On An Edge 2: On Games: GTA4

I took a while to get through this game.  Despite rather enjoying it, the game was heavy going.  Indeed, I find it hard to think of a game that I’ve enjoyed this much while having this little fun.  Because GTA4 is great.  It’s the kind of game I’ve been crying out for in this sea of call of duty ripoffs and formulaic dull characters and storylines.  GTA4 is Rockstar’s attempt to tell a serious story, to talk about something that they believe is important.  

They’re not far wrong.  GTA4’s Nico Bellic is a well developed character.  In fact, they all are.  The extravagant personalities of the franchise’s history have been toned down.  People are still assholes and often played for laughs but these are believable assholes, getting into believable situations.

Consider Manny from the second area of the game.  Manny is a would be celebrity who aims to draw attention to his communities social plight.  This is not an uncommon archetype for the GTA series to explore and they are as vicious with these would be saviors as they are with the people responsible for the problems.  In previous games, this was often extravagant tomfoolery against these types, one of many gleeful Fuck You’s interspersed in the history of the game.  In the past, Manny’s simpering hero from the streets act would have been turned up to 11 and played for cheap laughs.  But in GTA4 it’s kept in check.  Rather than being a comedy character, an ineffectual lawful stupid good guy in a sea of badguys, we see Manny for what he really is.  Throughout his whole section, there’s a distinctive undercurrent to Manny, implying that he is by and large in the business he is in because he feels it will make him famous.  Manny becomes a human character, an asshole but one we can feel for, one with aims and goals not dissimilar to our own.

This philosophy is applied to the whole game and lends it gravitas and far greater emotional impact.  Previous GTA’s to a degree glorified crime, in the same sense that a variety of awesome crime movies glorified it.  Things like the Italian Job, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and even the eponymous film GTA took it’s name from.  This calls on different reference points.  It’s goodfella’s, Scum and to a certain degree Layer Cake.  Here crime pays, but at a premium.  Nico ascends through the criminal underground (although never to the top, the rise of a gang that follows the main character has not been carried over from previous games) killing, thieving and kidnapping to scrape enough money together to carve out a living in the city.  Nico lacks options.  We stay with him, from the moment he steps off the boat and we spend our time as an immigrant in liberty city, inside it, involved with it but forever an outsider.

The whole experience culminates in what is finally a well written moral choice.  Far from the usual “Jesus loves the little children” versus “KILLFRENZY! KILLFRENZY! KILLFRENZY!” we are presented with a simple choice.  Not between good and evil, because we’ve spent the last however many hours realizing that Nico is a bad man.  He is made such by his circumstance, but he is undeniably a bad man.  At the end of GTA4 you simply choose what kind of villain you are.

This is where games need to go, I don’t mean down the more realistic route (and I’ll get to that in a minute) but down the more intense emotional experience.  GTA4 is a story, a beautiful story, that exists in a completely interactive way within a completely interactive setting. It shows us how we can go on a journey with our lead character and that journey can be something unique, can be something special and emotionally touching.

It is however, sadly, far from perfect.  Much has been said already about the driving system, I doubt I need to say more.  I’ll simply point out that it’s an example of this games problem.  The things it does right are the things that it does wrong.  The whole game is serious and more realistic, including the driving.  It lend power to the scenes, make us identify further with the characters.  However, it is simply outright less fun.  Vehicles slip and slide all over the place and racing around the place is simply not an option any more.

The same can be said of the setting.  Liberty City is a real looking and vibrant place.  Squint slightly and you’ll really believe you’re in New York.  But at the same time, it’s less of a fun place to be.  The humor in GTA4 isn’t bad, it’s just out of place.  Frankly they should have dropped it completely.  

In fact, they should have dropped the whole GTA thing completely.  Or even better, given it to the people who made Saints row 2.  GTA4 is a better game, undeniably.  It tells a fulfilling and powerful emotional story in a way that games rarely do.  It’s realism lends pathos and power to it, makes you care about the characters, makes the setting seem more real.  Then you drive passed a cluckin’ bell, remember the stealth pun and you remember that “Hey!  This is supposed to be GTA!  I should be doing something awesome and ridiculous and fun right now!”

But you’re not.  You’re trying to keep the car going in a straight line as the girl you kidnapped claws at your face reminding you yet again that crime is hard, a criminals life is full of this hard work and while Liberty City is a nice place to visit, you wouldn’t want to live there.  That is both GTA4’s greatest advantage and it biggest flaw.  It successfully tells you a story about a horrible tragic man, living out a horrible tragic life in a horrible tragic city.  And you’ll spend about half your time wishing you were playing something silly and fun and over the top. The best advice I could give you is to buy both this and Saint’s Row 2.  When this gets a bit much (and it will) shove in the other and let off some steam.

On An Edge 1: On Games: Storytelling

Video games are in an exceptionally interesting but also rather dangerous creative position today.  Money plays a large part in the market than it ever has before.  Budgets and the sheer scale of games have increased massively.  The "waka-waka" sounds of Pacman have been replaced by the rattle of chainsaw and the thrum of gravity guns.  Games are now a medium that can genuinely compete in their own right with the film and music industries.

But we can take a look at these industries and find a singular universal truth about the relationship between money and creativity.

Money, without exception, plays it safe.

Money wants derivative safe projects, guaranteed earners that will not change anything other than the bank accounts of their creators.  Right now it's the ubiquitous call of duty and it's myriad clones and whether we discuss world war 2 or the more contemporary modern warfare games call of duty dominates the scene at present and is surrounded by countless pointless pretenders to it's throne, each desperate to succeed COD as the fps de jour.  It isn't working and it never will.  COD is excellent at what it does, regardless of whether it's to your personal tastes or not.

But it's derivative; it's safe; it absolutely doesn't advance the medium and that is what gaming truly needs right now.  Here's why.

Games are approaching a moment that we've seen before.  Look at the movie industry, circa 1950.  Dominated by a swiftly diminishing number of studios and massively inflated budgets and, most disastrous of all, afflicted with a lack of originality.  Hollywood studios felt safe and flooded it's market with expensive, derivative crap, impressive true, but of no real emotional worth.  They had forgotten a vital fact, one that game developers are in danger of forgetting themselves.

These mediums tell stories


For all the budgets in the world, the story is the thing, to paraphrase the bard.  It is the emotional linchpin around which the whole work rotates.

The transylvanian castle in Dracula and other similar films is an astoundingly impressive visual image.  Let's do a little test.  Think of a spooky castle.  Is it this one?

Dracula (1931)

That's how archetypal Dracula's castle has become.  Now, consider this.  Would we remember the castle without the vampire?  Would those gothic spires be as portentous as they seem now?  Without Bela Lugosi or Max Schreck prowling the halls of our imagination, the castle is just a castle, nothing more.  It's the story that provides it with its unsettling presence.

How does this relate back to gaming?

More than any other media, gaming has always been in search of the next graphical peak.  Achievements in this field have become important enough to become selling points in and of themselves.  Gamers have shown that they care about graphics more than any but the most ardent of film buffs would care about cameras or the latest developments in CGI.

Why is this a bad thing?

Because these things are artifice.  They are the tools of the medium, nothing more and nothing less.  They are the building blocks that we construct an emotional experience with.  You wouldn't go see a movie just because they use a shiny new camera, so why would you play a game just because they have shiny high def textures?

So far, I haven't said anything you have already heard before from other commentators.  Here then are some home truths that are not being talked about and they should be.

The first is this.  This situation needs to be resolved soon.  Right now, things are good for the games factory.  Games are swiftly becoming a creative force on par with the other dominant creative industries.  We have come in leaps and bounds since the days of the powerglove.  But this won't last unless we can justify our being there.  I point you back to the film industry of the fifties.  In case you can't predict the outcome of that situation, in the face of endless repetitive, derivative and expensive films, audiences eventually simply lost interest.  With the advent of tv, the movies were no longer the only moving pictures market.  Swiftly, the audiences fell.  The whole industry took a massive hit.  They like to pin the blame for this fallow period entirely on the convenience of television but in truth they suffered because of a simple lack of ideas.

The gaming industry needs to look very closely at this example to try and avoid the same fate.  In case you're wondering, it was independent film that saved the industry and i'll be exploring some interesting parallels between that and our own indie gaming scene at a later date.

The second home truth is this.  Don't give up hope.  Their are a few games that have signposted the way that games need to evolve.  We have bypassed the novelty now.  Everybody games.  It is no longer fair to call this a niche interest.  This is both the cause of the problem, the factor that will lead to the downfall of the industry and the solution as well.  If you think downfall is a touch harsh, remember that cinema's were in a state of near irrelevance for almost twenty years after the fifties, only truly coming into it's own again in the seventies.  We can skip this stage in the evolutionary cycle of a creative medium if we can recognise what it took them twenty years to figure out.  Games are not an end but rather a means to tell a story in a different way from any other way it's been told before.  

In the early days of cinema, the increasing scale and budget was enough to fulfil the ambitions of most involved with the film industry and for the longest time they operated as though they were staging theater.  Think about it, the films that are heralded as the greatest of those era's are those that work as films and nothing else.  Nosferatu with it's strange angles and german impressionism, The Cabinet of Dr Caligieri and so on.  Consider what is popularly cited as the greatest film of all time: Citizen Kane.  Particularly of note is the breakfast table sequence.  Over a series of edits, Welles shows us the disintegration of a marriage without a single word of dialogue.  If you haven't seen it, search it out and consider how impossible it would have been to do in a theatre.  

Gaming needs it's Citizen Kane.  It needs a work that sets it aside as it's own creative entity, capable of telling stories in a unique way that we know it can, but it rarely does.

We have seen brief trace of this.  Eternal Darkness created fear by deliberately directing it's scares not just towards the characters but the player directly.  Perhaps the most discussed scene in Batman: Arkham Asylum plays the same card.  These scares communicate directly to the player and provide them with a taste of an experience they will never recieve in a cinema.  This is the advantage of games.  We don't just care about these characters, we become them and they become us.  This is what immersion means and this medium offers it in a way that no other can even come close to.  

By far and away the most impressive indicator to this possible future can be summed up with three simple words.

"Would you kindly"

I'm referring to the midgame revelation in Bioshock when you discover that your character has been hypnotically trained to follow certain commands.  At this point we are suddenly made to realise that the objectives given have never been optional.  As gamers we know that of course, they never were outside of the reality on the game, but within there is always the question of could you simply walk away?  When the protagonist reaches Rapture only to have his craft assaulted by one of the splicers that flood the city, he is urged on by a voice from a radio.  As gamers we assume that within the reality of the game, Jack could always simply turn around, send the bathysphere back up and forget he ever heard of Rapture.  With the revelation that he in universe is bound against his will to the same objectives that you are in turn bound to, you are blindsided by a direct attack on not the character, but you!  In a single second, what you had assumed was simply a function of gameplay becomes the shackles of your manchurian candidate nature.  That feeling, that connection between you and the reality of the game, that's what gaming storytelling needs.

I'll leave you with this.  Books tell a story one way.  Films tell it in a different way.  Television series too have their own style.  Video games also have their own techniques, their own ways of making us experience stories.  But we have yet to use these to their full extent.  We have no Citizen Kane.  Yet.  But there is hope.  I personally have great faith in this medium.  I believe it capable of letting us experience emotional journeys in a way utterly unlike, yet completely complementary to, it's contemporary mediums.  But developers must start thinking about this now, because to continue to push out derivative unimaginative products may earn you money now.  But in the long term, people will simply lose interest.  Games will return to being a novelty.  Perhaps in twenty years, we can begin this cycle again, as the film industry did.  But frankly, I'd prefer to skip the intervening years and get straight to it.