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This article investigates the Grand Theft Auto videogame series in order to demonstrate the potential of a folkloristic, ethnographic approach for the analysis of digital games. I discuss Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as 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. This case study suggests that digital gameplay should be regarded as a form of performance practice with the capacity to invoke traditional folkloric genres and engender new traditions.
A little girl asks, "Uncle Ricky? Would you read us a bedtime story, please, oh please?" He replies, "All right, you kids get to bed, I'll get the storybook. Y'all tucked in? . . . Once upon a time, not long ago / When people wore pajamas and lived life slow. . . "
The story he tells is a fable of urban violence and bad choices, about "a little boy who was misled" and fell into a life of crime. An action-packed play-by-play relates the climactic episode in this young man's life: he robs an undercover cop, escapes by pulling a gun, runs around the block, knocks over an old man in his haste, dashes into an abandoned building where he gets another gun from a filthy drug addict, heads outside to steal a car, crashes it into a tree, escapes from the wreckage, takes a pregnant woman hostage but lets her go, and runs again but is soon surrounded and shot by the police. The moral? "This ain't funny, so don't you dare laugh / Just another case about the wrong path / Straight and narrow or your soul gets cast. Good night!"
Slick Rick's hip-hop cautionary tale is titled "Children's Story" (Walters 1988). His laid-back, matter-of-fact delivery runs over a jumpy, menacing keyboard loop, the melody lifted from the bass line of Bob James's "Nautilus" (1974). Smooth jazz becomes sharp counterpoint, an itchy, edgy trigger finger. The subject matter is not unusual for late 1980s rap, but as it comes over the radio I'm startled into attention because Uncle Ricky seems to be telling my own story. Just moments ago, I foolishly robbed a pedestrian in front of a...