by Tom Bissell
Grand Theft Auto IV was announced in early 2007, two years after the launch of the Xbox 360 and one year after the launch of the PlayStation 3, the “next-generation” platforms that have since pushed gaming into the cultural mainstream. When the first next-gen titles began to appear, it was clear that the previous Grand Theft Auto titles—much like Hideo Kojima’s similarly brilliant and similarly frustrated Metal Gear Solid titles—were games of next-gen vision and ambition without next-gen hardware to support them. The early word was that GTA IV would scale back the excesses of San Andreas and provide a rounder, more succinctly inhabited game experience. I was living in Las Vegas when GTA IV (after a heartbreaking six-month delay) was finally released.
In Vegas I had made a friend who shared my sacramental devotion to marijuana, my dilated obsession with gaming, and my ballistic impatience to play GTA IV. When I was walking home from my neighborhood game store with my reserved copy of GTA IV in hand, I called my friend to tell him. He let me know that, to celebrate the occasion, he was bringing over some “extra sweetener.” My friend’s taste in recreational drug abuse vastly exceeded my own, and this extra sweetener turned out to be an alarming quantity of cocaine, a substance with which I had one prior and unexpectedly amiable experience, though I had not seen a frangible white nugget of the stuff since.
While the GTA IV load screen appeared on my television, my friend chopped up a dozen lines, reminded me of basic snorting protocol, and handed me the straw. I hesitated before taking the tiny hollow scepter, but not for too long. Know this: I was not someone whose life had been marked by the meticulous collection of bad habits. I chewed tobacco, regularly drank about ten Diet Cokes a day, and liked marijuana. Beyond that, my greatest vice was probably reading poetry for pleasure. The coke sailed up my nasal passage, leaving behind the delicious smell of a hot leather car seat on the way back from the beach. My previous coke experience had made feeling good an emergency, but this was something else, softer, and almost relaxing. This coke, my friend told me, had not been “stepped on” with any amphetamine, and I pretended to know what that meant. I felt as intensely focused as a diamond-cutting laser; Grand Theft Auto IV was ready to go. My friend and I played it for the next thirty hours straight.
Many children who want to believe their tastes are adult will bravely try coffee, find it to be undeniably awful, but recognize something that could one day, conceivably, be enjoyed. Once our tastes as adults are fully developed, it is easy to forget the effort that went into them. Adult taste can be demanding work—so hard, in fact, that some of us, when we become adults, selectively take up a few childish things, as though in defeated acknowledgment that adult taste, and its many bewilderments, is frequently more trouble than it is worth. Few games have more to tell us about this adult retreat into childishness than the Grand Theft Auto series.
In GTA IV you are Niko Bellic, a young immigrant with an ambiguous past. We know he is probably a Serb. We know he fought in the Balkans war. We know he was party to a war-crime atrocity and victim of a double-cross that led to the slaughter of all but three members of his paramilitary unit. We know he has taken life outside of war, and it is strongly suggested that he once dabbled in human trafficking. “I did some dumb things and got involved with some idiots,” Niko says, early in the game, to his friend Hassan. “We all do dumb things,” Hassan replies. “That’s what makes us human.” The camera closes on Niko as he thinks about this and, for a moment, his face becomes as quietly expressive as that of a living actor. “Could be,” he says.
Niko has come to Liberty City (the GTA world’s run at New York City) at the invitation of his prevaricating cousin, Roman. He wants to start over, leave behind the death and madness of his troubled past, and bathe in the comfort and safety of America. Niko’s plan does not go well. Soon enough, he is working as a thief and killer. Just as Lolita, as Nabokov piquantly notes in his afterword, was variously read as “old Europe debauching young America” or “young America debauching old Europe,” GTA IV leaves itself interpretively open as to whether Niko is corrupted by America or whether he and his ilk (many of the most vicious characters whose paths Niko crosses are immigrants) are themselves bacterial agents of corruption. The earlier GTA games were less thematically ambitious. Tommy from Vice City is a cackling psychopath, and C.J. from San Andreas merely rides the acquisitionist philosophy of hip-hop culture to terminal amorality. They are not characters you root for or even want, in moral terms, to succeed. You want them to succeed only in gameplay terms. The better they do, the more of the gameworld you see. The stories in Vice City and San Andreas are pastiches of tired filmic genres: crime capers, ghetto dramas, police procedurals. The driving force of both games is the gamer’s curiosity: What happens next? What is over here? What if I do this? They are, in this way, childlike and often very silly games, especially San Andreas, which lets you cover your body with ridiculous tattoos and even fly a jetpack. While the gameworlds and subject matter are adult—and under no circumstances should children be allowed near either game—the joy of the gameplay is allowing the vestiges of a repressed, tantrum-throwing, childlike self to run amok. Most games are about attacking a childlike world with an adult mind. The GTA games are the opposite, and one of the most maliciously entertaining mini-games in Vice City and San Andreas is a mayhem mode in which the only goal is to fuck up as much of the gameworld as possible in an allotted period of time.
There is no such mode in GTA IV (though the gamer is free to fuck up the gameworld on his or her own clock), one suspects because the game seeks to provide Niko with a pathos it absolutely denies Vice City’s Tommy and mostly denies San Andreas’s C.J. All the GTA games have been subject to mis-and overinterpretation, and GTA IV is no exception. GTA IV’s most frequent misinterpretation is that it boasts a story many credulous game reviewers deemed “Oscar-worthy,” which, they said, lent Niko’s plight real relevance. This is, in a word, preposterous. At its best, the story of GTA IV is pretty good for a video game, which is to say, conventional and fairly predictable. At its equally representative worst, GTA IV’s story does not make much sense, unless one believes that Niko would instantly forgive his cousin, Roman, for luring him to America under boldly false pretenses, that Niko could find a girlfriend after one day in America, that people who barely know Niko would unquestioningly entrust him with their lives and drug money, and that Niko’s mother would write him e-mails in English. The one narrative task GTA IV handles extremely well is dialogue, particularly whenever the incomprehensible Jamaican pothead Little Jacob ambles into the proceedings. A hilariously hairsplitting argument between a pair of Irish American criminals about whether the plastic explosive they are about to use to blow open a bank door is called “C4” or “PE4” feels scissored out of a Tarantino script. GTA IV’s dialogue has no bearing on its gameplay, of course, but does make it one of very few games in which listening to people talk is not only enjoyable but sociologically revelatory.
Niko’s real pathos derives not from the gimcrack story but how he looks and moves. Vice City and San Andreas were graphically astounding by the standards of their time, but their character models were woeful—even by the standards of their time. The most vivid thing about Vice City’s Tommy is the teal Hawaiian shirt he wears at the game’s open, and San Andreas’s C.J. is so awkwardly rendered he looks like the King of the Reindeer People. Niko, though, is just about perfect. Dressed in striped black track pants and a dirty windbreaker, Niko looks like the kind of guy one might see staring longingly at the entrance of a strip club in Zagreb, too poor to get in and too self-conscious to try to. When, early in the game, a foulmouthed minor Russian mafioso named Vlad dismisses Niko as a “yokel,” he is not wrong. Niko is a yokel, pathetically so. One of the first things you have to do as Niko is buy new clothes in a Broker (read: Brooklyn) neighborhood called Hove Beach (read: Sheepshead Bay). The clothing store in question is Russian-owned, its wares fascinatingly ugly. And yet you know, somehow, that Niko, with his slightly less awful new cl
othes, feels as though he is moving up in the world. The fact that he is only makes him more heartrending. The times I identified most with Niko were not during the game’s frequent cut scenes, which drop bombs of “meaning” and “narrative importance” with nuclear delicacy, but rather when I watched him move through the world of Liberty City and projected onto him my own guesses as to what he was thinking and feeling.
Liberty City, many game reviewers argued, is the real central character of GTA IV, and here they were not wrong. The worlds of Vice City and San Andreas, however mind-blowing at the time, were also geometrically dead and Tinkertoy-ish, with skyscrapers and buildings that looked like upturned Kleenex boxes. Their size and variegation were impressive, but surfaces held little texture and lighting and particle effects were distractingly subpar. Virtually every visual element of GTA IV’s Liberty City is gorgeously realized, and I have never felt more forcefully transported into a gameworld than while running across Liberty City’s Middle Park in orange-sherbet dusk, taking a right turn onto the Algonquin Bridge and seeing the jeweled ocean glisten in the hard light of high afternoon, or stepping out of a Hove Beach tenement into damp phantasms of morning fog. The physics that previously governed the world of GTA were brilliantly augmented as well. GTA IV replaced the zippily insubstantial, slippery-tired cars and motorcycles of Vice City and San Andreas with vehicles of brutely heavy actuality. While the crashes in Vice City are a ball, GTA IV’s car crashes are sensorily traumatic, often sending a screaming Niko through the windshield and into oncoming traffic. Running over a few stick-legged rag dolls in San Andreas is always good for a nasty-minded laugh, but running people down in GTA IV often leaves your bumper and headlights smeared with blood—evidence that gruesomely carries over into in-game cut scenes—and the potato-sack thud with which pedestrians carom off your windshield is, the first time you hear it, deeply disturbing. Liberty City is also more eccentrically populated. While there are plenty of people walking about Vice City and San Andreas, the character models are repetitive. I came across the latter’s shirtless, red-Kangol-wearing LL Cool J doppelgänger so many times I started shooting the dude out of general principle. Liberty City’s citizens have far more visual and behavioral distinction. (The bits of dialogue you overhear while walking down the street are some of the game’s funniest: “You know,” one cop cheerfully admits to another, “I love to beat civilians.”) Discovering who panics and who decides to stop and duke it out with you when you try to steal a car is one of the GTA games’ endless fascinations. When a Liberty City guy in a suit unexpectedly pulls out a Glock and starts firing it at you, you are no longer playing a game but interacting with a tiny node of living unpredictability. The owner of one of the first vehicles I jacked in Liberty City tried to pull me out of the car, but I accelerated before she succeeded. She held on to the door handle for a few painful-looking moments before vanishing under my tires in a puff of bloody mist. With a nervous laugh I looked over at my girlfriend, who was watching me play. She was not laughing and, suddenly, neither was I.
GTA IV’s biggest advance from its predecessors was the quality of its apocalyptic satire. (The GTA games are not made by Americans and probably could not be made by Americans. Volition’s Saints Row series, the most popular American-made GTA imitator, all but proves this, offering a vision of American culture that is unlikably frat-boyish and frequently defensive.) Vice City and San Andreas are too often content, satire-wise, to amuse themselves with stupid puns. While GTA IV has its share of pun gags (a chain of Internet cafés called Tw@, a moped known as the Faggio, an in-game credit card called Fleeca), and a number of simply dumb gags (its Statue of Liberty holds not a torch but a coffee cup), many of the haymakers it swings at American excess and idiocy make devastating contact. Much of the best material can be heard while listening to commercials on one of the game’s nineteen radio stations. An Olive Garden–ish restaurant chain known as Al Dente’s promises “all the fat of real Italian food, with a lot less taste and nutrients!” Broker’s emo station, Radio Broker, uses “The station hipsters go to to say they’ve heard it all!” as its call sign. WKTT, Liberty City’s conservative talk radio station (“Because democracy is worth suppressing rights for”), has as its Rush Limbaugh one Richard Bastion, a man given to pronouncements such as “Knowing you’re always right—that is real freedom” and “Sodomy is a sin—even if I crave it.” One of my favorite things to do in Liberty City is to retire to Niko’s apartment and watch television. A brilliant cartoon show called Republican Space Ranger offers one of the most Swiftian portrayals of George W. Bush’s foreign policy to be found in any medium: The Rangers’ spaceship is shaped like a giant phallus and guided by an “insurgescan;” after annihilating a planet the Rangers do not even deign to visit, they commend themselves for “freeing mankind.” The game’s spleen shows most splendidly with Weazel News, its barely exaggerated version of Fox News. One Weazel newscast opens: “In a bloody terrorist attack that will surprise nobody…” At the crime scene itself, the on-the-spot reporter tells us that it is “a madhouse! We’ve got policemen signing book deals and firemen holding hoses and being photographed for Christmas calendars!”
Is Liberty City a metaphor for New York City, an imitation of New York City, or an exaggeration of New York City? The strength of Liberty City—a carefully arranged series of visual riffs on how New York City looks and feels rather than a street-by-street replication—is that, almost instantly, it becomes itself. As you learn Liberty City’s streets and shortcuts, you are reminded of various real-life places—the cobbled streets of the Meatpacking District in the Meat Quarter, the shadowy concrete canyons of Midtown in Star Junction, the long weedy avenues of the South Bronx in South Bohan, the sterile pleasantness of Battery Park City in Castle Garden City—but these approximations quickly molt their interest. Soon you are thinking, Oh, I need a new car, and can steal one from that Auto Exotica dealership right around the corner from here, or I can pick up Molotov cocktails near that Firefly Island bowling alley, or If I call Little Jacob right now, he will meet me in that alley by Star Junction Square, but if I call him two blocks from here, I’ll have to find him underneath the East Borough Bridge. I lived in New York City for close to a decade but have never played GTA IV while living there. To my delight, I found that GTA IV made me less homesick for the city. For me, Liberty City is an aggregate of surrogate landmarks and memories and the best way I have—short of reading a novel by Richard Price (whose Lush Life was one of the two novels I actually finished in the last year)—to remind me of what I love about the city it mimics.
To anyone who has not played the GTA games, this may be hard to swallow. What many without direct experience with the games do know is that they allow you to kill police officers. This is true. GTA games also allow you to kill everyone else. It is sometimes assumed that you somehow get points for killing police officers. Of course, you do not get “points” for anything in GTA IV. You get money for completing missions, a number of which are, yes, monstrously violent. While the passersby and pedestrians you slay out of mission will occasionally drop money, it would be hard to argue that the game rewards you for indiscriminate slaughter. People never drop that much money, for one, and the best way to attract the attention of the police, and begin a hair-raising transborough chase, is to hurt an innocent person. As for the infamous cultural trope that in GTA you can hire a prostitute, pay her, kill her, and take her money, this is also true. But you do not have to do this. The game certainly does not ask you to do this. Indeed, after being serviced by a prostitute, Niko will often say something like, “Strange. All that effort to feel this empty.” Outside of the inarguably violent missions, it is not what GTA IV asks you to do that is so morally alarming. It is what it allows you to do.
GTA IV does have ideas about morality, some of which are very traditional. Many of the game’s least pleasant characters are coke addicts, for instance. Niko is never shown imbibing any illegal substance, and when he gets drunk and plants himself behind
the wheel of a car, the dizzily awhirl in-game camera provides an excellent illustration of why drunk driving is such a prodigiously bad idea. Finally, one surprisingly affecting mission involves Niko having to defend his homosexual friend Bernie from some thuggish gay-bashers in Middle Park. These are something less than the handholds of moral depravity.
Indeed, one criticism of GTA IV has to do with its traditional morality. Niko is shown during framed-narrative cut scenes to struggle with being asked to do such violent things, but while on furlough from these cut scenes Niko is able to behave as violently as the gamer wishes: Ludonarrative dissonance strikes again. But the game does attempt to address this. When Niko hits an innocent person in a car, he often calls out, “Sorry about that!” A small concession to acknowledging Niko’s tormented nature, perhaps, but an important one. (Neither Tommy nor C.J. ever shows such remorse.) I chose to deal with GTA IV’s ludonarrative dissonance in my own way. While moving through the gameworld, I did my best not to hurt innocent people. There was no ludonarrative dissonance for me, in other words, because I attempted to honor the Niko of the framed narrative when my control of him was restored.
There is no question, though, that GTA IV’s violence can be extremely disturbing because it feels unprecedentedly distinct from how, say, films deal with violence. Think of the scene in Goodfellas in which Henry, Tommy, and Jimmy kick to death Billy Batts in Henry’s restaurant. Afterward, they decide to put Batts’s body in the trunk of Henry’s car and bury it the forest. Of course, Batts is not yet dead and spends much of the ride to his place of interment weakly banging the trunk’s interior. When Batts is discovered to be alive he is repeatedly, nightmarishly stabbed. The viewer of Goodfellas is implicated in the fate of Billy Batts in any number of ways. Most of us presumably feel closest to Henry, who has the least to do with the crime but is absolutely an accomplice to it. Henry’s point of view is our implied own. Thus, we/Henry, unlike Tommy and Jimmy, retain our capacity for horror. Henry’s experience within that horror is the scene’s aesthetic and moral perimeter. In GTA IV, Niko is charged with disposing of the bodies of two men whose deaths he is partially responsible for. You/Niko drive across Liberty City with these bodies in the trunk to a corrupt physician who plans to sell the organs on the black market. Here, the horror of the situation is refracted in an entirely different manner, which allows the understanding that GTA IV is an engine of a far more intimate process of implication. While on his foul errand, Niko must cope with lifelike traffic, police harassment, red lights, pedestrians, and a poorly handling loaner car. Literally thousands of in-game variables complicate what you are trying to do. The Goodfellas scene is an observed experience bound up in one’s own moral perception. The GTA IV mission is a procedural event in which one’s moral perception of the (admittedly, much sillier) situation is scrambled by myriad other distractions. It turns narrative into an active experience, which film is simply unable to do in the same way. And it is moments like this that remind me why I love video games and what they give me that nothing else can.