It didn’t occur to me until someone made a Joker mod for Grand Theft Auto V that playing a character in GTA is eerily similar to being like the Joker. You do these outrageous acts of mass death and destruction because it amuses you, the player. People are ran over, experiments are held to find out new and often hilarious ways of killing civilians and police with explosives and whatever physics lets you get away with. Without the constraints of morals, ethics, or any sense of empathy because the characters are digital ants to you; you go out and obliterate people because it’s wickedly addictive fun. That’s how the Joker acts most of the time, only the people he kills aren’t digital. To him the people who are “real” in the world of the comic are faceless people-shaped targets for killing to satisfy his own need for violence. He’s without moral scruples because the way he sees the world around him is twisted like that; like one big game. The Joker sees people like you see Grand Theft Auto civilians. They might as well not even be real, which might explain why he’s so hung up on Batman in particular, who actually interacts with him in a way that he must be more “real” to him than the average person.
Conjecture aside, it kind of just struck me how perfect a Joker mod is for GTA and I’m incredibly glad someone went out of there way to make it. Taking Trevor as a base model, the most psychotic and violent of the three main characters, they make him in the perfect replica of the Clown Prince of Crime we all love to hate. If you have GTA V for the PC, I’d highly recommend checking it out and if not, just take a look at the video above and hope some people go out of their way to try and recreate scenes from The Dark Knight.
