Some Meditations on Grand Theft Auto

Been thinking about Grand Theft Auto IV? Well, I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto IV, more to the point; but it’s been interesting thinking about how powerful the storytelling and writing can be, despite the fact that the GTA series has always been one of the major posterboys for pointless violence in videogames. I mean, we’re talking a series that has consistently, from day one, let you shoot people in the head and steal their cars. My earliest memory of any Grand Theft Auto is creating a chain reaction of exploding cars and cackling fiendishly at my computer screen (GTA II, I think, but easily replicable in any GTA game). And yet… and yet almost all GTAs I’ve played have had very interesting stories and messages present within the game, and would have been suitable in any Uni Course where academics talk about ‘meaning’ and ‘intent’.

They could also be played, of course. But where’s the fun in that?

There’s no real need to introduce the Grand Theft Auto series, but for the faint of heart or the non-initiated I’ll tell you anyway. Players take the role of some kind of criminal with the power to do criminal things - hijack and drive cars, shoot people, rob stores, and so on and so forth. Because, at its heart, GTA is - as the name implies - a crime simulator game, it’s forever been the subject of various moral panics, crusades about violent videogames etc. It’s never been helped by developer Rockstar’s attitude towards these panics, either, which tends towards the old adage: any publicity is good publicity.

In case you’re wondering about the validity of the people talking about how violent and evil Grand Theft Auto is, well, it’s kind of indisputable. In every GTA I’ve ever played, missions have involved offences ranging from drug smuggling, vandalism, murder, kidnapping, destruction of property, and of course grand theft auto, not to mention the things players do when not directed to specifically by the game. Even the more legal elements of the game often involves objectionable materials, such as interactive strip clubs, aggressively violent or sexualised advertising in the game world, and so on. Rockstar actively creates this kind of atmosphere, either as social commentary on American/Western Society or simply to shock people - see Hot Coffee, for example, for a situation in which Rockstar actually thought they’d gone too far (but were found out anyway).

But underneath its rather juvenile skin almost all GTA games have had some kind of story that generally hits all the right notes. Criminal life in Liberty City, Vice City, or San Andreas is always a roving mixture of betrayal, revenge, greed and redemption - or not, of course, what with IV’s new-found focus on player choice. Similarities could be drawn to classic Japanese Yakuza movies or to other genres that are more anti-hero focused. So perhaps GTA’s storyline won’t win a major motion picture award any day, but - for a game founded entirely in violence and illegality - the depth of writing in every game is surprising.

Before even starting on the main storylines, let’s talk about the world in which GTAs always inhabit. Liberty City, Vice City, and the giant state of San Andreas; every GTA has always been set in some crapsack version of America, a world in which 90% of the population are either belligerent morons, sociopaths, or just morally corrupt or damaged in some form or another. This is reflected in everything you see or hear, from the radio personalities to the comments of passers-by on the streets to the depressingly sexualised advertising and the news. Every aspect of American life gets a potshot from the boys at Rockstar, often in extremely witty ways, and other times simply by dialing the knob up to eleven. For instance, the natural evolution of using sex appeal in beer advertising is obviously going to look something like… this.

The amount of effort that has gone into the social media within the GTA world in every game is, to be frank, astounding. Mostly developed and written by Lazlow (who maintains an in-game personality in every game since III, starting from a Rock Station DJ in Vice City and spectacularly falling from grace in subsequent games), the GTA radio - and by IV, TV and Internet - has always been a high point of each and every game. My favourite station of all time is probably VCPR, Vice City Public Radio, a series of talk shows hosted by the hapless Maurice Chavez debating issues such as “Morality” and “Public Safety”, featuring increasingly bizarre guest stars who go on about nudity, death, and mind-tripping anti-depressants. But even the music stations will have brief segments where the DJ bemoans the lack of drug use in modern music composition, or play an ad for a film franchise that is being sold purely for the merchandising rights. In short; even the stuff that comprises what in other games would be ‘background noise’ is well-written and targetted extremely well.

But that’s just the world. What about the story? It’s been a long time since I played III and Vice City, but I remember one overriding theme about all these games: betrayal. It’s inevitable in every one of those games, a consequence of a story set in crime. Someone’s always going to stab you in the back to get a foothold, or to get rid of a rival, or just because they’re backstabbing scumbags. San Andreas, on the other hand, focused more about the corrupting effects of drugs on a community(hey, it was the 90s). I want to talk more about GTAIV, since it’s still fresh in my memory. GTAIV isn’t actually about betrayal.

GTAIV is about revenge.

I’m not sure how else to describe it, but unlike in other games, betrayal and revenge aren’t neccessarily synonomous. Certainly, in this game - like in every other GTA - you’re going to get betrayed. But that’s not what the game’s about. This is because of Rockstar’s new-found habit of offering player choice. Sure, they’ve got a ways to go: every choice is embarrassingly binary, and always a choice between “Kill him… or don’t!”. But nonetheless. Nonetheless.

A consequence of player choice is this: you are responsible for your actions. This may not seem big, and without some quality writing - and voice acting - to back it up, it isn’t. But when it all comes together… it can be intense. Let’s give you a general outline. The basic premise of GTAIV is that protagonist Nico Bellic has travelled to Liberty City in pursuit of two things: the American Dream, and vengeance. Revenge against a man who has betrayed him, revenge Fairly late in the game, you have the chance to take your revenge on a man who has wronged you, but to do so requires that you betray a man you are working with. I took the choice to take my vengeance, not to compromise the values that I felt that Nico Bellic held dear. And yet…

It seemed odd. I fought my way through hordes of mooks (a much larger challenge in this game, to my infinite joy), ducking between cover, tossing grenades and firing bullets with a song in my heart. Finally! It was time to confront a traitor of all I held dear. And yet when I took him down, put a bullet in his brain, it felt… wrong. It felt empty. It solved nothing. Back in reality, I thought to myself: Damn, it’s been a while since a game has made me feel this way. And I faced the consequences of my actions, afterwards, too.

And that’s the truth of it. GTAIV has been crafted to such an extent that feelings that are more usually evoked from a movie or a book are realised in the game world. Importantly - to me, anyway - they don’t come, as in from previous GTA games, from the cutscenes surrounding it. The final cutscene from San Andreas, for example, probably hit me as hard as what occured in GTAIV, but the difference remained; San Andreas’s emotional impact was in the cutscene, the movie inside the game. But GTAIV got me in the gameplay. Maybe this kind of thing will become more common. I don’t know if expect so, not just yet, but I certainly hope so.

As a side note, this article was only intended to be about 300 words. I guess I got carried away.