Grand Theft Auto IV: Open Paper Bag, Insert Head
You know, it's almost a question worth asking -- are people so wound up about Rockstar's opus that they're pill-popping to cope with the countdown stress? Silly me to say so, right? I'm probably providing aid and comfort to the enemy, who'll no doubt cite this blog as evidence that Grand Theft Auto IV increases the use of SSRIs and benzodiazepines.
Speaking of discombobulation, you have to admit the hype machine's pretty impressive -- nigh Borgian. From The New York Times to some 518 articles in the Google News aggregator at midday tally -- even the Beeb's getting into it.
I have to forego reviewing the reviewers because it's frankly a little distressing reading some of them -- not that the reviews are "right" or "wrong," but because for all the extra pages of text unnecessarily bloating up the screen, there's such a proportional lack of insight packaged, just giddy play by plays that feel like watching Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus in Gladiator responding -- all thumbs -- to cue cards that read "cell phone," "lines of dialogue," "level of drunkenness," "Easter eggs," "number of missions," "shoot controls," and so on. (If, however, you are craving a slap fight, Kotaku's Luke Wilson bravely indulges with his "GTA IV Reviews: An Exercise In Hyperbolism.")
Speaking of hyperbole, our own Scott Nichols points out that it's a rare occurrence for games to receive perfect scores, but that GTA IV's got more pouring in than the filmic love child of William Wyler and James Cameron. True enough. It's also kind of funny watching sites dangle a "perfect" 10 or 100 just out of reach, with the sort of grade school parochiality about A's as tops for mortals, and A-pluses reserved for the omniscient-only. Like aesthetic sensibility works on an absolute scale or something.
Someone, somewhere, is going to eventually make much of the fact that aggregators like Metacritic and Gamerankings could end up listing GTA IV as the highest scoring game in their respective databases (the highest score, like, ever). At Gamerankings, that honor most recently belonged to Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64, which with 32 reviews beats Super Mario Galaxy (68 reviews) by .414 percentage points. Which in turn beats Super Mario World (5 reviews) by .574 percentage points. Which all told as you whittle your way through decimal points drives me barking nuts about aggregators. Why? Because they take what's already a problematic marriage of deterministic math and pliable aesthetics and amplify the discord by kludging disparate scoring systems together and assigning an arbitrary rank deceptively tethered to an objective ruler-bar. There's a personality profile that feeds into this stuff, of course -- the sort that can fill message boards with blather about the difference between 95 (of 100) points and 100, as if five points could be the difference between "Great!" and "Earth-Shatteringly Awful." The tragedy's that these people care less about issues like "Does GTA IV offer an interesting, remotely accurate portrayal of a former East European citizen?" and more about whether it's going to arbitrarily topple a totally unrelated late 1990s game on a glorified data-mining/cubing site.
Anyway, keep your eyes peeled (and your long knives sharp) for self-appointed pop gurus waiting in the wings like opportunistic loonies to accuse the game of everything from encouraging kids to go on crime sprees and do drugs to alien abduction. And watch this space for a rigorous, lively engagement of the game in the context of what's turning out, as I read through it, to be the best book yet written on the subject of violence in games. If you care about the issue as much as I do, consider picking up a copy, then reading it along with me, since I'll be returning to it repeatedly in the coming weeks and months.
Re-Play
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I haven't even gotten the game yet and I've already killed two hookers, stolen a BMW, and...er...perhaps I should stop with the self-incriminating confessions.
No, in all seriousness...I've never bought the violent games/film/television programming causes the same behavior in children argument.
As a college professor I had pointed out: if Beavis and Butthead had the power to cause children to become pyro-maniacs...we'd have seen a statistically significant number of children lighting fires at home as a result of being exposed to the programming.
I've never been as angry over the issue as I was when I discovered that the Attorney General of Minnesota has been wasting her time worrying about these issues.
All next-Gen video game systems have a whole slew of parental control features built in.
It is ultimately up to the parents of young people to use common sense when it comes to the media that their children are exposed to.
WOW!! I can't agree more. All the articles and the complaints about the game violence and our children... Being a parent of a 9 year old son, I am one who will not allow my son to play this game. I will however buy the game for my own entertainment. To all those that are complaining that it is too violent, I say... spend less time complaining and more time being a parent/enforcer of rules to your child. Being a parent is more than putting a PS3 or 360 in front of them for their birthday and walking away to have a moment of "peace and quiet".
Matt,
I encourage you to hit 'The Ebay' and pursue the bizarre story of why anyone would pay someone $100 or more for the regular version of GTAIV that they could just go buy at the store for $59.99.
My roommate says he thinks it is younger people who wouldn't be able to go to the store and purchase the game themselves.
I think it is just a case of greedy people hoping to make a buck for nothing.
One guy claims in his auction that he bought the copies of GTAIV with 'rewardzone points that were about to expire' and he couldn't think of anything else in the store that he'd want.
What always amazes me is the fact that the individuals waving the banner of all the reasons young people play the game are from individuals that are no more qualified to judge the game than I am to give an opinion in heart surgery. In a typical fashion, a snapshot is taken from a fraction of the demographic that just happens to be physically and emotionally immature and then uses their words in a twisted context. Here is where the real problem lays... no other game or developer has been able to create the content that allows a player to be fully immersed, period. The game is reveled by so many because of the free roaming ability and vast terrain that can be covered and the ability to stray away from the preconceived plot if you so desire. Not to mention all these things combined add a high "replay" value that gamers look for. When you pay upwards of $60 a game, you do not want to play something that you are bored with in 8 hours of content! Get the facts and play a game morons!
Matt. Thanks for the great article. I love FOX news is leading the charge against a video game featuring theft, killing, and high speed driving while FOXs own top TV shows 24 feature on virtually every episode scenes of actual torture, theft, killing, and high speed driving, And that is why GTA4 as a sly parody of violence and culture is so funny: the angrier the people you are parodying get, the funnier it is.Keep it up! -Rzr