2. The Rampant Killing of Innocents
What's one of the first activities you take part in when first playing a new GTA game, whether part of a mission or not. That's right, a massacre. What do you do every night after you've saved, before you turn the game off? That's right, a massacre. The ability to choose to kill innocent bystanders is one of the cornerstone features of the entire GTA franchise; it's also probably the feature that has caused the most consistent controversy for all of these years. The fact that you have that
choice is probably what makes this whole mechanic so traditionally controversial. After all, there's some chemical process or other which happens in your brain when you decide to see how long you can kill in-game before the police manage take you down; certain people argue that this chemical process can't be that far from the one that happens when someone makes the same decision in real life. Again, I'm convinced that that's not the case but it sounds
just feasible enough to be taken seriously by concerned parents everywhere when each new GTA game comes out. And for all the good it'll do, I guarantee that GTA V will come under fire for that very reason.