Windows and Video Game Cops

I have been playing a whole lot of Saints Row 2 lately, which might come as a surprise to those who know how I feel about sandbox games.  I was never a fan of the sandbox games' silent motto of "do whatever the hell you want, there's this big world we created that is wholly accessible," but I'm trying my best to get over it.  My solace comes with forgetting about world exploration and striving for a goal -- doing solely missions in one sitting, or trying to find all of *insert findable object here*.  Beyond that, I rarely find myself going all Attention Deficit Disorder and trying to accomplish everything; that, my friends, is one way to make my head explode.  Too many options.

But this is quite a stretch beyond the scope of what I wish to say here.  Getting back on topic.

There is one diversion required of a sandbox game that I will always regard as the icing on the cake (all Portal jokes aside): the police chases.  Even in the games where the police is attempting to arrest you, their methods are still drastic enough to say "we want to arrest you, but just as a second option."  And really, this is one of the long-standing appeals of sandbox games.  You can be thrown into a new world and still feel comforted to know that bumping into some random authoritative figure is enough to have them spew a strangely windows-sounding error message: "The player has performed an illegal operation and needs to be shut down."  All I did was lightly nudge his shoulder, but now he wants to take it personal and contact my skull with his nightstick.

Does messing around with corrupt cops make me a masochist?  I have the urge to shout out "no" almost instantaneously, but then I remember how all of those encounters end: me in a hospital.

I laugh on the inside to think of how these events can start out so trivial and escalate so quickly.  I nudge cop, cop draws out nightstick, I use fists in self-defense, cop has friends, cops have guns, and suddenly there is a blur between now and the cops sending helicopters and tanks to eradicate one citizen who had been on his way to buy the coffee shop down the street.

I suppose it's positive they don't have the game mechanics act too realistic, and I actually have a choice for when to pick my fights.  Realistic driving mechanics of some sandbox games aside, I don't want to obey the traffic laws to keep the cops from freakin' out. Getting around quickly when you have to worry about red lights? That would never catch on.