When Grand Theft Auto IV launched, I was mired in exam hell. In my mind, I assumed I would blog all sorts of interesting things about it after I had some time to sit down with the game but: a) I got caught up with other things; b) you can spend a lot of time in GTA IV doing absolutely nothing – walking in the park, driving around listening to Coltrane, getting into random fights or getting handjobs. So, since I’m now in that nebulous space where it’s too late to join the initial conversation and too early to reflect on ‘what it all means’, I’m just gonna’ put some random thoughts here. If you plan on playing the game but haven’t yet, there will be some early spoilers (I’m still only about 15% through).

What is Interactive Fiction?

An early mission in the game required me/Nico to kill Vlad, a character that Russian formalist Propp would call a ‘sender’ (i.e. s/he who sends the hero on their mission). It didn’t seem like a particularly great idea to me – killing him for cheating on someone? – but I seemed to have little choice as this is what the game had not only decided I should do but eventually, in a very graphic, disturbing scene, did for me. Depending on your perspective, this is either good or bad. The upside is that this sort of linear narrative structure forces you to empathise with your avatar; what he does is what you do and you undergo a weird sort of distanced, deferred sense of ‘being that person’. The downside is that robs you of that feeling of control that makes gaming, and sandbox games especially, appealing. I felt conflicted – I had no desire to ‘kill Vlad’ but I also respect the idea of telling a story in a particular way. This question is huge, so I’d be interested to know what others think.

Reality, Fantasy and Desire

Speaking of that exam I wrote, one of the things that came up over and over again was the function and implications of re-presenting reality. I tend to argue that the space of the aesthetic produces our reality as much as it reflects it i.e. art becomes an inescapable lens through which we see such that all apprehension of ‘reality’ is always going to be somehow ‘tainted’ by the aesthetic. So, what sort of reality is being reflected in Liberty City? And what is being produced? The game obviously has a satirical edge. It attempts to not only present New York as cutthroat and dog-eat-dog but also puts the centrality of money in the foreground of both the world and the story. I suppose that much is obvious though. Perhaps the more interesting question is, if we consider fantasy as the space to act out the unconscious, what are we to make of the sheer mayhem that you can perform in the city that isn’t even part of the narrative? I mean, I took a big rig and drove it onto the runway of the airport and got it stuck under an airplane’s wing – and it felt great, largely because in a virtual representation of New York, it was about the worst thing you could possibly do. So what, if any, are the links between capitalism, New York and the fantasy of enacting violence? (Also, feel free to psychoanalyse, but the one glaring omission in the gameplay for me was the inability to walk up to a bench and sit down. You can jump over it, you can seek cover behind it, you can shoot at it – but you can’t sit on it and just watch stuff pass by. This sucks.)

Yes Kids, This Game is Sexist

There was a point in Shaun of the Dead when Nick Frost‘s character pulls up in a car and says ‘S’up niggas?!’. I couldn’t really take offense to it because Ed has at that point been painted as someone who doesn’t really care about propriety or much of anything really. It’s funny because he has the gall and is obliviousness enough to say it. So it’s easy to have characters with unlikeable qualities and not have a story promote those characteristics. But GTA IV takes things a step further. Yes, Roman and Nico are, if not sexist, then ‘manly’ in a very usual way – they talk about ‘titties’, getting laid and other things you’d expect to hear from adolescents and adolescent men. Fine. But the game also uses women as a sort of currency. You can, after all, hire a sex worker to quite literally ‘boost your health’. The reason that Vlad is killed is because he has cheated with Roman’s girlfriend – Mallory’s role is never brought up, as if she was a silent witness to the proceedings rather than an active participant. But more to the point, so far, women only exist in these functions. I’ve been told that strong female characters come later and even so, I don’t think there’s anything inherently sexist about having a story that deals mainly with men. But when female characters become things to be passed around and used or property to be defended, we have a problem. There is nothing in either the mimetic or diegetic world (mimesis=representation, diegesis=storytelling) that seems to provide any other perspective. And if this were some sort of isolated occurrence, it would be no big deal. But the fact that this sort of misogyny is common and that GTA IV is such a major cultural event is disturbing to say the least.

I might, if and when I finish the game, record some more thoughts. Right now though, I’m more interested to hear yours. Whaddya’ think about GTA IV?