I don’t know if it is sheer coincidence or shrewd marketing foresight that governed that Quentin Tarantino’s re-imagining of Inglourious Basterds and id’s re-envisioning of the classic Wolfenstein FPS arrivred for public consumption in the same week.  Somehow it seems appropriate that Tarantino’s pleasure in providing his audience the chance to play voyeur to a heap of Nazi bashing and id’s return to its roots with what is kind of the original Nazi killing simulator would remind us of how we feel about violence and justice.  It seems that we take enough joy as a post-World War II generation in the witnessing of and even taking a hand in the disposal of the men of the Third Reich tto warrant two big budget media events that would celebrate this similar idea.

The intriguing thing to me about this seemingly well timed reminder of who really deserves to “get it,” though, is in the distinct difference between what a film can provide in considering this experience and what a game provides, which might tell us a little something about how we see ourselves ethically as players of games as opposed to viewers of movies.  As noted, Tarantino’s Nazi slaughter is voyeuristic in nature, but id’s is participatory; Tarantino’s is about witnessing the termination of the “master race,” while id offers the opportunity to take a hand in this extermination.

Since the release of the original Castle Wolfenstein in 1981, Nazis have served as a fairly common enough enemy in a host of games, be they fantastic villains as they are in id’s game about escaping from a fictitious Nazi castle culminating in a final battle with the Fuhrer himself in Wolfenstein 3-D to the more “historical” recreations of the European Theatre in games like Call of Duty.  They seem appropriate enough enemies for a game, though, especially given id’s even more successful cloning of the frantic FPS action of the Wolfenstein in the Doom series.  Like the horrible monstrosities that crawl out of Hell in Doom, the very appearance of the Nazis in the Wolfenstein games tends to provoke a rationale for killing.  Neither game needs to justify much to the player in pointing out that these are the “bad guys” because, for all intents and purposes, there is a presumption on the part of the narrative that we have enough historical and cultural understanding to presume that demonic hordes and Nazis essentially boil down to the same thing: monstrosity.

I do emphasize appearance in drawing this conclusion as Doom plays on some fundamental levels of the human psyche (appropriately enough, those most likely arising from the id) in demarcating its villains through pure ugliness and difference.  The first time that I ever saw a Cacodemon in Doom for instance (those creatures that resemble a gooey mound of flesh surrounding a giant levitating eyeball), I immediately wanted desperately to make it go away.  Luckily, I just happened to be holding a shotgun at the time.  Much like being surprised by a bug as big as your hand crawling near your shoe, your first instinct is to kill that thing because it is too alien to bear or, more simply put, too ugly to live.

The swastika and the uniform of the SS seems to provoke a similar response in anyone in the least familiar with the actions of the Nazis during World War II, and thus, like that massive bug they become something alien and too ugly to live.  Most importantly, they are reasonable to kill.

As noted earlier, this otherness is very appropriate to games because it is an easy way of representing evil without much need for narrative and ethical justification for the player to actually participate in a behavior that might otherwise seem morally questionable.  But it is also appropriate given that video games despite being participatory media have a seemingly morally neutral quality in the choices that they represent to the player.  If I kill a Cacodemon or a Nazi or a Space Invader (the original “monstrous” alien Other in the shooter genre), what difference does that action make?  Rather than merely taking pleasure in seeing justice meted out or the destruction of something “other” to myself as I might in a film, I have participated in the act of destroying pixels, and that act amounts to little more than the “termination” of flashes of light on a screen.

Nevertheless, what the Nazi killing simulation does remind us (especially when we begin to make comparisons to other games) is that simulation is still representational and meaningful and that representation does matter to us in a way that the more clinical ways of considering what simulated murder amounts to (flashing lights on a screen) fails to address.  While politicians and parents might level criticism at the violence in Wolfenstein, it seems unlikely to me that anyone is upset that the game represents “violence against Nazis.”  However, I find it more likely that criticism of Grand Theft Auto might focus on violence generally but also specifically on violence against women.  Clearly even the notoriously libertarian Rockstar seems to recognize that what is being presented in a simulation and how it is represented may make a difference in an audiences’ reasonable or unreasonable reactions to such seemingly “unreal” activities.  For instance, I remember reading an interview with someone over at Rockstar a number of years ago concerning what fans often requested for upcoming Grand Theft Auto titles.  The developer said that while fans often wanted to know why there were no children or dogs in GTA games that—given the freedom the series affords in taking violent action against others—including character models of children and dogs was simply “not funny,” and thus, not in the developer’s plans for forthcoming titles.

Frankly, anyone who felt squeamish (as I did) upon learning that you had a choice to either rescue or harvest the Little Sisters in Bioshock understands what this Rockstar developer is getting at.  While simulating killing may be an activity that is functionally morally neutral, a lot of the experience of playing a video game and how we react and respond to the choices that we make have to do with the packaging and appearance of those choices.  Representation matters.

So, I’d heard some good things about Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood.  As a fan of the Western genre, I felt some desire to check it out, so I spent a few days with the game.  And, indeed, it is a pretty good game.  It is extremely pretty, handles some good standard Western themes (greed, revenge, struggles over domesticity and family) rather well, and has some good very good shooting mechanics.  The latter quality is to be expected, though, from an FPS.  After all, a shooter should be good at (if not exceptional at), well, shooting.

What had me baffled after my satisfactory encounter with Bound in Blood was why I hadn’t played the first Call of Juarez.  Well, I had played a bit of it, but by now, my experience was a hazy memory.  I knew I had rented it, and it was one of those games that I put in, played for an hour or two, and then had cursed the fact that I had paid for the 5-day rental instead of the 2-day.  But, all I really remembered was that I had thought that it was bad for some reason or other.

Having played through its prequel now, though, I decided to give the game another go (and even reluctantly went with the 5-day rental plan).  It took me only three days to complete the first gane, and I suffered for most of the 11 or so hours that it took me to get through it.

Unlike many of our expectations about film sequels, the fans of video games often do not necessarily have low expectations for sequels.  Very often improvements in graphics quality, new and improved mechanics, and overall higher production values for a game can mean that a sequel to a successful game title might in fact mean a better game than the first.  Certainly, the graphics, mechanics, plotting, and voice acting in Bound in Blood are all superior to the original Call of Juarez, which also certainly explains some of the pleasure that I found in the sequel as opposed to its predecessor.  However, a play through of the original also reminded me of why I had found the first game just kind of silly enough to turn off after just a few short hours.  Much of Call of Juarez is simply unconventional.  And not in a good way.

The most frustrating and, very simply put, outright wacky elements of Call of Juarez are largely found when playing the bits of the game dedicated to one of that title’s protagonists, Billy Candle.  Billy is an outcast Mexican-American orphan who is a bit of a thief, so in addition to wielding a six shooter in the game, he also does a lot of sneaking around and… jumping? 

Very early on in Call of Juarez, the player is introduced to Billy’s whip and trained to use it to snag overhanging branches to swing from cliff to cliff.  He also climbs around a lot.  Oh, and he has to jump… a lot.  I guess that locomotion is a fairly important detail in most video games, be it walking, running, driving, flying, or jumping.  Indeed, jumping is one of the staples of video gaming.  For example, you may have heard of a certain upwardly mobile plumber that has starred in a few games.  However, it is less of an essential staple in most FPS-style games.  While Mirror’s Edge attempted to make a go of hybridizing jumping mechanics with the first person perspective, its success in doing so is debatable.  Whether or not Mirror’s Edge was able to pull off the marriage of platforming with the FPS genre though, its efforts to do so are certainly a lot more successful in doing so than Call of Juarez was.  The inability to gauge distances easily without seeing your character on screen makes the large chunks of platforming in Call of Juarez... well… fall flat on their face. 

Part of the relative success of Mirror’s Edge at better platforming sequences, though, is clearly related to the focus and interest of the game and its designers.  It is a game about a parkour-style runner, and thus, a lot of effort went into working with this essential mechanic,a mechanic necessary to gameplay but also to the narrative of the game.  When one considers Call of Juarez, one wonders what exactly is the interest in wedding a Western narrative to platforming mechanics.  Doing a first person shooter that is a Western?  Makes sense.  As previously noted, an FPS is all about shooting mechanics.  Westerns are kind of interested in that kind of thing, too.  But, I don’t often see Clint Eastwood gingerly hopping from precarious perch to precarious perch in the Leone films.

That isn’t to say that there is no logic whatsoever to making Billy into a character that has to make quick and unusual escapes.  As I mentioned, he is a bit of a thief.  However, as both a gamer and an avid fan of the Western genre, it certainly was a surprise to me to find myself hopping around Mario-style in a game that advertised itself as a Western.  Part of my initial irritation at the game may be related to simple expectation, that this was not the game that I expected to play given the literary or cinematic genre category that it falls into (I would also be very surprised by witnessing torture porn gore in a light romantic comedy or a lot of skin in a children’s movie). 

But, given the focus of the genre itself, it seems that not a great deal of energy went into developing these, the worst parts of the mechanics of Call of Juarez.  For example, witness the way that Billy’s shadow hangs stiffly in the air when he swings from a tree branch.  It is as if no thought was given to animating poor Billy when he hangs from his whip because the player cannot see him and because swinging is such a minor element by comparison to the other FPS-related mechanics in the game. 

By the way, it is those mechanics, the shooting mechanics, that Bound in Blood does very, very well.  Improved concentration modes (when you get to slow down the pace of the game in order to gun down a room full of enemies because you are: just that fast), floating targeting reticles that snap to targets when blazing away with two guns, and increased accuracy with the slower but harder hitting rifles all make Bound in Blood‘s gun play that much more authentic in feel and that much more fun to experience, which is kind of what I expect in a genre associated with… gun play. 

Now, I don’t want to say that innovation isn’t nice sometimes (Sukiyaki Western Django is an often weird but interesting film for example), but I do want to say that sometimes a game should focus on simply being what it is.  There is a pleasure to be taken in conventionality when it is done very well, and it is often done better when the dominant experiences in a game are focused on at the exclusion of curious odds and ends that don’t necessarily suit the genre or, more specifically, the way that the gameplay complements that genre.  Bound in Blood does include some light swinging and sneaking elements (I suppose as a nod to the conventions of its predecessor).  However, these moments are blessedly brief.  Most of the impact of the new game lies in its adherence to the conventional elements of the Western.  The game is more an homage to the gun fight than scattered pieces of game play mechanisms that are all underwhelmingly accomplished.  Given the pride that the game takes in accomplishing what it is and doing it very well, I have to prefer the more conventional vision of the Western in this case.

A couple of weeks ago, I discussed the curiously moralistic approach that Grand Theft Auto games take towards drug use.  In response, my colleague L.B. Jeffries pointed out that, perhaps, Rockstar doesn’t find drug usage as an activity for the player to be all that reasonable.  While Jeffries point seemed to be that GTA‘s grotesque nature as a game that allows us to do things that we normally wouldn’t think of doing (stealing cars and murdering innocents) is in direct contrast with the realistic notion that drug usage is something that the average person with a moral compass might still plausibly do, nevertheless, his point got me thinking about the “active” nature of the crimes committed by the player in GTA as opposed to the passive presentations of the protagonists of these games.

There is a bit of a disconnect in any open world game between choices that the player makes as he or she inhabits a character and the choices that that character makes in the storyline that evolves in the plot of the game.  While there are many examples of such problems, I remember reading a message from a GTA player in a forum once that reported that that player always drove as carefully as possible when playing Vice City while his kids were in the room because he didn’t want them to see him casually mowing over innocent bystanders.  Such a player choice is obviously fairly antithetical to the decisions made by Tommy Vercetti throughout the game as he destroys the lives and properties of many innocents that get in his way on his way to becoming a criminal overlord.  The morality of the character in essence changed when actively being directed by the player from what is was when being passively viewed through cutscenes.

Such disconnects, though, might serve an interesting purpose in this particular series, however, since the activities that a player can engage in might make the character that they are playing extremely unsympathetic, and thus, undesirable characters to want to play as again.  What I mean by this might be clarified by my recent experiences reviewing another open world game, Prototype.  Unlike many other reviewers as my review indicates, I actually liked a fair amount of a number of the elements presented in Prototype.  However, one thing that I really didn’t like was the protagonist, Alex Mercer.  I had trouble with the game initially because of this general dislike.  Largely, I was a bit disgusted with the choices that I had to actively pursue in order to “be” Alex.  Since the character in that game feeds off of others as a means of fueling his superhuman powers and maintaining his own health, I was brutally murdering just about anyone that was close at hand.  To make matters worse, as I passively witnessed the way that Radical Entertainment chose to portray this character in cutscenes, I didn’t feel any better about Alex.  He seemed like a man largely indifferent to others.  As a rather stoic personality in the Clint Eastwood vein (but lacking some of the clever one liners of an Eastwood cowboy), he also lacked any recognizable personality traits that might make up for this heartlessness.  He wasn’t funny or charming or really anything more than a moody, brooding bastard occasionally growling out “tough” (but unspired) one liners.  My general distaste for Alex and the ferocity of the brutal killings that I was participating in by “being” him almost led me to turn off the game early on.

Ferocious and brutal behavior is not a strange idea to any fan of the GTA series, and yet, characters like CJ and Niko remain generally well liked.  Much of their likability depends not on player generated choices (after all, GTA allows the player some pretty grotesque choices throughout the game and does make murder and theft requisite activities if the player wants to complete the major story arc of any of the games) but instead on reshaping how the player views the character through the passively viewed sections of these games’ plots.

To return to my discussion of drug usage for a moment, San Andreas contains a passively received anti-drug theme by pitting the player against bad guys that represent drug usage, like Big Smoke, in the story missions and showing CJ turning down Officer Tenpenny’s offer of a hit from a bong in one scene.  The player is never asked if he or she would like CJ to turn down that hit or if he or she wants to free CJ’s hood from the tyranny of dope dealers.  Playing the story requires such decisions be made for us and also reshapes our views of CJ in light of other more reprehensible choices that the player might make at other times in the game.  CJ’s decisions to protect his family are not ours, but they make him seem much more human and humane than our other decisions may have made him seem.  A strung out pothead like the game’s Ryder is somewhat hard to like, but CJ depite his criminal behaviors at least evidences some self restraint, making him appear a bit more noble than his fellow thugs.  Additionally, CJ is often funny and almost inevitably charming whether we as the player guiding him are or not either of those things.  A little humor and charm go a long way in making a criminal and anti-hero likable.  Just ask Han Solo.

With the upgraded combat mechanics of the game, Niko Bellic from Grand Theft Auto IV is one of the more effective killers in the series’s history, and GTA IV may be the most murderous game in the series with many more missions oriented towards assassination than the other criminal activities of prior games.  Nevertheless, Niko is a very sympathetic character because players are witness to his intentions in making himself over into an assassin through the cutscenes.  Of particular note is Niko’s murder of the minor mobster, Vlad.  Because Niko’s motivation and his relationship to his victim is spelled out so clearly in the mission in which the player is required to kill Vlad (as seen in previous scenes, Vlad has been a jerk to Niko throughout their prior interactions, and he is screwing Niko’s cousin Roman’s girlfriend), offing Vlad becomes an action that may not be pretty but is at least comprehensible and seemingly not the act of a sociopath.  Niko isn’t killing Vlad as casually and indifferently as he might when you are playing him and simply running down a jaywalker, he has a legitimate beef with him and a beef that reveals his concern for a loved one.

Admittedly, the story missions in GTA IV do allow the player to make some moral choices that effect the plot (most notably, decisions that concern killing or sparing several individuals).  However, these moments tend to be fraught with more ambiguity than the Vlad episode (should Niko get revenge against a guy who betrayed he and his fellow soldiers years and years ago?), and they are once again offset by our knowledge of the scripted elements of Niko’s character.  And once again, they are also offset by the personality that Niko derives from scripted experiences like when he goes bowling or drinking with friends that indicate a bit of a sense of humor and a humble kind of charm (I defy anyone not to crack a grin, the first time that they hear Niko declare to a bowling buddy “I may not be great at life, but I bowl like an angel!”).

I think that because our medium allows for participation in building characters and shaping plot rather than the pure voyeurism enforced by storytelling media like film or literature, gamers are sometimes offended by scripted scenes and enforced choices that occur in “their” storyline (I’m looking at you Bioshock and Prince of Persia).  Nevertheless, what the lovable thugs of GTA demonstrate is that sometimes a little scripting goes a long way in simply making our “selves” into someone that we can actually like.

This discussion does contain some spoilers about the plots of various games in the Grand Theft Auto series.

While a hue and cry arose over the drug dealing simulation that served as a secondary gameplay element in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, critics of the Grand Theft Auto series would likely be surprised by the series’s rather moralistic approach to the question of drug use and abuse.

Despite the fact that the games most popular setting, Liberty City, bears an appellation suggestive of a commitment to a libertine philosophy, when it comes to drugs, the Grand Theft Auto series has always had a very simple message: “Just Say No.”

Certainly, Chinatown Wars does feature a protagonist, Huang Lee, that largely depends on drugs as his primary source of income and the catalyst of the plot of Vice City is a drug deal gone wrong that that game’s protagonist, Tommy Vercetti, was involved with, but despite the fact that the main characters in these games are drug dealers, they are never users.

Drug usage in the GTA games is left largely to the minor characters, and most often, these secondary players in a GTA drama are made to look like fools.  In Vice City, Tommy Vercetti’s first underworld contact is the crooked lawyer and lunatic cokehead, Ken Rosenberg.  Rosenberg (a character likely inspired by David Kleinfeld from Carlito’s Way, a similarly coke addled, shady lawyer played by Sean Penn), is a less than competent, extremely neurotic compatriot of Vercetti’s.  Both Rosenberg’s ineffectuality and paranoia seems largely attributable to his coke habit.  Other “friends” of GTA protagonists that are featured as crazed by their dope habits include CJ Johnson’s hippie, peacenik pal, The Truth, from San Andreas.  While one of The Truth’s kooky conspiracy’s concerning alien technology being secreted away in a government facility does prove to have some veracity, nevertheless, The Truth’s role throughout the game is largely as comic relief.  He is a paranoid dude that hasn’t woken up from the marijuana haze of his hippie youth.  Neither of these characters’ problematic personalities probably even compare to the peyote induced stupidity of the members of the fictional band Love Fist in their appearance late in San Andreas.  From getting themselves lost in the Las Venturas desert to sleeping with a red neck gal infested with all manner of sexually transmitted diseases, these bozos clearly cannot handle their illicit substances.

However, it isn’t just intellectual retardation and generalized insanity that GTA typically associates with imbibing in pharmaceuticals.  Drug use is quite simply put, an easy enough marker for recognizing villainy.  This tendency is especially true and noticeable in San Andreas.  Part of what makes anti-hero CJ Johnson sympathetic and even potentially heroic in the game is his mission to clean up his hood, specifically by ridding it of the dealers that are enslaving his home.  An early cutscene in San Andreas introduces the player to one of CJ’s former Grove Street crew, a now rather broken down junkie named Big Bear.  Big Bear has been reduced through his drug dependency to slavery.  We find him cleaning the toilet of his dealer for the sake of protecting the source of his next fix.  Big Bear’s degradation inspires CJ’s commitment to “freeing” his people from this insidious chemical master in a that perhaps nods to Malcolm X’s opposition to drug use and observations about the effects of drug abuse on his community, specifically its tendency to become a new means of enslaving them.

If dope becomes an identifiable plague in CJ’s hood, his former friends that prove to be traitors to the Grove Street cause, Big Smoke and Ryder, are incarnations of that plague.  Big Smoke’s name has an obvious association with a chemical hobby while Ryder is almost never featured without a joint in his hand or a commentary on how he would rather be smoking.  As CJ discovers towards the close of the first act of San Andreas, Big Smoke and Ryder have betrayed Grove Street and are partly responsible for the invasion of dealers in the Los Santos neighborhood through their dealings with Grove Street outsiders.

San Andreas‘s main antagonist, the crooked cop Officer Tenpenny, likewise, is partially responsible for the surge in the drug trade in Los Santos.  He, too, is featured as a user in the game’s cutscenes; CJ watches him take a hit off a bong in a scene in which Tenpenny manipulates our beloved thug to do some dirty work for him.

The only time that CJ does get high in the game is accidental.  He does so as a result of torching a crop of marijuana in an attempt to dispose of evidence for The Truth when federal agents raid The Truth’s farm.  Appropriately enough given the negative connotations associated with being stoned in the GTAn series, this accidental high proves no end of trouble as CJ’s flight is impaired by a greenish haze and wavering camera.  The impaired gameplay itself indicates the problematic nature of being under the influence.

Interestingly, GTA‘s prohibition against drug use does not apply to legal drugs.  Alcohol abuse is entirely permissible in GTA IV.  While driving drunk is a possibility for Niko Bellic, it is a choice that can be avoided as Niko can do the responsible thing and take a cab following a night of binge drinking or otherwise suffer from ill effects similar to the accidental impairment of CJ Johnson.  That Niko does have this choice, though, may be related to the fact that drinking can have positive effects in this game and that legal drug use is treated in a more evenhanded fashion.  As one of numerous activities that can be selected from when Niko dates or builds relationships with his friends, drunkenness provides a for a kind of bonding experience between Niko and his chosen drinking buddy.  Like all social activities in GTA IV, drinking is a way of provoking dialogues that further reveal the personalities that he interacts with.  In particular, the dialogues that Niko takes part in with his drunken friends are especially illuminating about who these people really are as the drunken dialogues are completely uninhibited reflections of these individuals’ ids (for instance, note that the stool pigeon, Michelle, most overtly spills about her duplicitous nature when she gets smashed).

However, corruption, betrayal, and foolishness are the consequences of illegal drug abuse in what is otherwise a series of games that encourages the most illicit and questionable behaviors from its protagonists.  Engaging a prostitute, stealing a car, and straight up murder are all forgivable offenses in the GTA universe.  They are the cost of doing business.  But the protagonists’ bodies are generally treated as if they are a temple as the main characters may serve as distributors of drugs but never as users of these products.  In this emphasis on self restraint as a moral virtue, GTA may be reflecting a growing brand of moralism that focuses less on how the individual treats others as it does on how the individual treats him- or herself.  The “bad guys” in our culture are those that cannot control themselves: the tobacco user, the overeater.  Though, this emphasis on making sure that the individual does no harm to the self may reflect a belief that less evilly intended individual choices may have negative consequences on community.  We fear the perils of second hand smoke and the rising cost of health care for the obese maybe more often than we do the people directly or intentionally doing harm to someone else.  Thou Shalt Kill, Thou Shalt Steal, Thou Shalt Generally Interfere With the Life, Health, and Well Being of Others, these are the libertine commandments of Grand Theft Auto.  But when it comes to protecting the long term well being of the main character himself, the GTA games eschew the liberty of jacking up yourself for a clear imperative: Thou Shalt Deal, But Thou Shalt Not Use.

It was two related things that first drew me to the Grand Theft Auto series: music and nostalgia.

Nostalgia immediately gripped me when I first booted up Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (my first experience with a Rockstar game).  The blue field with the thick border that emulates a Commodore Vic 20 operating system immediately transported me back to the 1980s.  I was delighted by the sounds of the heavy tapping of a Vic 20-style keyboard and the words, “LOAD: VICE CITY,” followed by the command any computer geek from that decade knows well enough, “PRESS PLAY ON TAPE.”  It was as if I was sitting once again at ten-years-old before the television set, reaching out to press play on the only “floppy drive” that I knew how to load a game from, the Vic 20 tape deck.

The nostalgia for playing games in the 1980s was quickly replaced, though, by another set of positive memories.  I lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, quite near Miami, until I was five, and I visited grandparents in the city at least once a year for my entire childhood.  The box said Vice City, but it looked like Miami, felt like Miami, and the tunes playing on the radio, “Cars,” “Africa,””Kids in America,” all of these contributed to my familiarity with the setting, both place and time.  This was Southern Florida in the 1980s.  I knew it because I had seen and heard these things before.

Rockstar’s commitment to details often not considered by game designers in the early part of this decade is for me the real achievement of the Grand Theft Auto series.  Building a town and an era based on the foundations of the little details that you take for granted, architecture, weather patterns, and the music that accompany it, was a revelation for me in 2002 and represented the first time that I wanted to talk about a video game world, rather than simply a video game.

I had heard of this game called Grand Theft Auto III at the time, but it sounded fairly stupid, something about boosting cars and running over hookers—not really my idea of a proper game.  I was partial to puzzles and RPGs.  However, while I immediately went out to purchase a copy of GTA III after completing the main storyline of Vice City, it remained a pale shadow of the nostalgic experience of living in Vice City.  Had GTA III been my first Rockstar experience, it might have been my last.  The world of GTA III is interesting and immersive for a number of reasons but lacked the brilliance of Vice City‘s ability to wed what was so familiar in reality to me into a meaningful virtual experience just by creating the proper ambiance through artifacts of sight and sound.

San Andreas was likewise a positive experience for me of such a thoroughly living virtual reality.  The 1990s were years that I knew well, having attended college and grad school during this period of time.  I had some familiarity with Los Angeles and San Francisco (though, I had spent much more time in other areas of Southern California when I was a kid, like San Diego), and while rap wasn’t exactly a genre I knew especially well, taking on the role of a gangbanger in SoCal blasting Dre and Snoop seemed authentic.  The addition of the final missions in Los Santos that paralleled what I had seen myself on television of the LA riots just added to the sense that the state of San Andreas felt vividly alive, and if not an experience evocative of personal experience, at least one that had a kind of cultural historicity to it.  The music, major events, and clothing of the period all felt right, and once again, I felt like I had entered a very familiar and very real space due in large part to the nostalgia generated through music and style rather than mere exposition and plotting.

The reason that I bring up all of this navel gazing about my personal experiences with Rockstar’s worlds is that I recently completed playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars in addition to GTA IV and The Lost and the Damned.  While I enjoyed all three games and certainly applaud Rockstar’s continued commitment to the details of world building, I found myself disappointed with that element that had so transported me in my experiences with the earlier games in the series: the nostalgia and historicity evoked through music.  Actually, The Lost and the Damned has some extremely immersive ambiance like biker clubs blasting hardcore thrash that contributes to the expansion’s seeming versimilitude (in addition to what seems to me to be—though, I have to admit no real direct knowledge of the subculture – some fairly authentic representations of biker life).  Generally, though, GTA IV‘s soundtrack left me a little cold with few tunes that I knew well and thus nothing to anchor some sense of time and place in my experience of this new iteration of Liberty City. 

Likewise, the Nintendo DS’s limitations in being able to provide a full array of “real” songs to listen to while cruising the Liberty City streets bummed me out a bit.  I admire the way that Rockstar chose to feature a few radio stations that produce something sounding like techno or rock music admirable.  The near .wav quality of the tunes is mildly evocative (and kind of cute in a retro kind of way) but lacks the nostalgic power of actual familiarity with the sounds of an actual car stereo.

Nevertheless, Chinatown Wars still hooked me a great deal, and it was certainly a sense of immersion that I felt in the top down, slightly more cartoonish DS world that in part was responsible for this.  I had to think a bit more, though, about what was producing this immersion in a hand held version of GTA to figure out why I found this new game so compelling.

On reflection, I believe what it was was Rockstar’s smart use of the technology at hand.  While the radio was disappointing to me, Rockstar’s clever near parody of its own radio stations was smart.  However, what really dragged me into this experience of GTA was less related to setting and ambiance provoked by sight and sound and more related to the additional sensory experience that Nintendo products have recently focused on providing.  It wasn’t the sights and sounds of Liberty City that mesmerized me; it was touching the city for the first time.

In the opening sequence of Chinatown Wars, the game’s protagonist, Huang, is grazed by a bullet.  Thinking Huang dead, a couple of thugs dump him in a car, which they then proceed to drive off a dock in order to dispose of the body.  Witnessing these events from overhead on one screen and looking at Huang’s dazed responses on the other for those moments, the perspective then changes to what is probably the most overtly immersive points of view that a game can provide, a first person view of the interior of the car.  You, as Huang, look out of the windshield of the car at the rising bubbles in the ocean as the car sinks towards Davy Jones’s Locker, and you are instructed to break the glass using the DS’s stylus.  Tapping at the window and seeing spider webs of glass appear exactly at the spot that you tap, feels forceful.  When the glass explodes, that force feels altogether real and relieving.  You have just physically altered a car in Liberty City.  It “feels” just right.

Throughout the DS experience, the game offers these momentary breaks in the standard action that allow you to “feel out” what you are doing in the city from moving quantities of drugs between a lockbox and a car trunk to smashing a padlock off of a gate.  More significantly, though, for the first time in a GTA game, I legitimately felt like I was boosting a car because the stylus allowed me to unscrew the plate on a steering column with quick circular motions and—better still – had me twisting together two wires to actually hotwire the thing.

Like my familiarity with the sights of the city being emulated by Vice City and the sounds coming from my speaker, I have stripped wires and spliced them together before (maybe not on a car, but speaker wires for sure).  The twisting motion required by the use of the stylus was a familiar one, and like when the other sensory details that helped more fully immerse me in GTA experiences of the past, this near tactile experience generated these seemingly familiar sensory connections to a world. Basically, it made the world come alive under my fingers.

Immersion seems to me to be one of Rockstar’s fortes in game design and adding the ability to experience the world through physical force seems an appropriate one in a game committed to exploring violence and physical violation.  In some sense, evoking a Miami reminiscent of the era that produced Al Pacino’s turn as Scarface (as Vice City does) is impressive but that was already achieved in the medium of film.  Rockstar has expanded its capacity to provide immersion through a sense that other media rarely get to involve their audience in (but video games through their interactivity can) and one ever so appropriate to the crime genre—the actual feel of getting your hands dirty.