by Tom Bissell
An alkaloid drawn from a South American shrub, cocaine has been used by human beings for at least a thousand years and spectacularly abused for quite a bit less than that. Its familiar form as a white powder is yet another product of Teutonic ingenuity, for it was a German scientist who isolated the fun, psychoactive part of cocaine. An Austrian named Freud was among the first to study it seriously. (His initial findings: Cocaine was terrific.) Until 1914, cocaine could be legally purchased in US drugstores, parlors, and saloons, and was most often prescribed by doctors as a cure for hay fever. “Cocaine,” Robert Sabbag tells us in the smuggling classic Snowblind, “has no edge. It is strictly a motor drug. It does not alter your perception; it will not even wire you up like the amphetamines. No pictures, no time/space warping, no danger, no fun, no edge. Any individual serious about his chemicals—a heavy hitter—would sooner take thirty No-Doz. Coke is to acid what jazz is to rock. You have to appreciate it. It does not come to you.”
Cocaine has its reputation as aggression unleaded largely because many who are attracted to it are themselves aggressive personalities, the reasons for which are as cultural as they are financial. What cocaine does is italicize personality traits, not script new ones. In my case, cocaine did not heighten my aggression in the least. What it did, at least at first, was exaggerate my natural curiosity and need for emotional affection. While on cocaine, I became as harmlessly ravenous as Cookie Monster.
This stage, lamentably and predictably, did not last long. Doing cocaine for more than a couple of days is a little like falling in love with someone who is attractive, friendly, adoring, devious, manipulative, evil, and congenitally incapable of loving you in return. But this person feels so unnaturally good, and makes you feel so unnaturally good about yourself, that you accept this as a fair bargain. When the deal you make with cocaine sours—and it will—your mind is as empty as a pasture, your basal ganglia shredded. You are now the moon to cocaine’s sun: With it, you are bright indeed; without it, you are nothing more than a cratered rock stupidly afloat in space. You want to glow again. You do more cocaine. You do not glow—but you do feel somewhat normal. Soon you are doing cocaine not to feel radiant but to feel like yourself. Cocaine is no longer a sun but a hangman; this is how his noose tightens. And around my neck the rope tightened more quickly than I could have imagined.
A large portion of my last two months in Las Vegas was spent doing cocaine and playing video games—usually Grand Theft Auto IV. When I left Vegas, I thought I was leaving behind not only video games but cocaine. During the last walk I took through the city, in May 2008, I imagined the day’s heat as the whoosh of a bullet that, through some oversight of fate, I had managed to dodge. (I was on cocaine at the time.) Even though one of the first things I did when I arrived in Tallinn was buy yet another Xbox 360, I had every intention to obey one of my few prime directives: rigorous adherence to all foreign drug laws. I had been in Tallinn for five months when, in a club, I found myself chatting with someone who was obviously lit. When I gently indicated my awareness of this person’s altered state, the result was a magnanimous offer to share. Within no time at all I was back in my apartment, high on cocaine, and firing up my Xbox 360. By the week’s end, I had a new friend, a new telephone number, and a reignited habit. I played through Grand Theft Auto IV again, and again after that. The game was faster and more beautiful while I was on cocaine, and breaking laws seemed even more seductive. Niko and I were outlaws, alone as all outlaws are alone, but deludedly content with our freedom and our power. Soon I was sleeping in my clothes. Soon my hair was stiff and fragrantly unclean. Soon I was doing lines before my Estonian class, staying up for days, curating prodigious nosebleeds, and spontaneously vomiting from exhaustion. Soon my pillowcases bore rusty coins of nasal drippage. Soon the only thing I could smell was something like the inside of an empty bottle of prescription medicine. Soon my biweekly phone call to my cocaine dealer was a weekly phone call. Soon I was walking into the night, handing hundreds of dollars in cash to a Russian man whose name I did not even know, waiting in alleys for him to come back—which he always did, though I never fully expected him to—and retreating home, to my Xbox, to GTA IV, to the electrifying solitude of my mind at play in an anarchic digital world. Soon I began to wonder why the only thing I seemed to like to do while on cocaine was play video games. And soon I realized what video games have in common with cocaine: Video games, you see, have no edge. You have to appreciate them. They do not come to you.
The world of GTA IV is not as open as it initially seems. The number of buildings you can enter is negligible; those few you can rarely provide anything to do other than walk in, look around, and maybe steal the cash from the register. GTA IV’s mini-games—darts, bowling, billiards, strip-club lap dances—are uninteresting, and one sorely misses the taxi and ambulance driver mini-games of Vice City and San Andreas (which if nothing else provided outlets for socially beneficial behavior). Liberty City’s comedy club has in rotation several rather good five-minute stand-up bits by Katt Williams and Ricky Gervais, and its television and radio stations are always entertaining, but these are not very gamelike activities. Rather, they are examples of traditional entertainment that happen to be embedded in a video game, though they are no less commendable for that. Once you have played GTA IV long enough, it occurs to you that, as real as Liberty City seems, you have no hope of even figuratively living within it. Accident or no, this is thematically coherent: Niko is a newcomer to and outsider in Liberty City, much of which is as fictionally inaccessible to him as it is literally inaccessible to us.
Although Niko has a cell phone, and an ever-fattening docket of friends to call, only a few can be rung up out of mission and asked out on “dates.” You can then go play darts, bowl, or play billiards; visit the comedy club, strip club, or cabaret club; drink in a bar or go get something to eat at a surprisingly limited number of establishments. None of these activities are taken up because they are fun. They are taken up, rather, to win the influence of your friend or date, and I frequently wondered why such a prominent part of the game was handled in such a repetitive manner and supported by such a dearth of options.
Almost all of my fondest memories of GTA IV are anecdotal. The time I sniped the pilot of a zooming-by news chopper while standing on the GetaLife (read: MetLife) building and watched it whirlingly plunge down into the street and explode. The time a collision launched me from my motorbike and sent me sailing harmlessly through the girders of the Algonquin Bridge and into the East River hundreds of feet below. The time I used a few errantly parked city buses and garbage trucks to create a massive traffic jam in Star Junction Square, dropped a single grenade, and ran like hell as the cars blew up, one after another, for what felt like minutes. (The really violent stuff I did in games whose progress I did not save, so as to preserve my Niko’s moral integrity.) The wonderful thing about the earlier GTA games was that they allowed anecdotally arresting things to occur while engaged in an otherwise scripted mission. GTA IV selectively, and thus frustratingly, abandons this idea. Some scripted chase-fights offer enemies who are inexplicably immune to damage until they reach a certain point on the game map. This is a problem because the game gives you no inkling as to which kind of enemy you are facing. Some narratively important chase-fights are not regulated in this way and some narratively unimportant chase-fights are. In one (important) chase, you have to swerve around a garbage truck that abruptly pulls out in front of you. Exciting the first time, frustrating the third, boring the fifth—and the game forces you to avoid the garbage truck because the enemy and his car cannot be damaged until after he passes it. In another (unimportant) chase-fight, you have to pursue two men on motorcycles through Liberty City’s subway system. The first biker can be taken down quickly but the second refuses to take any damage, no matter how many times you shoot him, until you have dodged enough oncoming subway cars. The first time I played GTA IV I thought this mission was one of the most amazing I had ever experienced. When I reali
zed that the first biker you damage becomes vulnerable, thereby making the other invulnerable, the once-thrilling chase seemed contaminated, arbitrary. Missions such as this nullify gamer skill and creativity because they force him to experience scripted events in an unalterable way, which goes against the whole spirit of what made earlier GTA games so revelatory.
The least interesting parts of the game are those that show the strongest authorial hand—and yet the part of GTA IV that affected me most is authored with an unopposed authorial hand, which brings me up short from being able to say with confidence that games are affecting because of gamer agency. This scene occurs near the end of the game, when Niko comes face-to-face with the man who betrayed their unit back in the Balkans, and who is now a pathetic, drooling, sore-covered, drug-addicted wretch. It would be pointless to describe the scene in much detail, but I will say that it is so well acted, written, and staged that it would not be out of place in any violent masterpiece, whether filmic or literary. What gives the scene its power is Niko’s imploded recognition of his own moral ruin when he learns why this man betrayed him and his friends, which Niko had obviously imagined as an act of wicked grandeur. “You killed my friends for a thousand dollars?” Niko asks quietly, his voice breaking. Every time I have watched this scene, no matter how hard I fight it, tears fill my eyes when Niko’s voice cracks, and they did again, just now, while thinking about it. When the scene concludes, you have your choice: kill the traitor or walk away. I struggled with my decision, and it feels almost too personally revealing to share what I did my first time through GTA IV. (I will share what I did my second time through: I walked away, hopped in a nearby semi, and ran the man over repeatedly.) Until this point, the radio has been your great companion—you have fishtailed into flocks of pedestrians to MC Lyte’s “Cha Cha Cha,” evaded SWAT teams to Philip Glass’s “Pruit Igoe,” and enjoyed hooker tug jobs to R. Kelly’s “Bump N’ Grind,” sometimes scratching your head at the music–moment dissonance and sometimes winning the equivalent of a music–moment lottery—but while driving away from the aftermath of his decision, Niko, for the first and only time in the game, turns the radio off and tells his cousin, Roman, to stop talking. The wound this scene has left is too dirty to sterilize with anything other than silence. On the long ride home, Niko has only your thoughts to accompany him.
There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last twenty-five years, times when I think of it as an unsurpassable example of what games can do, and times when I think of it as misguided and a failure. No matter what I think about GTA IV, or however I am currently regarding it, my throat gets a little drier, my head a little heavier, and I know I am also thinking about cocaine.
Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude, and make me feel good and bad in equal measure. The crucial difference is that I believe in what video games want to give me, while the bequest of cocaine is one I loathe and distrust. As for GTA IV, there is surely a reason it was the game I most enjoyed playing on coke, constantly promising myself “Just one more mission” after a few fat lines. (In Vegas and Tallinn, “One more mission” became the closest thing I have ever had to a mantra.) For every moment of transcendence there is a moment in the gutter. For all its emotional violence there are long periods of quiet and calm. Something bombardingly strange or new is always happening. You constantly find things, constantly learn things, constantly see things you could not have imagined. When you are away from it, you long for its dark and arrowy energies. But am I talking about video games or cocaine? I do know that video games have enriched my life. Of that I have no doubt. They have also done damage to my life. Of that I have no doubt. I let this happen, of course; I even helped the process along. As for cocaine, it has been a long time since I last did it, but not as long as I would like.
So what have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that points not toward but at something. Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.
I still have an occasional thought about Niko. When I last left him he was trying to find all the super jumps hidden around Liberty City, which is a strange thing for a wanted fugitive to be doing. I know he is still there, in his dingy South Bohan apartment (my Niko is definitely a South Bohan kind of guy. That penthouse near Middle Park? I never let him near the place), waiting for me to rejoin him. In early 2009 Rockstar released some new downloadable content for GTA IV, The Lost and Damned, in which you follow the narrative path of Johnny Klebitz, an incidental character in Niko’s story (his most memorable line: “Nothing like selling a little dope to let you know you’re alive!”) but whose story, it turns out, intersects with Niko’s in interesting ways. I played this new GTA IV story for a few hours but gradually lost interest and finally gave up. I realized, dismayingly, that a lot of what powered me through GTA IV had been the cocaine, though it is still my favorite game and probably always will be. I was no longer the person I had been when I loved GTA IV the most and, without Niko, Liberty City was not the same.
Niko was not my friend, but I felt for him, deeply. He was clearly having a hard go of it and did not always understand why. He was in a new place that did not make a lot of sense. He was trying, he was doing his best, but he was falling into habits and ways of being that did not reflect his best self. By the end of his long journey, Niko and I had been through a lot together.
APPENDIX: AN INTERVIEW WITH SIR PETER MOLYNEUX
Anyone who plays video games will probably have a list of titles that he or she wishes I had talked about in this book. As it happens, I myself have such a list. Games I did discuss but wound up cutting include Shadow of the Colossus, Half-Life 2, and Assassin’s Creed, while games I intended to discuss but never found a way to include Indigo Prophecy, Ico, Perfect Dark, Mirror’s Edge, and Eternal Sonata. (This is to say nothing of some wonderful games I have played since finishing the book, including EA’s Dead Space and Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.* Two of the games I was most eager to discuss before I began this book were Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Lionhead’s Fable II, both of which, to my regret, turn up in Extra Lives only in passing.
I generated many pages of notes and observations about both games and spent two very enjoyable evenings with the video-game critic Leigh Alexander—the Western world’s resident Hideo Kojima expert—playing Metal Gear Solid 4, which manages to be as graphically beautiful and mechanically complex as any game ever and, at the same time, somehow deliberately backward-looking aesthetically (not to mention its many mescaline-grade weirdnesses, which include a smoking monkey in a silver lamé diaper). Alexander’s take on why MGS 4 is this way is so interpretively brilliant that, as she spun it out for me, my skeptical frown gave way to a dropped jaw and many thoroughly persuaded nods. Unfortunately, as Alexander admits, the story of the Metal Gear Solid games is “incomprehensible” to anyone not deeply steeped in its lore, and trying to summarize that story here would be akin to a one-page encapsulation of War and Peace. The following, then, taken from my interview with Alexander, is for Metal Gear Solid brown belts and above:
ALEXANDER: I don’t see the game as being solely metaphorical but I think there’s an intended subtext, which is the journey of the game designer whose methodology is out of date. After Metal Gear Solid 3, Kojima said, “I don’t want to make Metal Gear games anymore.” But here was this new PS3, and it looked like it might allow Kojima to execute his vision to the fullest. Remember, Kojima is a national hero in Japan, and Sony, a Japanese company, approached him and said, “Do you really want to
stop when you could make the ultimate stealth game on this piece of ultimate hardware?” So here’s Snake, a man who doesn’t believe he’s a hero, with one more job to do, and technology is what’s going to make it possible. But the promises of technology are always inhuman and disappointing—and Kojima has pretty much said that the PS3 did not live up to what he was promised it could do. In Metal Gear Solid 4, additionally, Snake is old. The player is very deliberately made to feel sympathy for this guy who used to be so strong and unstoppable and is now just a relic. The cinematography of the game—whether or not you hate the epic cut scenes—creates a ridiculous amount of empathy for this old guy being constantly eclipsed by younger, faster guys, like Johnny. By ending up with Meryl at the end of the game, Johnny begins to visually resemble the young Snake—even down to the mullet! The subtext is obvious: Meryl likes Johnny because he reminds her of a young Snake. I believe that this is Kojima’s concession to having been eclipsed by Western game developers. You have this young, dumb, blond guy who used to be a fuckup, and he’s the one who gets the girl. What is the most interesting thing about Johnny? He had not been corrupted by the promises of new technology. He was dumb, but he was pure. So Kojima is taking this buffoon and saying, “Man, the stupid white kid knew better all along, and now he’s taken over.” The war in the game is the console war.