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1. Peter Conrad, Observer writer and critic
As a non-driver who hardly remembers being a teenager, I don’t belong to the demographic category targeted by video games. But I agreed to man the console of Grand Theft Auto IV because I’m curious about the future. Can it be true that this geekmobile will have more customers than Hollywood’s noisiest, flashiest blockbuster? Industrial spies report that the movies may soon vanish into the gadget I was gripping, with its fiddly gearsticks and handbrakes, its zoom control and directional pad: technology is being developed that will enable you both to direct and to perform in the film you’re watching.
I spent an afternoon hijacking cars and totaling a satisfactory number of pedestrians. My alter ego at the wheel was a granite-visaged eastern European thug called Niko, sent to ferry his mobster cousin’s cronies around New York. I realized — once I got over the lethal joy of running red lights and skidding on to the pavement — that I had signed on as that dreariest of nocturnal drudges, a minicab driver. But I soon gave up asking where I was going, or why. The plot is an excuse for motion: cinema is kinesis, and I’m happy enough to watch John Wayne riding or Steve McQueen driving or Matt Damon running. Hitchcock once likened his films to rollercoasters, and interestingly GTA IV skirts the derelict funfair at Coney Island in Brooklyn. Hitchcock knew that he was programming sensations, infecting audiences with motion sickness as his characters struggle to control runaway cars; smirking sadist that he was, he would have liked the way video games place us in the driver’s seat and allow us to crash and burn.
GTA IV is about the revved-up tempo and suicidal trajectory of our mechanized lives. But it has a more reflective dimension: games like this dramatize the interplay of fate and chance, or destiny and contingency. Niko’s cousin asks what he’s doing in America. “What’s anyone doing?” he shrugs. “I’m just trying to make the right decisions.” That’s also the gamester’s occupation. Do I go left or right? Forwards or in reverse? Do I return the call in which the slinky Michelle begs for another date? Such decisions are quickly, unthinkingly made, but their consequences unfurl peripherally in a nuclear chain reaction. “This is fucking chaos,” someone says during a highway snarl-up. In fact, it is chaos theory: I began as a fluttering butterfly an hour ago, and the result of my impromptu thumb-twiddling was this thunderstorm of concertinaed metal and squirting gore.
Although GTA IV takes place in a mythically somber America, its producers are based in Edinburgh, and I suspect they have designed a satire on the self-destructive superpower across the ocean. Liberty City (which is what they call their version of New York) enshrines the glutted liberality of capitalism, but the freedom it offers — to turn this way or that, to drink Patriot beer or the imported brew called Pisswasser, to go bowling or lap-dancing — deludes us with variants of the same thing. All routes lead to a dead end. “You got capitalism,” snarls a voice on the car radio, admonishing the Americanized Russians in a cabaret called Perestroika. “Now enjoy what you asked for.” In the game’s guidebook, an ad for a grease-clogged burger rants against the liberal obsession with healthy eating and asks: “What are you doing to us, America?” The designers may be voicing the same complaint, which is why they create a virtual realm and goad us to sabotage it. “Is your best friend a terrorist?” a shock jock on the car radio asks as I dry-hump the competition on a freeway. If I could have seen my face in the rearview mirror, I might have winced. With the console in my hands, I was indeed a terrorist. A minute later, the screen faded to black. Had the X-Box 360 malfunctioned? No, it was my fault: I was dead, though I had the satisfaction of taking several fire hydrants, lamp posts and letter boxes with me. Not quite the World Trade Center, I know, but I am a beginner. Is this a game, or a holy war conducted by other means?
2. Laura Cumming, Observer art critic
How artful is GTA IV? Let me count the ways. It is better to look at than to play. Forget the main game, which essentially involves mass destruction for the unresisting gamer round the clock, what’s destroyed is so beautifully crafted you could almost regret the speed at which the images shoot by.
In Liberty City — aka New York — steam rising from manhole covers flares and dissolves as the cars sweep through. Twilight falls in a glow repeated in every puddle; sunlight rakes the backstreets and plazas, sparkling on the Hudson River at exactly the frequency of life, not animation. Even the price racking up on the gas station meter is exorbitantly right for our times. Everything looks so real — at first sight.
Then you notice the way that a couple of nighthawks in a diner appear to be re-enacting the famous Edward Hopper painting; or that the struts of Brooklyn Bridge, through mist, resemble an Alfred Stieglitz photograph. It is true that New York has a tendency to look like the art that it inspires any hour of the day, but the references here feel fairly conscious.
Some of it is just camp. The Statue of Liberty holding a giant styrofoam coffee cup is straight out of the Chapman brothers’ consumer-fetishist phase. And the comfy furnishings in the antihero’s rented flat (don’t forget that the creators are British) are pure Wallace and Gromit. Peering through an apartment window I even thought I glimpsed someone playing Grand Theft Auto though I may have imagined it; still, it would hardly have been a hair’s-breadth from reality.
It is no more than cliche to say that the real star here isn’t Niko Bellic but Liberty City itself. Swoop through its dark canyons by helicopter, watch the brownstones blaze red in the heat, witness the lights coming on like fireflies at dusk. But even the figures have a perverse attraction. Bellic is a coarse, hirsute edition of ER’s Goran Visnjic (who is of course Croatian, not Serbian, but let’s not get into the game’s feckless disregard for Balkan politics) and he walks, despite his thuggishness, with an actor’s grace.
Almost the most impressive thing about GTA IV is in fact its depiction of motion. The Euphoria physics engine the makers used means you can shove an enemy out of a window and watch him dangle by the fingertips just plausibly long enough before dropping, or make Bellic yawn so languidly you start feeling drowsy yourself.
But nobody looks quite real in the end. They are all as weightless as Bambi. And while proliferation — dubious gift of computer-generated art — means you can wander all over without seeing the same person twice, it’s only in the service of keeping the gamer fixated on the console. Fixated on the chance to vary the narrative themes of violence, depravity and murder; and, in the case of New Yorkers themselves, the chance to clock their local deli before torching it.
3. Bidisha, author and critic
It’s a long, hard, bitter task filling the shoes of Niko, the avatar-protagonist of Grand Theft Auto IV. Cursed with a chunky, clenched-bottomed running style and stilted right hook, laboring under the weight of a massive racist stereotype, garbling unfunny puns in a comedy Balkan accent, Niko acts as a gofer for his greasy cousin Roman’s syndicate of lowlifes, hustlers, skanks and shysters and their ethnically cliched associates. There’s the jive-talking Rasta dealer, the timid and inarticulate Oriental shopkeeper and the Serb thugs.
Liberty City, the sarcastically named venue for this obvious trawl, is an expansive, pixel-speckled wasteland of tenement buildings, dead ends, wafting litter, chicken wire and trees that look like yellow and green cotton buds. It’s not arcane enough to create any frisson of otherness (as the epic, mythic games Halo and Assassin’s Creed do) and not realistic enough for you to imagine that you’re in an actual metropolis with its own infrastructure. Still, there are neat details such as the chinked glass of a shattered windscreen, sunlight filtering into an underpass, the chunky matt gray of a discarded bullet. Niko’s small, dead eyes, thick skull and broken nose bear poignant witness to his brutalized biography: Tiny Tim goes techno.
Visually this is a basic arena in which bored, boring men engage in lumpy mutual rucks scripted with bad guy-on-guy thug porn in mind. Peripherally, though, it’s witty. There’s the Memory Lane bowling alley, the hijacked car that has asinine sat nav droning in the background, the hyper radio advert that crows, “For too long TV game shows have been the province of women clucking over things they know nothing about,” and promotes “The Men’s Room, bringing masculinity back to television.” Another radio phone-in listener bawls, “I blame the blacks and the Jews!” while a woman touts “a Ukrainian delicacy: chocolate-covered pig fat.” In Roman’s office the boss is ribbed for his aftershave: “What’s it called? Sex Pest?”
Whoever scripted these incidentals should call HBO and pitch a show, leaving the rest of the team to design more hit-and-runs. When I was done I went home and happily played my Dungeons & Dragons board game by myself.
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