The best game I thought that would work for this assignment was Grand Theft Auto 5 Online. GTA Online is an open world game meaning that the player has a large virtual world they can roam around with other players and pretty much do whatever they want. GTA is notorious for being the game where you basically run around shooting whoever you want, stealing anything and everything, and of course murdering hookers. In GTA Online, you are placed into this giant world with up to 15 other players to compete in death matches, races (land, air, and sea), heists, and all sorts of mayhem. For this assignment I joined a full 16 player lobby to maximize my chances of finding racist or sexist comments. To further accelerate this process, I went around blowing up everyone I could find by throwing sticky bombs on them. It was literally less than a minute after my drive by bombings in which the racism started to appear. Five minutes later the voice chat and messaging was a mess of racism, sexism, and all sorts of terrible comments. Soon everyone was getting in their jets, helicopters, and tanks blowing up everyone and the whole time screaming and shouting at each other with such limitless foul language.

I then decided to leave that lobby and see what would happen if I purposely crashed into people during car races (something I never do unless I need to provoke them for some reason like this assignment). The most intense reaction happened during a race in which another player and I were way far ahead of everyone else and he was just about to cross the finish line. Right before he could, I “accidentally” blew his car up and crossed the finish line. He had to watch literally everyone pass him as his burning car was sitting just a few feet from the finish line. The racism that came out of this seemingly very young kid was very intense. As everyone’s true identity is hidden in the game, players are more likely to say things that they would not normally say in public or in front of someone (we call them keyboard warriors). Apparently if you piss someone off online they always assume you are African-American and go from there to insult you. They bring up your family and your mom, and it is just a mess of racism.