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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