I am driving through Idlewood again when those Ballas Gang motherfuckers come out of nowhere to shoot me down. This is my fourth death today, and purgatory is the top of some stairs in a quiet park in Jefferson. I can hear the popping of guns far in the distance. A war rages at the bottom of these steps, and I just want to stand here, to let "C.J." - my virtual alter ego - chill a minute. Then, C.J. lets a fart rip. "Jesus, man!" an old Latino guy mutters at me. "You smell like my ass! You got a pooper problem?"

This is the hostile and hilarious world of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. A place where everyone is looking for a fight, and the only way to win is to murder, steal, and fuck with abandon. The videogame is hated by many (and played by many more) and is currently framing the argument in the demand for tighter restrictions on content and ratings in videogames as a way to protect America's youth from its immoral influence.

Hackers recently uncovered graphic sex scenes hidden in the game that can be accessed by a downloadable "Hot Coffee" modification. Senator Hillary Clinton has seized upon the opportunity to grab the political spotlight and asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate. Before long, the Entertainment Software Rating Board changed the game's rating from M (Mature 17+) to AO (Adult Only), prompting retailers to yank San Andreas from their shelves. Rockstar Games, developer of the Grand Theft Auto series, announced plans to expunge the sex scenes from the game, but seethed in a statement: "Unfortunately, the recent confusion only serves to suggest that games do not deserve the same treatment as other forms of creative expression."

Every generation spawns some new cultural artifact that transfixes teens and horrifies adults: comic books, rock 'n' roll, punk, hip-hop. Ratings were created to protect children from inappropriate content, which has worked well for movies and music. The world of Grand Theft Auto is exquisitely designed, full of intricate plotting and dialogue, littered with jokes and cultural references, rendered in stylish detail and pushing the boundaries of its genre. But Clinton and her ilk see videogames as idle dross or worse, and not entitled to the same cultural consideration as other art forms, which only infuriates gamers and game makers.

I'm thinking about going down the stairs, stealing a car, and getting back in the game. My boy, Sweet, is pinned down by the Seville Gang, and I cannot let him get wasted. As I stand here quietly, the POV dials in and out. My eyes are a zoom lens on the movie that is C.J.'s life. A tall, saucy babe in a halter dress sashays up the steps toward me and hisses, "You must hate yourself in shoes like that!"

This is how the chicks talk to me in the 'hood. I get no respect because I haven't earned any. I have failed 19 out of 24 mission attempts, I have caused $41,415 in property damage, and have just 43 bucks in my pocket. I have actually succeeded in blowing up my own car while trying to make a three-point turn. In short, I suck at this game. My sex appeal level is barely readable on the stat bar. I'll never get a 'ho to fuck me at this rate.

I wish I could say I got GTA out of some kind of journalistic/parental mindfulness. In fact, I simply fell for the TV commercial. Choppers swooping and blowing up tanks, a big black dude with ropy arms clutching an M-16, popping off rounds as Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" screamed in the background. It just looked so cool. I loved the idea of exploring an "open-world" and doing anything I wanted. Here in my married, middle-aged real life, I often feel like I am living in a distinctly closed world - hemmed in by kids, responsibilities, the Golden Rule. I yearned to blow that shit off and just roll. My husband, ever sensitive to my needs, bought me the game for my birthday.

So I invited my old friend Mark over to break it in with me. Though he'd never played GTA either, Mark has worked in game development and is a fount of information. "This is an FMV, full-motion video," Mark says during the opening movie. We watch as C.J. returns home to a murdered mother and revenge to pay in San Andreas. He hooks up with homies Sweet, Ryder, and Big Smoke, the motion-capture animation making the characters eerily real, even as they are rendered in broad, graphic strokes. GTA isn't so much realistic as it is really cinematic. Many characters are voiced by recognizable stars (Samuel L. Jackson, James Woods, Peter Fonda, etc.). There is mise en scene here, and a Steadicam POV that zooms and pans over the action. We are not really seeing the world through C.J.'s eyes, but rather we are the camera filming C.J.'s high-impact lifestyle. We are Big Brother, functioning as the Ego to C.J.'s twisted Id, trying to mitigate the selfish drive that this game demands.

"This is why people aren't going to the movies anymore," Mark enthuses, clearly excited. "This is just as good if not better than a film. See, cinema is exterior, and the game is interior. It is you in the movie." That is all very interesting, I think, but Mark is hogging the controller. Being a boy, he is almost magnetically attached to the thing. Occasionally, he remembers it's my game and my house, and gives it back, but before long it ends up in his hands. While he drives, I, ever the chick, consult the map and tell him where to go. I am actually happy not to be driving, which is really, really hard. The car veers crazily, and I can't control it. But figuring out the map is not so easy, either. For a game this sophisticated, I am surprised how rough the map is. Points of interest are marked with crude, colored blips. I struggle to get my bearings, but my brain has been shaped by evolution for gathering, not hunting. In real life I navigate with landmarks, using store signs and unusual buildings to mark my way through the world. But the landscape of San Andreas is as flat and repetitive as a Flintstones cartoon background.

Mark is hell-bent on accomplishing missions. "Alright, let's tag up some turf! This is so cool!" I, on the other hand, want to get C.J. something to eat, some rest, maybe some pussy. I would be happy just to wander around the streets of Los Santos on foot, poking into stores, getting tattoos, shooting hoops, changing my 'fro at the barbershop. But if I want to get ahead, it would behoove me to pick up a shovel and smash somebody's face in. "What's so interesting about this game," Mark observes, while kicking the shit out of an innocent bystander, "is it forces you to behave in a socially unacceptable manner. You cannot play without committing serious crimes." I'm starting to wonder if I'm too much of a girl to be good at this. I've got enough testosterone to want to play the game, but not enough to win.

Much has been made of the violence in GTA, but the violence is merely the means to an end of accomplishing missions. What surprises me about Grand Theft Auto is not its brutality, but its humor. The game is one long spoof on American culture, complete with prattling talk radio and ads that skewer American consumerism, like the commercial for the fictional De Koch Fine Jewelers: "Shut that bitch up with ice." An irony of the current hoopla around GTA is that it is being blamed for our cultural downfall, when really it's just throwing our own culture back in our faces. It is an homage to the best and worst of America, from Patsy Cline to drive-by shootings.

One of the great pleasures of the game is listening to San Andreas radio, where every station from reggae to country to '90s hip-hop is jamming. Cruising down a boulevard in a stolen lowrider convertible, with an orange sun melting into the horizon, listening to Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" is as chill as it gets.

Mark, being a responsible grown-up, has obligations that prevent him from hanging out with me all day playing GTA. Left alone with the game, I try to make sense of it. I feel like I could be good at this if I could only read the map or drive a car. I die one grisly death after another: gunshot, car crash, car fire, you name it. And always I end up back at the top of the steps in Jefferson.

Mark sends me to his friend Gus for a game tutorial. When I get to Gus's house, he hands me a cold beer and the controller. A connoisseur of pop culture, he has an entertainment console that includes a PS2, GameCube, Xbox, and an old Dreamcast unit. Gus looks old enough to be my kid brother, and, despite a lifetime spent watching movies and playing violent videogames, is a gracious and intelligent man. He kindly doesn't laugh at me as I total my car trying to get out of C.J.'s cul-de-sac, though Sweet, ever the bitch, yells at me from the screen, "C.J., you asshole!"

Gus tries to get me to relax: "Just drive around and don't worry about getting anywhere." I try to keep an even touch on the button that accelerates the car, but I've got a lead finger. My car lurches and jerks forward. When I take out a gaggle of pedestrians, he observes, "You're not really a gamer, so you don't have all the built-in training. The language of driving a car in a game isn't ingrained."

"You can say that again," I reply, straining to keep my car from going off a bridge. "I used to play as a kid. I liked Pac-Man and Galaga."

"Those were good games," Gus says of those '80s arcade attractions. "Anyone could play them. There was a time when a bunch of people who played games stopped" - when the game industry crashed in the mid-'80s - "and they missed the learning curve of how to play these complex games."

Pac-Man is to Grand Theft Auto what tic-tac-toe is to chess. The rules of today's games are confusing and revealed slowly. It is a vastly complex world. It's not about learning how to win the game, but learning how to be in the game. In his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues these games are making us smarter. "The great secret of today's videogames ... is how difficult the games have become," he wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed piece. "That difficulty is not merely a question of hand-eye coordination; most of today's games force kids to learn complex rule systems, master challenging new interfaces, follow dozens of shifting variables in real time and prioritize between multiple objectives." In GTA: San Andreas, a simple dance party on the beach has me rhythmically hitting buttons in a random pattern to make C.J. boogie. I can feel my poor, aging brain straining to accommodate all this new information. This is not a pastime for the intellectually inert.

Driving home from Gus's house, I feel for the first time the visceral influence of the game. Navigating traffic post-GTA is an altered experience. I feel as reckless and invincible as a teenager. As I'm cruising down Western, a car in front of me suddenly changes lanes to reveal a homeless man wandering across the road. His face, illuminated by my headlights, is etched in animated madness. He is muttering to himself, probably saying something GTA-ish like, "I like sexy cartoons!" For a moment, I consider running him over, but I stop myself. He probably doesn't have any cash or weapons.

If you play GTA in Los Angeles, there is a surreal feeling of crossover. After all, "San Andreas" is a stand-in for California, and the city of "Los Santos" is recognizable as L.A. It is both strangely familiar and completely foreign. I know it, but I don't know my way around it. In real life, I live on the edge of the 'hood. Gang tags appear on our garage door overnight, cars get stolen, homes are robbed. Ghetto birds fly over our house most nights, their high beams probing our backyard for guys like C.J. Playing the game gives me a strange new perspective on some of my neighbors.

I don't deny that playing this game can affect your real-world behavior, but in a socialized adult, that effect is momentary. By the time I get back home, I am grounded in my own reality once again. But what about the influence on the impressionable minds of children?

As a parent, I don't live in fear of videogames. Maybe that's because I have girls, who would much rather play with their hamsters and build fairy houses than go on simulated killing sprees. My friend Judie, however, is in constant negotiation with her 10-year-old son Alex over his access to his Game Boy, and is currently debating whether he can have an Xbox for his birthday. These limitations haven't quelled his enthusiasm. My daughter tells Alex I am writing about Grand Theft Auto, and my stock with him instantly rises. He gives me tips and cheats for a game he won't be legal to play for another 11 years.

"Here's how you spawn a rhino tank," Alex says from the swimming pool, where he is in the middle of a lesson with my kids, shouting out the secret button combination: "Circle, circle, L1, circle, circle, L1, L2, R1, triangle, circle, triangle." He gets the cheats off the G4 website, mentally cataloging them for the day when he will get to play.

"Look, your health is down. Let's go find a soda machine," says Jake, without taking his eyes off the screen. He expertly steers C.J.'s car off a freeway exit, precisely locating a soda machine. "Did you know if you drink a soda you get full health?" Then, he adds, "I quit drinking soda about six months ago."

Jake is a clear-eyed boy of 12. He gets a cold one for C.J., and, sure enough, as C.J. guzzles, his red health meter goes to full. It's just another little Rockstar joke. This is the fun of a topsy-turvy world. What's bad is good.

Jake and I are in his family's rec room, surrounded by the artifacts of his enriched upbringing: books, videos, puzzles, tubs of sports equipment. I am folded into a kid-sized butterfly chair, watching him play. He tells me he's not that good, but Jake's got C.J. out the door and over to Colonel Fuhrburger's house inside of a few minutes and is executing a seamless home invasion that I have failed four times already. There is a certain careless freedom in Jake's movements through the virtual world. The controller is an extension of his body. Whereas I wince and hesitate my way down the street, Jake bangs the truck along, hugging turns, pedal to the metal. He ditches the truck and steals a motorcycle to perform a stunt jump on the freeway. The bike pinwheels through the air and lands 30 feet below, shiny side up, scoring us major points.

Jake takes me on the "Robbing Uncle Sam" mission, and we drive down to the National Guard Depot by the Ocean Docks. He expertly shoots out the switch, opening the warehouse door where crates of ammo are stored. Simultaneously loading crates into his van with a forklift and shooting National Guardsmen, Jake explains why he doesn't play videogames much.

"There's too much else to do. If I play by myself it's because I'm bored, and that doesn't happen that often." He knows kids who are hardcore gamers. "They're freaky. They don't have much patience. It's like they don't have much of a life. You can't make many friends when you're playing a videogame." This is my biggest problem with Grand Theft Auto: It is a single-player game, and, as such, kind of lonely. Jake would rather be outside hitting tennis balls with his dad, which, after an hour of playing with me, is exactly what he does.

I am alone again at the top of the steps in Jefferson. The early morning gray saturates with color as the sun rises on another day in San Andreas. I know I am not meant for this world. I came too late and with too many obligations to linger. But I'm glad I got this far. Now at least I know that the videogames are not destroying our youths' moral fiber. If they are stuck inside playing in the virtual streets, it's because the streets they live on are too dangerous. And I do worry about angry, isolated kids playing Grand Theft Auto all day because no one is there to toss them a ball or nag them to do something else. Some of those kids may actually turn into sociopaths. But you've got to wonder: Is this the fault of a game or of poor parenting and, by extension, a society that pays lip service to "family values" but does little to support them? That Hillary Clinton is trying to score political points with this ass-backward logic makes me seethe with anger. I take off down the steps, looking for someone to take it out on.