Crime isn't just shooting people

Mafia II borrows so much from GoodFellas that 2K Czech probably ought to give Scorcese and Pileggi co-writing credits. Direct references to the film appear in a couple of specific scenes, but the real influence is more fundamental. GoodFellas depicts the mafia as a group of buddies, and Mafia II is built around the same idea. Although family matters motivate the game's protagonist, Vito, when it's convenient for the plot, the real impetus for his journey through the Empire Bay underworld comes from his friends. Unfortunately, the game's vision of mafia life falls apart because of its ill-considered adherence to gaming convention. Mafia II devolves into a series of increasingly ludicrous and bloody shootouts, even though a realist mob drama in the vein of GoodFellas would be an amazing game.

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A good way to spend a day and a half

My compilation of critical writing about Grand Theft Auto IV has gone up at Critical Distance. If you have a couple of hours to devote to reading some interesting writing about the game that was supposed to change everything then hop on over and get clicking. There's a lot to read, and I ended up including a pretty diverse set of posts, from straight essays to cross-blog dialogues, to one post from Corvus' site that ended up in there because of a really interesting comment. Also, because the game appeals to such a broad swath of gamers, I made an effort to dig into gamer-oriented blogging sites like Destructoid and IGN, with uneven success. I found plenty of posts, but many of those bloggers seem to be focused on producing their own reviews rather than a focused essay. Unfortunately, while everybody has an opinion, not everyone has an interesting idea.

One idea plenty of people had was to compare GTA IV to Saints Row 2. This was an easy thought to have because the folks at Volition kept pushing the concept that GTA IV had lost the fun of the sandbox while SR2 had expanded it. I must have scrolled through a dozen bullet-point posts about why SR2 was better (this seemed to be the prevailing opinion). I probably could have hacked together a section about it, but it would have required me to accept a painful quality dip. Instead, I linked copiously to Shamus Young's compare/contrast series on the two games, which I thought did a really admirable job of examining the competing design philosophies rather than just talking about how much more fun SR2 was.

Another subject that received a lot of coverage was the phenomenally ill-advised "Ladies of Liberty City" video IGN made and then retracted. This was a real problem because the people who responded to that video generally made reasonable points about the GTA series, but often didn't do a good job of GTA IV itself, mostly because they never played it. I seriously considered a secondary post or sub-section just on this subject, because there was a lot of interesting writing about it. Unfortunately, much of it was undermined by bad fact-checking; a significant proportion of these posts, even some of the better ones, included false information about the content of the game. The sad part is that most of these essays would have been just as compelling without the misinformation. After some internal debate, I had to conclude that making the section would only lead to drama I didn't want to deal with — in particular I felt that I might end up inadvertently turning those posts into flamebait.

Aside from these, most of the other main threads of commentary made it into the sections you see in the compilation. I feel like I did a little more synthesis in this compilation than previous ones. I tried not to come down on one side or the other of any particular case, but I did try to subtly draw out ideas that were somewhat nascent in the individual essays so that they might attract new writing. One of the ideas rumbling beneath the complaints about GTA IV's heavy emphasis on linear narrative is that the gameplay of Grand Theft Auto games is inherently transgressive: the game is about breaking the rules, the boundaries, the laws. In that kind of game, ludonarrative dissonance might be created just by having a linear narrative that denies the player significant input.

I also thought there was an intriguing idea percolating in a couple of pieces that Niko lies to himself about his sociopathic tendencies using the fiction that he has no choice but to be a murderer. Niko, and Rockstar's handling of him, engendered a lot of negative reaction, but my own feeling was that they did a reasonably good job of exploring a very bad person who, like many very bad people, sees himself as a fundamentally good guy with a functional moral code. But it was also interesting to me to find that there were a number of people who took Niko at face value, and consequently tried to play the game in a way that minimized property crimes and murders. The prevailing opinion is that GTA IV requires a lot of killing, but creative players have been exploiting the game's flexibility to draw the number of murders down to a surprisingly low level. Maybe that's ganking the system, or maybe that's buying in to one part of the system over others.

Whatever you think of the Pacifist Niko Challenge as an approach to rulesets generally, it does underline one key fact about GTA IV. The rules and systems created by Rockstar North allow for a huge range of behavior, but don't really require any more violence than is typical in any other gunplay-focused game. Popular attacks on the game interpret the most extreme activities that it permits as if they were actions the game requires, often as a consequence of (proudly proclaimed) ignorance. This strikes me as a case of shooting the messenger. If we're going to get upset about what happens in a game of GTA IV, we ought to worry less about the fact that people can do horrible things in a game, and more about the fact that they actually choose to do them.

One more thing. In order to comply with the FTC I will now list everything I've received for free from a game publisher:

That is all.

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Take the shot!

Dimitri Rascalov runs for his life, as he must, because he has angered the wrong man. Niko Bellic, a former soldier and incredibly efficient killer, has sworn to avenge his cousin Roman's murder on Rascalov's orders, and has tracked his enemy to this dilapidated casino on the edge of town. Now Dimitri's only hope is to escape in his helicopter. Niko pursues him across the roof, sees him about to escape, then races halfway across the building to grab hold of the landing skid. Moments later, he is shaken off into the water next to a speedboat. Now there will be a spectacular chase, by boat and helicopter, across Liberty City, culminating in a confrontation at its most famous landmark. But it is a chase that should not be happening, because Niko Bellic, trained killer, had a rocket launcher, and a clear shot he should have taken. That he did not is a signpost to one of Grand Theft Auto IV's central flaws.

A video game, particularly of the kind GTA IV is, poses a challenge for the creator because the experience of the work that ultimately emerges depends strongly on the input of the player. In order to define the parameters of the experience the creator must exert authorship in a variety of ways. The display of cutscenes, the presentation of incidental dialogue, and the occurrence of scripted events are authorial influences familiar from other media. The developer also constrains the experience through the design of spaces, the placement of enemies, and the programming of artificial intelligence. Beyond this, the conditions for "victory" also define the player's experience because of his assumed desire to complete the game. The key is to use all these authoring steps so that they work coherently. It's not enough to make sure the characters behave consistently across all their cutscenes — every aspect of the game must be considered in light of the characters and their goals.

A reasonably intelligent criminal who knows he will be fleeing from police shortly would not, given any choice at all, take a slow and clumsy vehicle to escape from a crime scene. Nor would the player, for whom the victory condition involves escaping his pursuers. To this point, authorship has succeeded in bringing the player's perspective into line with the criminal's. The developer, desiring that the player/character should use an unwieldy vehicle anyway, has some options. One (good) option would be to arrange the mission in such a way that the heavy van is the only vehicle close to hand. An alternative approach is to make using the van a requirement of success for some obvious reason — say, something valuable is in the van and cannot be removed. A game starts to run into trouble if it requires the player to use the van, for no apparent reason, when a more suitable vehicle is immediately available. This final approach breaks the fiction, using an arbitrary, externally imposed requirement to force the player and characters to act in ways at odds with their goals and personalities.

GTA IV uses this approach all the time, both in and out of actual missions. At one point, Niko receives a call from Packie McCreary, telling him to go visit Packie's brother Gerry in the penitentiary in a remote corner of the city. It is arguably a problem to even mention prison in a game where you can kill a dozen cops, get arrested, and undergo no greater inconvenience than the trip to the police station and the loss of your considerable arsenal of assault weapons. It is certainly a problem to have Niko Bellic — a wanted illegal immigrant, drug runner, and prolific murderer — walk into that prison. And it simply implodes the fiction to have him go to that prison so that Gerry can tell him to call Packie, who — you will recall — set this whole trek into motion with a phone call in the first place. The long, credulity-stretching detour to the prison leads the story precisely nowhere, and what is most troubling about this is that it's not the worst use of authorship in the game.

Consider, for example, the mission "A Long Way to Fall", in which Niko, in a cutscene, walks up to a door and leans his head towards it, allowing a drug dealer on the other side to bang the door into Niko's face. For Niko, ostensibly a hardened soldier, to approach a door this way under these circumstances would be problematic for any kind of narrative. Of course, if Niko had walked peacefully into the building, accepting fresh-baked cookies from little old ladies, the scene would be a reasonable continuation of the fiction. But the immediately preceding gameplay emphatically warned against carelessness. Prior to encountering this door, the player has climbed through a housing complex full of the dealer's hostile posse. Because of the game's difficulty, this is only possible by advancing cautiosly, with judicious use of cover. Moreover, when the player first enters the apartment, he must use a doorway as cover against the well-armed thugs waiting in the main room. The importance of approaching a door carefully will therefore be at the front of the player's (and ostensibly Niko's) mind. In order to serve their dramatic end, the developers use a cutscene to force Niko to act in ways counter not only to the way the character should act, but also to the way the game has been encouraging the player to behave.

For me, this is the defining flaw of GTA IV — so many of the missions, cutscenes, and incidental moments actively undermine the propositions the game is trying to sell you on. Niko is an unstoppable trained killer until the developers' plan for a mission requires him to act like a man who has never fought inside a building, or to choose an obviously inappropriate vehicle, or not to kill a man until he reaches Alderney. Rascalov is a nervous wimp constantly concerned about playing by the "rules" until the developers' plot requires him to kill all his business partners and allies. The characters act not from the internal motivations arising in a fully-imagined personality, but from the external motivation of the developers' desire to move along to the next set-piece.

GTA IV has been hailed as a new gold standard in video-game storytelling, and if that is true then we should double-check the purity of our ingots. The character who is always precisely as smart or as foolish, as competent or helpless as the plot requires at a given moment is a consistent staple of poorly-written action flicks and romantic comedies. GTA IV operates entirely on that same wavelength, except that the authoring of mission objectives and cutscenes means that Rockstar attempts to make the player be as smart or stupid as their dramatic purpose requires. But Rockstar can only constrain action, not thought. They can make me chase Rascalov all around the city, but they can't make me forget Niko Bellic's rocket launcher, or the shot he should have taken.

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