that they impair your fake drunk driving quite a bit in the game, so it's quite difficult, and besides it's a general PITA (e.g. the cops will take away your guns and money) and really it's 10x easier to just call a cab.

Of course in a game where you commit murder Madd thinks drunk driving is worse. Not much different than their real life view.

GTA is just about the only game I've seen that really tempted me to buy an XBox or PS or whatever it works on. Among my cop friends, of which I still have many despite retiring to less dangerous work some years ago myself, GTA is hugely popular. 50-year-old sergeants enjoy it as much as 20-something probies. None of them seem to worried about its effect on the children.

If they made the game in a way that you can "get better" at driving drunk the more you do it, then I can see that as being troublesome. It's entirely possible that some could think that the fact that they can drive drunk in the game would make them better at driving drunk in real life. There *are* stupid people out there, you know.

However, if (as the first poster suggests) the game clearly punishes drunk drivers and rewards those who take a cab, then it could very well be a good thing.

Do they know no bounds! All I can say is does MADD deserve a new place as a charactor in GTA V? I vote OOOOOOya!!! please put MADD in the game, please please please. I can not wait to meet them on the street. Purely vicariously of course.

I've seriously thought about this subject before, but not in connection with drunk driving.

You see, one of my dear friends, a lady who practically raised me, was carjacked and murdered by gang members. To me, carjacking and murder isn't exotic or abstract: I can clearly remember the photos of my friend's body which I viewed at the trials of her killers.

Here's the thing, though: I have no problem with GTA. I've listened to a lot of people who seem to think I should have a problem with it, but I don't. My friend was a person. The pixels on the screen in GTA are not people. I've made 3d character models for video games; that's what I do for a living. They don't have feelings. Pushing a button which makes them look dead instead of alive isn't the same as choking an actual flesh and blood person with a rifle and backing over her with a car, which is what happened to my friend. The 3d character models do not have husbands who must now wake up every morning alone and children who suddenly belong to single-income families, as my friend did. There is no similarity between them at all.

If anyone is trivializing real victims of drunk driving, it's the members of MADD, for claiming that there's any resemblance between the real people who are harmed by drunk driving, and the game characters, whose entire world ceases to exist when you push the off button on your console.

I should add that I don't personally play GTA. I've played it in an earlier incarnation, for several days, and while I was impressed by the virtual world and the gameplay, the universe it depicts is too bleak and mean-spirited for me to want to live in it long. I don't enjoy being that person. Probably part of this has something to do with the fact that to me, it's not fantasy; it's too close to home.

Solution? Turn the console off, walk outside, take deep breath of fresh air. No one is forcing me to play it.

At some point I'll probably get a free demo disk with a magazine or something and I'll enjoy driving around looking at the graphics without playing the missions. It's a pretty amazing thing they've done as far as recreating the city.

It sounds like driving drunk in GTA IV is a bad idea. People will try it to see what the game does -- I'm definitely going to try it when I get the chance -- but they'll find that they're "punished" for it.

If you ever played SimCity, you could put all your houses next to coal power plants and heavy industry. Doing so will cause property values to plummet, will erode your tax base, and will cause people to leave your city.

Even so, it was one of the things you could do. Environmentalists must be outraged!

No one has called for the game to be 'pulled from the market'. You should immediately retract this falsehood.

I've seen previous versions of GTA (but not the current one)-- enough to know that it will appeal more to high school boys than anyone else (socially inept, malleable high school boys, I might add), and everyone knows that 'Mature' rated games commonly end up in the hands of younger kids.

So, Farhad, apparantly you think that teenagers should have access to a game portraying fellatio and other sexual situations, and glorifying hooker-murder and drunk driving. If this game is only appropriate for adults, whats the problem? Its not difficult to buy porn-- my local Fry's carries tons of it-- it wouldnt be difficult to buy GTA with an Adults Only rating. I can hear the whining now-- wahh, wahh, Wal-Mart doesnt carry the game I want. Well, that is their choice. If the demand is really strong, thre will be plenty of sellers. The only party to suffer would be the game maker, and that is a risk they chose when they made a game so inappropriate for kids.

I really, truly dont care what ways adults choose to waste their lives-- if you want to get sucked into endless TV, video games, internet porn, hey, go nuts. Kids are a different story. Yes, the ultimate responsibility is with the parents, but the reality of our world is that a lot of teenagers have working parents, are hiding their activities from parents, etc ,etc. This very liberal, open-minded person changed his opinion on things like this the minute I had kids. You need to apply a little more mature outlook to this issue, Farhad.