"What I like to do is get in the car and drive around and do drive-by shootings," said Chris Trudeau of Norwalk, Conn. "You can haul someone out of their car and beat on them and steal their money and their car. It's kind of amusing that you have that ability."
Colin Smith, from Charlotte, North Carolina, said: "The drive-by shootings of innocent pedestrians are always fun. It really does bring out the quote-unquote evil in you."
These aren't journal entries from prison inmates. No, just the heartfelt testimonials of some die-hard fans of the best-selling and -- not coincidentally -- most violent video game in America: Grand Theft Auto 3, a wantonly anti-social carjacking escapade in which players are rewarded for having sex with a prostitute, killing her and stealing her money.
Banned in Australia
It's no problem in Grand Theft Auto 3 to grab a rifle and shoot innocent pedestrians (blood spurts from their heads when they're hit), or to toss a grenade in a busy city intersection, or to simply whale passers-by with a baseball bat until they collapse in writhing heaps. The game was banned in Australia and earned a dishonorable mention on the annual video game violence report card by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl.
But fans of the game, who must be 17 years old to buy it, are hardly a collection of weirdos and social misfits. An awful lot are like Trudeau, a 29-year-old computer programmer, and Smith, a 30-year-old sports marketer: professionals with successful careers, wives or girlfriends and, in many cases, children. And to hear a lot of them tell it, well, Grand Theft Auto 3 is just too much fun.
Rich Estrin, 24, a publicist from Long Island, says the game's allure comes down to "just going on killing sprees."
What is it about virtual carjacking and killing innocent pedestrians that's appealing to young men who are otherwise upstanding citizens? According to Eugene Provenzo, a University of Miami professor of education who has written extensively about video games, mature-rated games may be the adult equivalent of flashlight-under-the-covers reading. They satisfy the urge to be naughty.
"It allows us to enter a dangerous space in a new way and to explore something that's a bit forbidden," he said. "Maybe it's not a space we want to go to in reality, but it's something we want to test out."
It's this generation, which grew up on Atari and Pac-Man and now spends with credit cards instead of quarters, that has contributed to the incredible growth of the video-game industry in the last two years. Retail sales of video games totaled US$9.4 billion last year, a 42 percent increase over the US$6.6 billion in sales in 2000, and even more than Hollywood took in at the box office last year.
Despite the perception that gamers are pimply-faced Bart Simpsons, the average video-game player in the US is 28 years old, according to the International Digital Software Association.
Grand Theft Auto 3 is hardly the only big seller among mature games, which last year accounted for 9.2 percent of all video-game sales and are the fastest-growing sector of the market, according to the NPD Funworld, a retail research firm.
Other big sellers include Resident Evil; Max Payne -- a game built around the revenge of a cop whose wife and child were killed by thugs; and Halo, a gory shoot'em-up for Microsoft's Xbox that allows as many as 16 players to gun away at each other at once.
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