media Influencers

Being Jacob: Young Children, Automedial Subjectivity, and Child Social Media Influencers

Doom Guy Comes of Age: Mediating Masculinities in Power Fantasy Video Games

Doom Guy Comes of Age: Mediating Masculinities in Power Fantasy Video Games

Is Sexual Objectification and Victimization of Females in Video Games Associated With Victim Blaming or Victim Empathy?

The goal of this study was to investigate whether the sexual objectification and virtual violence against females in video games increases negative attitudes toward females, when addressing a variety of noted methodological issues. Study participants were randomly assigned to a control group, where participants played Madden NFL 12, or an experimental group, where participants played Grand Theft Auto. In the experimental group, participants played the game with a confederate, who exposed participants to sexual objectification and violence against females. Study results indicated that both the experimental and control groups had equivalently low levels of rape myth acceptance prior to game play. Immediately after game play, there still was no statistically significant difference in rape myth acceptance between groups; however, there was a decrease in rape myth acceptance for the experimental group. The decrease in rape myth acceptance continued and magnified for the experimental group, over time, to the point of creating a statistically significant difference between the two groups for the follow-up measure at the end of the study.

Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study

It is a widespread concern that violent video games promote aggression, reduce pro-social behaviour, increase impulsivity and interfere with cognition as well as mood in its players. Previous experimental studies have focussed on short-term effects of violent video gameplay on aggression, yet there are reasons to believe that these effects are mostly the result of priming. In contrast, the present study is the first to investigate the effects of long-term violent video gameplay using a large battery of tests spanning questionnaires, behavioural measures of aggression, sexist attitudes, empathy and interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs (such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness, risk taking, delay discounting), mental health (depressivity, anxiety) as well as executive control functions, before and after 2 months of gameplay. Our participants played the violent video game Grand Theft Auto V, the non-violent video game The Sims 3 or no game at all for 2 months on a daily basis. No significant changes were observed, neither when comparing the group playing a violent video game to a group playing a non-violent game, nor to a passive control group. Also, no effects were observed between baseline and posttest directly after the intervention, nor between baseline and a follow-up assessment 2 months after the intervention period had ended. The present results thus provide strong evidence against the frequently debated negative effects of playing violent video games in adults and will therefore help to communicate a more realistic scientific perspective on the effects of violent video gaming.

Grand Theft Auto: Calibrating Laboratory Conditions to the New Normal in Union Elections

In the twenty-first century, unions need to organize workplaces in traditionally anti-union battlegrounds to survive. But as the United Auto Workers' momentous defeats in recent years at foreign manufacturers located in the Deep South have shown, this mission becomes virtually impossible when anti-union forces — here, everything from business groups to private interests to conservative elected officials — may unite and campaign at will against a union's organizing efforts. This Article argues that the National Labor Relations Board should expand its laboratory conditions doctrine to encompass anti-union community pressure as coercive activity worthy of overturning NLRB election results. Otherwise, large-scale corporations like Nissan are free to continue recruiting regional and national anti-union forces to flout the untainted experiment that industrial democracy requires to measure employees' freedom of choice.

Facing Fanon: Examining Neocolonial Aspects in Grand Theft Auto V through the Prism of the Machinima Film Finding Fanon II

<p class="p1">In this article, I examine the Machinima film <em>Finding Fanon II</em>, by London-based artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, for what it can tell us about the relationship between video gaming and the postcolonial. Evoking Frantz Fanon, one of the most piercing voices of the decolonisation movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of <em>Grand Theft Auto</em> (GTA), one of the most technologically advanced and, at the same time, scandalous video game series of the 21<span class="s1">st </span>century, <em>Finding Fanon II</em> amounts to a scathing critique of both the game series’ depiction of race and academic scholarship that has been defending the series on the grounds of its use of humour and irony. Shot in the in-game video editor of <em>GTA V</em>, <em>Finding Fanon II</em> lets this critique emerge from inside the game and as an effect of the artists’ engagement with it. By suspending the game’s mechanisms and programmed forms of interaction, the artwork brings their racialised logic to the fore, pointing towards the ways in which <em>GTA V</em> commodifies black men for the consumption of white players. This commodification has the effect of normalising and naturalising the precarious position of black people in Western society. What the artwork adds to this argument through its facilitation of a Fanonian perspective is a reminder that it is not only the gaming experience of <em>white</em> players that is framed in this way. Players with ethnic minority backgrounds might also accept the white gaze of the game as a given. Acts of self-commodification along the lines of a white Western rationality must thus be seen as a plausible new form of cultural imperialism promoted by the GTA series.

Interactive Experience and Identification as Predictors of Attributing Responsibility in Video Games

Abstract. This study examines the effect of interactivity on the attribution of responsibility for the character’s actions in a violent video game. Through an experiment, we tested the hypothesis that identification with the main character in Grand Theft Auto IV mediates the effect of interactivity on attributions of responsibility for the main character’s antisocial behavior. Using the framework of the fundamental attribution error, we demonstrated that those who actually played the game, as opposed to those who simply watched someone else playing it, identified with the main character. In accordance with the theoretical expectation, those who played the game and came to identify with the main character attributed the responsibility for his actions to external factors such as “living in a violent society.” By contrast, those who did not interact with the game attributed responsibility for the character’s actions to his personality traits. These findings could be viewed as contrasting with psychological research suggesting that respondents should have distanced themselves from the violent protagonist rather than identifying with him, and with Iyengar’s (1991) expectation that more personalized episodic framing would be associated with attributing responsibility to the protagonist.

The Myth of Blunted Gamers: No Evidence for Desensitization in Empathy for Pain after a Violent Video Game Intervention in a Longitudinal fMRI Study on Non-Gamers

Background/Aims: It is a common concern in the research field and the community that habitual violent video gaming reduces empathy for pain in its players. However, previous fMRI studies have only compared habitual game players against control participants cross-sectionally. However the observed pattern of results may be due to a priori differences in people who become gamers and who not. In order to derive the causal conclusion that violent video game play causes desensitisation, longitudinal studies are needed. Methods: Therefore we conducted a longitudinal fMRI intervention study over 16 weeks. Participants were randomly assigned to 1) play a violent video game (Grand Theft Auto 5), 2) perform a social life simulation game (The Sims 3) 30 min/day for 8 weeks, 3) serve as passive control. To assess empathy processing, participants were exposed to painful and non-painful stimuli (e.g. someone cutting a cucumber with or without hurting herself) either as real photographs or video-game like depictions in a 3T MRI scanner before and after the training intervention as well as two months after training. Results: We did not find any evidence for desensitization in the empathy network for pain in the violent video game group at any time point. Conclusions: The present results provide strong evidence against the frequently proclaimed negative effects of playing violent video games and will therefore help to communicate a more realistic scientific perspective of the effects of violent video gaming in real life.

Killing characters in video games kills memory for in-game ads.

Evolutionary theory predicts that people attend to emotionally arousing cues at the expense of less arousing cues. Violence is one emotionally arousing cue that attracts attention away from less arousing cues located in the same visual environment. Previous research has shown that violent media content attracts attention at the expense of brands advertised during violent media content. We predicted that participants who played a video game violently would recall and recognize fewer brands than participants who played the same game nonviolently. In Study 1, participants (N = 154) drove cars in the game The Getaway while real brands appeared within the city. Half of the participants played the game violently (running over characters) and half of the participants played the game nonviolently (carefully avoiding characters). Violent players recalled and recognized fewer brands than did nonviolent players. In Study 2, participants (N = 102) drove cars in the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas while fictitious brands were advertised on their vehicles. Half of the participants played the game violently (running over characters) and half of the participants played the game nonviolently (carefully avoiding characters). Violent players were less likely to recognize advertised brands than were nonviolent players. Not enough participants recalled brands to test whether violent players recalled fewer brands than did nonviolent players. These results across both studies suggest that within-game violence reduces the effectiveness of product placement, such that brands advertised in violent video games are less likely to be remembered than brands advertised in nonviolent video games.

Comparing the Similarities and Differences between All Versions of Grand Theft Auto

The article investigates the similarities and differences between all versions of Grand Theft Auto as an adventure game with the widest popularity in the last decade. The game is a story collection, a frame for performance, a virtual museum of vernacular culture and a widely circulated pop culture artifact whose double-voiced aesthetic has given rise to diverse interpretive communities. The aim of comparing the differences and similarities between different versions of the game is to be able to evaluate the game from the user’s point of view. With this aim, whether with the verisimilitude that the different versions offer makes GTA a product of an iterative design process or not will be displayed.

On informing jurors of potential sanctions.

Two experiments tested (a) whether jurors make assumptions about the potential punishment that would follow from a guilty verdict, (b) whether those assumptions influence jurors' implicit threshold for reasonable doubt, and (c) whether informing jurors of the potential punishment additionally influences their implicit threshold. Experiment 1 manipulated the alleged crime (grand theft vs. manslaughter) holding all other factors constant, and found that mock jurors (n = 102, recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk) had different expectations about the relative punishments but that these expectations did not affect their implicit threshold for reasonable doubt. Experiment 2 manipulated the alleged crime as well as a judicial description of the potential punishment (e.g., term of incarceration of 2-6 vs. 7-20 years). Again, mock jurors (n = 297) were sensitive to the relative punishments, yet their implicit threshold did not differ on this basis. These findings call into question whether jurors should be informed of the potential punishment if the defendant is convicted, an argument advanced by several legal scholars. (PsycINFO Database Record

Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals

This article focuses on Farocki’s four-part film cycle Parallel I–IV which explores the image genre of computer animation. In Parallel I–IV, Farocki traces the development of video-game graphics from the crude two-dimensional images of the early 1980s to the hyper-realistic environments of contemporary titles, such as Grand Theft Auto. The article situates the film cycle in relation to Farocki’s wider body of work and thematic interests, while also considering how Parallel I–IV sheds light on a media–archaeological reassessment of cinema history. Five interrelated topics are addressed: representation and reproduction; operational images; surveillance and the military; simulation and role play; and the labour of invisibility and the invisibility of labour.

Advising caution in studying seasonal oscillations in crime rates.

Most types of crime are known to exhibit seasonal oscillations, yet the annual variations in the amplitude of this seasonality and their causes are still uncertain. Using a large collection of data from the Houston and Los Angeles Metropolitan areas, we extract and study the seasonal variations in aggravated assault, break in and theft from vehicles, burglary, grand theft auto, rape, robbery, theft, and vandalism for many years from the raw daily data. Our approach allows us to see various long term and seasonal trends and aberrations in crime rates that have not been reported before. We then apply an ecologically motivated stochastic differential equation to reproduce the data. Our model relies only on social interaction terms, and not on any exigent factors, to reproduce both the seasonality, and the seasonal aberrations observed in our data set. Furthermore, the stochasticity in the system is sufficient to reproduce the variations seen in the seasonal oscillations from year to year. Researchers should be very careful about trying to correlate these oscillations with external factors.

The release of Grand Theft Auto V and registered juvenile crime in the Netherlands

Prior research suggests that playing videogames can have a voluntary incapacitating effect on criminal behaviour. The current study investigates whether this negative association between videogames in general and crime rates can also be found for the release of a single videogame – Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) – and for registered juvenile crime in the Netherlands. A diminishing effect was modelled to estimate the active player base of GTAV (that is, the most players are active on and directly following release, with a decline in the weeks thereafter) and correlated with the number of registered offences in 2012–15 committed by males aged 12–18 and 18–25 years in a time series analysis. The effect of the release of GTAV was negatively associated with the number of registered offences in both age categories, while controlling for covariates (for example, day of the week). Implications are discussed.

Formación en valores sociales en adolescentes que juegan Grand Theft Auto V

(analítico): Objeto: comprensión de las relaciones entre los preadolescentes y las nuevas prácticas comunicativas en las redes informáticas, respecto a la construcción de valores sociales que se propician mediante su participación en los videojuegos colaborativos, en una observación en adolescentes con el videojuego Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V). Metodología: es un estudio cualitativo, con herramientas etnográficas, apoyado por una encuesta tipo Likert, con estudiantes de un colegio de Bogotá. Resultados y conclusiones: Los estudiantes diferencian con claridad el contexto valorativo del juego y el de la vida real. Los valores sociales como el respeto, la solidaridad, la otredad y el cumplimiento de las normas tienen significaciones diferentes en el juego y en la vida. La familia es la fuente de valores más reconocida en la vida real. Se extraen enseñanzas del mundo avieso del juego.&#x0D; &#x0D; Palabras clave: valores sociales, preadolescentes, comunicación interactiva, ética, videojuego (Tesauro de Ciencias Sociales de la Unesco).&#x0D; &#x0D; Palabras clave autoras: espacios convergentes, videojuegos colaborativos, Grand Theft Auto V.

PENGALAMAN REMAJA BERUSIA DI BAWAH 18 TAHUN DALAM BERMAIN GRAND THEFT AUTO GAME

GTA (Grand Theft Auto) is a video game containing sexual and violent content classified as a mature category (18+). However in Indonesia, this video game is often played by teenegers under 18 years old. This research purposes to describe teeneger’s experience on playing GTA game and the factors influencing them to play the game. The informants of this research are 6 teenegers who have been playing this game with under 18 years old obtained by using snowball sample technique. The method used in this research is qualitative with phenomenological approach. The data were collected through semi-structured interview. The result of this research shows that teenegers who play this game said that they could gain new experiences like being outside of country situation. For teenegers it was exciting because they could perform things that they could not do in the real life like kill, rob, and fight beetwen gang. The factors influencing them to play GTA game come from their playmates, parent’s supervision, and also education level. Playmates are the main cause for teenegers to play GTA game. Teenagers playing GTA game without parent's supervision will tend to get negative impact. While higher level of teeneger education decreases the intensity of playing GTA game. Therefore, in order to minimize negative impact obtained by teenegers in playing GTA game, it requires the parent supervision so that the teenegers know time limit to play and the certain behavior in the game that may or may not be imitated in the real life.