Authors: Tom Bissell
Writing and reading allow one consciousness to find and take
shelter in another. When the mind of the reader and writer perfectly and inimitably connect, objects, events, and emotions become doubly vivid—realer, somehow, than real things. I have spent most of my life seeking out these connections and attempting to create my own. Today, however, the pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar. Today, the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games. For instance, I woke up this morning at 8 a.m. fully intending to write this chapter. Instead, I played
Left 4 Dead
until 5 p.m. The rest of the day went up in a blaze of intermittent catnaps. It is now 10 p.m. and I have only started to work. I know how I will spend the late, frayed moments before I go to sleep tonight, because they are how I spent last night, and the night before that: walking the perimeter of my empty bed and carpet-bombing the equally empty bedroom with promises that tomorrow will not be squandered. I will fall asleep in a futureless, strangely peaceful panic, not really knowing what I will do the next morning and having no firm memory of who, or what, I once was.
The first video game I can recall having to force myself to stop playing was Rockstar’s
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
, which was released in 2002 (though I did not play it until the following year). I managed to miss
Vice City
’s storied predecessor,
Grand Theft Auto III
, so I had only oblique notions of what I was getting into. A friend had lobbied me to buy
Vice City
, so I knew its basic premise: You are a cold-blooded jailbird looking to ascend the bloody social ladder of the fictional Vice City’s criminal under-and overworld. (I also knew that
Vice City
’s violent subject matter was said to have inspired crime sprees by a few of the game’s least stable fans. Other such sprees would horribly follow. Seven years later, Rockstar has
spent more time in court than a playground-abutting pesticide manufactory.) I might have taken better note of the fact that my friend, when speaking of
Vice City
, admitted he had not slept more than four hours a night since purchasing it and had the ocular spasms and fuse-blown motor reflexes to prove it. Just what, I wanted to know, was so specifically compelling about
Vice City?
“Just get it and play it,” he answered. “You can do anything you want in the game. Anything.”
Before I played
Vice City
, the open-world games with which I was familiar had predictable restrictions. Ninety percent of most open gameworlds’ characters and objects were interactively off limits, and most game maps simply stopped. When, like a digital Columbus, you attempted to journey beyond the edge of these flat earths, onscreen text popped up:
YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY!
There were a few exceptions to this, such as the (still) impressively open-ended gameworld of Nintendo’s
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
, which was released in 1998. As great as
Ocarina
was, however, it appealed to the most hairlessly innocent parts of my imagination. Ingenious, fun, and beautiful,
Ocarina
provided all I then expected from video games. (Its mini-game of rounding up a brood of fugitive chickens remains my all-time favorite.) Yet the biggest game of its time was still, for me, somehow too small. As a navigated experience, the currents that bore you along were suspiciously obliging. Whatever I did, and wherever I moved, I never felt as though I had
escaped
the game. When the game stopped, so did the world.
The world of
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
was also a fantasy—a filthy, brutal, hilarious,
contemporary
fantasy. My friend’s promise that you could do anything you wanted in Vice City proved to be an exaggeration, but not by very much. You control a young man named Tommy, who has been recently released from prison. He
arrives in Vice City—an oceanside metropolis obviously modeled on the Miami of 1986 or so—only to be double-crossed during a coke deal. A few minutes into the game, you watch a cut scene in which Tommy and his lawyer (an anti-Semitic parody of an anti-Semitic parody) decide that revenge must be taken and the coke recovered. Once the cut scene ends, you step outside your lawyer’s office. A car is waiting for you. You climb in and begin your drive to the mission destination (a clothing store) clearly marked on your map. The first thing you notice is that your car’s radio can be tuned to a number of different radio stations. What is playing on these stations is not a loop of caffeinatedly upbeat MIDI video-game songs or some bombastic score written for the game but Michael Jackson, Hall and Oates, Cutting Crew, and Luther Vandross. While you are wondering at this, you hop a curb, run over some pedestrians, and slam into a parked car, all of which a nearby police officer sees. He promptly gives chase. And for the first time you are off, speeding through Vice City’s various neighborhoods. You are still getting accustomed to the driving controls and come into frequent contact with jaywalkers, oncoming traffic, streetlights, fire hydrants. Soon your pummeled car (you shed your driver’s-side door two blocks ago) is smoking. The police, meanwhile, are still in pursuit. You dump the dying car and start to run. How do you get another car? As it happens, a sleek little sporty number called the Stinger is idling beneath a stoplight right in front of you. This game
is
called
Grand Theft Auto
, is it not? You approach the car, hit the assigned button, and watch Tommy rip the owner from the vehicle, throw him to the street, and drive off. Wait—look there! A
motorcycle
. Can you drive motorcycles, too? After another brutal vehicular jacking, you fly off an angled ramp in cinematic slow-motion while ELO’s “Four Little Diamonds” strains the limits of your television’s half-dollar-sized speakers.
You have now lost the cops and swing around to head back to your mission, the purpose of which you have forgotten. It gradually dawns on you that this mission is waiting for
you
to reach
it
. You do not have to go if you do not want to. Feeling liberated, you drive around Vice City as day gives way to night. When you finally hop off the bike, the citizens of Vice City mumble and yell insults. You approach a man in a construction worker’s outfit. He stops, looks at you, and waits. The game does not give you any way to interact with this man other than through physical violence, so you take a swing. The fight ends with you stomping the last remaining vitality from the hapless construction worker’s blood-squirting body. When you finally decide to return to the mission point, the rhythm of the game is established. Exploration, mission, cut scene, driving, mayhem, success, exploration, mission, cut scene, driving, mayhem, success. Never has a game felt so open. Never has a game felt so generationally relevant. Never has a game felt so awesomely gratuitous. Never has a game felt so narcotic. When you stopped playing
Vice City
, its leash-snapped world somehow seemed to go on without you.
Vice City
’s sequel,
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
, was several magnitudes larger—so large, in fact, I never finished the game.
San Andreas
gave gamers not one city to explore but three, all of them set in the hip-hop demimonde of California in the early 1990s (though one of the cities is a Vegas clone). It also added dozens of diversions, the most needless of which was the ability of your controlled character, a young man named C.J., to get fat from eating health-restoring pizza and burgers—fat that could be burned off only by hauling C.J.’s porky ass down to the gym to ride a stationary bike and lift weights. This resulted in a lot of soul-scouring questions as to why (a) it even mattered to me that C.J. was fat and why (b) C.J. was getting more physical exercise
than I was. Because I could not answer either question satisfactorily, I stopped playing.
Grand Theft Auto IV
was announced in early 2007, two years after the launch of the Xbox 360 and one year after the launch of the PlayStation 3, the “next-generation” platforms that have since pushed gaming into the cultural mainstream. When the first next-gen titles began to appear, it was clear that the previous
Grand Theft Auto
titles—much like Hideo Kojima’s similarly brilliant and similarly frustrated
Metal Gear Solid
titles—were games of next-gen vision and ambition without next-gen hardware to support them. The early word was that
GTA IV
would scale back the excesses of
San Andreas
and provide a rounder, more succinctly inhabited game experience. I was living in Las Vegas when
GTA IV
(after a heartbreaking six-month delay) was finally released.
In Vegas I had made a friend who shared my sacramental devotion to marijuana, my dilated obsession with gaming, and my ballistic impatience to play
GTA IV
. When I was walking home from my neighborhood game store with my reserved copy of
GTA IV
in hand, I called my friend to tell him. He let me know that, to celebrate the occasion, he was bringing over some “extra sweetener.” My friend’s taste in recreational drug abuse vastly exceeded my own, and this extra sweetener turned out to be an alarming quantity of cocaine, a substance with which I had one prior and unexpectedly amiable experience, though I had not seen a frangible white nugget of the stuff since.
While the
GTA IV
load screen appeared on my television, my friend chopped up a dozen lines, reminded me of basic snorting protocol, and handed me the straw. I hesitated before taking the tiny hollow scepter, but not for too long. Know this: I was not someone whose life had been marked by the meticulous collection of bad habits. I chewed tobacco, regularly drank about ten Diet
Cokes a day, and liked marijuana. Beyond that, my greatest vice was probably reading poetry for pleasure. The coke sailed up my nasal passage, leaving behind the delicious smell of a hot leather car seat on the way back from the beach. My previous coke experience had made feeling good an emergency, but this was something else, softer, and almost
relaxing
. This coke, my friend told me, had not been “stepped on” with any amphetamine, and I pretended to know what that meant. I felt as intensely focused as a diamond-cutting laser;
Grand Theft Auto IV
was ready to go. My friend and I played it for the next thirty hours straight.
Many children who want to believe their tastes are adult will bravely try coffee, find it to be undeniably awful, but recognize something that could one day, conceivably, be enjoyed. Once our tastes as adults are fully developed, it is easy to forget the effort that went into them. Adult taste can be demanding work—so hard, in fact, that some of us, when we become adults, selectively take up a few childish things, as though in defeated acknowledgment that adult taste, and its many bewilderments, is frequently more trouble than it is worth. Few games have more to tell us about this adult retreat into childishness than the
Grand Theft Auto
series.
In
GTA IV
you are Niko Bellic, a young immigrant with an ambiguous past. We know he is probably a Serb. We know he fought in the Balkans war. We know he was party to a war-crime atrocity and victim of a double-cross that led to the slaughter of all but three members of his paramilitary unit. We know he has taken life outside of war, and it is strongly suggested that he once dabbled in human trafficking. “I did some dumb things and got involved with some idiots,” Niko says, early in the game, to his friend Hassan. “We all do dumb things,” Hassan replies. “That’s what makes us human.” The camera closes on Niko as he thinks
about this and, for a moment, his face becomes as quietly expressive as that of a living actor. “Could be,” he says.
Niko has come to Liberty City (the
GTA
world’s run at New York City) at the invitation of his prevaricating cousin, Roman. He wants to start over, leave behind the death and madness of his troubled past, and bathe in the comfort and safety of America. Niko’s plan does not go well. Soon enough, he is working as a thief and killer. Just as
Lolita
, as Nabokov piquantly notes in his afterword, was variously read as “old Europe debauching young America” or “young America debauching old Europe,”
GTA IV
leaves itself interpretively open as to whether Niko is corrupted by America or whether he and his ilk (many of the most vicious characters whose paths Niko crosses are immigrants) are themselves bacterial agents of corruption. The earlier
GTA
games were less thematically ambitious. Tommy from
Vice City
is a cackling psychopath, and C.J. from
San Andreas
merely rides the acquisitionist philosophy of hip-hop culture to terminal amorality. They are not characters you root for or even want, in moral terms, to succeed. You want them to succeed only in gameplay terms. The better they do, the more of the gameworld you see. The stories in
Vice City
and
San Andreas
are pastiches of tired filmic genres: crime capers, ghetto dramas, police procedurals. The driving force of both games is the gamer’s curiosity:
What happens next? What is over here? What if I do this?
They are, in this way, childlike and often very silly games, especially
San Andreas
, which lets you cover your body with ridiculous tattoos and even fly a jetpack. While the gameworlds and subject matter are adult—and under no circumstances should children be allowed near either game—the joy of the gameplay is allowing the vestiges of a repressed, tantrum-throwing, childlike self to run amok. Most games are about attacking a childlike world with an adult mind. The
GTA
games are the opposite, and one of the most maliciously entertaining mini-games
in
Vice City
and
San Andreas
is a mayhem mode in which the only goal is to fuck up as much of the gameworld as possible in an allotted period of time.
There is no such mode in
GTA IV
(though the gamer is free to fuck up the gameworld on his or her own clock), one suspects because the game seeks to provide Niko with a pathos it absolutely denies
Vice City
’s Tommy and mostly denies
San Andreas
’s C.J. All the
GTA
games have been subject to mis-and overinterpretation, and
GTA IV
is no exception.
GTA IV
’s most frequent misinterpretation is that it boasts a story many credulous game reviewers deemed “Oscar-worthy,” which, they said, lent Niko’s plight real relevance. This is, in a word, preposterous. At its best, the story of
GTA IV
is pretty good for a video game, which is to say, conventional and fairly predictable. At its equally representative worst,
GTA IV
’s story does not make much sense, unless one believes that Niko would instantly forgive his cousin, Roman, for luring him to America under boldly false pretenses, that Niko could find a girlfriend after one day in America, that people who barely know Niko would unquestioningly entrust him with their lives and drug money, and that Niko’s mother would write him e-mails in English. The one narrative task
GTA IV
handles extremely well is dialogue, particularly whenever the incomprehensible Jamaican pothead Little Jacob ambles into the proceedings. A hilariously hairsplitting argument between a pair of Irish American criminals about whether the plastic explosive they are about to use to blow open a bank door is called “C4” or “PE4” feels scissored out of a Tarantino script.
GTA IV
’s dialogue has no bearing on its gameplay, of course, but does make it one of very few games in which listening to people talk is not only enjoyable but sociologically revelatory.