GTA and the City
I’ve been playing quite a bit of GTA4 recently. Its graphics and world-building are remarkable, often beautiful, and really intricate. What I’m finding very interesting, though, is the experience of playing this game, ostensibly set in New York City (even if called Liberty City), while living in the city myself. I’ve got some observations about this, and then, towards the end of this post, I apply them to a consideration of spinoff and licensed games.
One of the reasons the GTA games have been so successful, I believe, is because of their writers’ savvy, exacting, and satiric sense of urban space, sounds, and living. Neighborhoods flow into one another seamlessly, the voices, cars, and architecture changing in subtle and organic ways. Talk radio, too, has never been so brilliantly satirized as in the GTA games. Impressively, moreover, the designers have often captured the feel of certain spaces to a tee. I once noted to a friend, for instance, that I couldn’t go into a sparsely populated mall without thinking I was in GTA Vice City’s mall, and he’d had exactly the same experience, since GTA captures the soullessness, the stasis, and the mind-numbing brightness of shopping malls with such ability.
With GTA4 and Liberty City, the designers have captured some spaces very well. Large parts of Brooklyn feel very recognizable, to the point of hyperreality – Brooklyn feels like GTA to me, rather than vice versa. The cars on New York streets have also thrown me for a loop, as I’m recognizing them all by their GTA names. I found it profoundly odd last week in particular when I came home to find that the car parked outside my window was almost exactly the same model that was parked outside my safehouse in GTA. I’ve also tried to use my knowledge of NYC to work out where I’m most likely to find good cars, or certain types of pedestrians, in GTA. Funnily enough, too, my greatest annoyance in NYC – commute times – has become my greatest annoyance in Liberty City, as I spend way too much time going back and forth across the Triborough Bridge (ironically, the bridge that would make my commute quicker if I had a car in NYC). But all sorts of little details have made it into the game – the plethora of pylons at the entrance to each bridge, jokes about Roosevelt Island (the helitour pilot says it’s like the appendix – we know it’s there, but don’t know why), sidewalk preachers in the Bronx, recognizable stores and store types in Manhattan, the army recruiting center at Times Square, the cavernous and claustrophobic feel of underground subway stops, the fact that almost every car around Times Square or on the Brooklyn-Manhattan is a taxi, and so on.
And yet there are also some glaring omissions. GTA’s Bronx captures a small section of the South Bronx well but includes none of the recognizable streets, and the rest of it feels nothing like the Bronx that I know. I was disappointed, too, and felt somewhat displaced, to find that my neighborhood of Queens doesn’t exist in Liberty City. Personal landmarks don’t exist either, so that Lincoln Center exists, but no Fordham at Lincoln Center, my favorite block of the East Village is missing, and my subway line has been mixed up with others. Fifth Avenue is spookily under-populated by pedestrians or city buses, and at times feels more like Will Smith’s New York in I am Legend than a thriving metropolis. Subways are empty, and Niko always gets a seat.
This sometimes subtle, sometimes stark mix of real NYC and missing NYC defamiliarizes the actual city. And thus while I’ve always appreciated the GTA games for how they capture some of the patterns, sounds, sights, and feels of generic urban spaces, GTA4 is making me pay way more attention to the structuring logics and patterns of the real New York. I’m listening to passersby when I’m out, I’m looking at which cars can be found in which areas, I’m thinking about how one neighborhood bleeds into another and how the texture of those neighborhoods change or mix, I’m observing elevated subway lines’ design and structural supports, and in general, I’m spending way more time looking at the city. I’m deeply impressed by how this game has made me look at the city again. All for 60 c/hr.
In this regard, GTA may provide an example of how licensed games work, and it may provide the key to understanding the pleasures that they offer. When we purchase a licensed game, we likely do so because of a certain familiarity with the storyworld of the media product in question. In other words, we already “live” in that world to a degree. Licensed games rarely extend the plot of storyworld, nor do they usually add much in the way of depth to the world’s characters. But neither does GTA4 extend New York City in any real way. Rather, as I’ve said above, GTA4 defamiliarizes parts of New York, drawing my attention to nooks and crannies and governing logics. Licensed games too can pull us back from the familiar storyworld and give us the means of appreciating nooks and crannies and governing logics, sometimes because they’re there in the game, sometimes because they’re missing.
I don’t mean to suggest that this is the only source of pleasure in licensed games. The best licensed games will be enjoyable regardless of whether one knows the storyworld or not, just as GTA4 doesn’t require one to know New York in any way. But even when a licensed game’s gameplay is rather ho hum, sometimes its value comes from how it encourages us to think about the texture, structure, and tone of the licensed property.
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