It's definitely a compromised vision-where Far Cry 2 depicts nakedly your character's immorality, Grand Theft Auto, quite literally, pulls back. In the world of video games, where moral ambiguity is poison, I'm impressed with how deftly GTA gains my complicity. Far Cry 2 isn't a difficult story, either, but it's at least honest: in the video game genre called "shooter," what character could you reasonably play other than a mercenary who trades violence for cash? Grand Theft Auto sells to you a vicious protagonist and an unreliable narrator, and you buy him.
But I admire the completeness, and consistency, of Grand Theft Auto. Perhaps without realizing, as you play, you're ingratiated to the mindset of your character.Īgain, it's not necessarily a hard set mental state to communicate-to GTA's assumed audience of teenage boys and bored young men, smashing up cars, and shooting people with guns are easy experiences to sell. The forensic details, the blood, guts and consequences of your actions-none of these things reach you in Grand Theft Auto.
Bullets fly, cars explode, pedestrians squelch under the wheels of your truck, but it's so far away and filtered that it feels inconsequential-you're playing a morally loose career criminal, and the physical distance from the carnage you're causing reflects his own mental distancing. From such a height, and considering GTA's already pixelated visual style, it's hard to worry about what you're doing. Its top-down view places you at a literal distance from the violence and crime that you commit. The first game does it most gracefully of all. What it has done, though, is communicate a specific kind of character. This isn't to say Grand Theft Auto is a game that celebrates human diversity, or illustrates any kind of confrontational political ideology-starting in '97, and continuing until the present day, the Houser brothers have successfully repackaged domestic stereotypes and adolescent nihilism into what game critics, clearly in need of some better literature, call "satire." It peacocks and it masturbates, but in regards to social and political conversations in the West, Grand Theft Auto has contributed nothing. It's a self-eating snake, whereby the people most associated with buying video games never have their world view challenged and so keep buying, and keep being affirmed, and keep buying, and keep being affirmed. Consistently, they've failed to represent peoples outside of the Western, white, male middle-class, but that itself is a perverse and paradoxical way of keeping games as accessible as possible. That's where games fall down: they aspire to be commercial, apolitical and non-divisive. It presents characters who have opinions, lives and frames of mind that are not your own and invites you to sympathize with and understand them. And when I think of great writing, it's writing that challenges and confronts. So many video game characters are broad or nothing-y, or written so inoffensively that it's easy to empathize with them-most abysmally of all, some don't even have a voice, allowing you to project directly into them. 'Grand Theft Auto' as it appeared to players of 1997