The Art of Mayhem and Murder

When I write a post about videogames on my NEWSWEEK.com blog, Level Up, my target audience is the sizable one that's already knowledgeable about the medium. The real challenge, however, comes when I return to the pages of the magazine. It's not easy to explain a game like Grand Theft Auto IV to an audience that's not native to this art form. Yes, I said art: to draw an analogy or three, Grand Theft Auto is to videogames what "The Sopranos" was to television—a sprawling, operatic crime series that has elevated the genre and made its creator very rich in the process (Rockstar Games took in more than $1 billion in the United States for the last three GTA games alone). But on the TV show, you only watch Tony and his minions kill their enemies. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you also direct and star in a story that unfolds over as many as 100 hours, depending on your skill as a gamer.

The experience is hard enough to sum up that I'm tempted to put novices at ease by writing something like this: a first-person, here's-what-I-did-in-the-game introduction, followed by a colorful précis of the Grand Theft Auto IV story and characters, then a recitation of the numerous landmarks and radio stations that give this skewed facsimile of New York City—called Liberty City in the game—its authentic flavor. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't begin to give you a feel for what it's actually like to play the game. Just as the majority of movie reviewers still struggle to find a meaningful critical and technical language with which to discuss actors' performances, we who write about videogames have yet to find a vocabulary that enables us to thoroughly engage the medium. One that will allow us to examine the mechanics, visuals, sounds and narrative elements of videogames not in isolation, but in concert.

So what is it like to actually play the first 10 or so hours of GTA IV? It's a much slower burn than its predecessors, which quickly introduced you to the mayhem that has twisted its critics' knickers. Once your protagonist/alter ego Niko Bellic, a newcomer to the United States from an unspecified war-torn Eastern European country, steps off a cargo ship and into the welcoming embrace of his shady dreamer of a cousin, Roman, you'll soon find yourself in Broker, Liberty City's rendering of Brooklyn. There, you score some new duds (I opted for eyeglasses and camouflage pants), land a new girlfriend, Michelle (she's obsessive-compulsive), and take on a series of odd jobs, ranging from ferrying people around in one of Niko's cousin's livery cabs, to theft, intimidation and murder. Surprisingly, at this early stage, your main instrument isn't a gun—I didn't get my first pistol until a couple of hours into the game—but rather a mobile phone that connects you to the other characters as you walk or drive along Liberty City's mean streets. Want to take Michelle to a bowling alley? Accompany Roman to a strip club? Carry out a drug run for Little Jacob? Just reach out and touch someone.

"This game is about relationships," says Rockstar's vice president of development, Jeronimo Barrera, 36. "Having the player now be so connected through the cell phone or the Internet—it's all very believable." The GTA series has always been about player choice in a criminal world, but in the past those choices have been limited to cars, clothing, guns, victims. With each release, however, Rockstar has expanded those options, culminating in GTA IV's new friendship simulator. Now it's about driving over to your girlfriend's to pick her up for a date … only to get a call from a small-time gangster asking you to handle some business for him. It's about going to a strip club with your cousin and watching digital dancers grind against your avatar as the controller vibrates suggestively … or going to a cabaret to watch an interpretive dancer's take on the Wild West.

By first emphasizing the blah-blah-blah and the kiss-kiss before layering on the bang-bang, Rockstar is able to give its virtual killings an emotional impact that it has only sporadically achieved in its previous efforts. "Well, it has to have weight—otherwise, what's the point of it?" Barrera says. "Somehow, somebody decided that games are supposed to be an exercise in visual entertainment, period. You're not supposed to feel anything about it. And the way we feel is, no, it's got to make you feel something."

When you find yourself, as Niko, standing on the edge of a crane, deciding whether to save the low-level hood you've been ordered to kill or speed his passage to the afterlife, what will you do? I let him live, even though part of me very much wanted the instant gratification of watching him fall. What held me back, however, was not just how convincingly the digital actors can portray the series' signature violence (because of the way your enemies stagger, stumble and crawl after being shot, the killings now feel more squalid than exhilarating). It's also because the writers have given our mercurial protagonist a conscience, a fatigue with death and a desire to start afresh. Rockstar managed to convince me that Niko wouldn't do this—so I didn't. "Not every action is supposed to make you feel happy," says Barrera. "You can question it. It's OK to question it—and play it a different way." That's where the art of Grand Theft Auto IV resides, in the complicated responses it can elicit. Even for those among you who aren't gamers, attention must be paid.

© 2008