GTAIV = Completed!

A winner I am!

So, yesterday around 6pm I beat the final mission for GTAIV. I've been thinking heavily about the uniformly positive fanfare surrounding this game before its release the whole time I've been playing it, and some of the heavy criticisms since I started playing. The first time that I was just driving around at night, and I saw what were unmistakably sex workers, I stopped the car and let one in, intending to enact an age old tradition. I never got that far. After I figured out that I had to honk the horn to get her attention, Niko's cousin Roman called asking if I wanted to go play darts. I let her in anyway wondering what would happen if she was with me when I picked up Roman. Immediately I noticed that she wasn't charging me for just being in the car, and when Roman got in, she got out. I opened up the door and opened fire, but when she started to scream and clutch at her sides in her effort to get away, a horrible, unsettling feeling washed over me. I felt shame and anger. Immediately I knew there was something different about this game that made picking up and killing sex workers a totally different experience, and after losing a few rounds of darts I never even thought to pick up another woman apart from my story appointed girlfriend.*

I'll pick that thread back up later. For now I just want to say that I can see why so many people found Niko Bellic a more sympathetic character than in the past, but I still largely think this judgement is superficial. If you tally up the tropes of "sympathetic anti-heros" I guess Niko qualifies. He is well acted and fleshed out in the story, but just like Tommy Vercetti and Carl Johnson, he is ultimately a sociopathic murderer (Claude is a cipher, so he doesn't count). Since Tommy was a decidedly less apologetic murderer than CJ or Niko, I spent most of my time comparing Niko and his motivations to the protagonist of San Andreas than to Vice City's favourite social climber.

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Carl Johnson had his family to live for, and largely avoided the tropes that are laid on anti-heroes to make them seem sympathetic. CJ had an inner life and personal motivations that made him interesting. He wasn't just a découpage of craptasms. He didn't have a dead girlfriend (Ugh! The dead women! How sick I am of dead women motivating the hero!). Yes, his mother was murdered, and his brother had been, too, but largely it was the people he loved that were still around whose well being he worked to protect by allowing himself to be controlled by a corrupt cop on a power trip. At the end, CJ isn't just getting revenge, he's getting freedom. Real freedom. His family and friends are safe, he has a life, and the future is bright and full of optimism.

In the process, he commits some pretty heinous crimes, and you never really get to choose how you approach them (really, the only thing you have any control over is your muscle mass/fat and fashion sense). Ultimately, the games writers have determined who CJ is, and not you, the player. Which is fine. That's what a movie is, right? If games aspire to be like films, because certain film critics don't consider them art, I suppose that's just dandy. San Andreas, like every GTA game before it, aspired to be little more than a collection of movie and pop-culture references.

I think the reason that GTAIV has been so popular is that it feels more real and your choices have a stronger impact on the tone of the ending. To begin with, these kinds of choices themselves break the mold. You take a more active role in deciding the course of the narrative. Niko's body shape never changes. You can't waste hundreds of in-game dollars on pink afros and gang tattoos, or hundreds of minutes on a virtual treadmill wearing down your body fat for sex appeal. In fact, the vast majority of those RPG elements are gone. Niko can only shop at three stores and the few bonus costumes he gets look out of place in most cutscenes. There are fewer cars and no ambulence missions. You can't play for 150 health/armour. In fact, there aren't many sidequests at all apart from making friends and keeping girlfriends happy (one of the few additions to San Andreas I actually wish they hadn't included in this game; getting a text on a mission from an unhappy girlfriend who wants me to take a break from "those other cheap sluts" to take her out are actually very irritating).

That said, when I took my of-Irish-descent friend, Packie McReary, out for drinks toward the end of the game, and, stumbling around looking for a taxi, he delivered a heart rending performance of "Oh Danny Boy" which echoed in my mind as I watched the final missions unfold, I was glad of the opportunity. I don't know how often he does this when you take him out, but I've yet to see a friend repeat anything they said before during an activity. I don't know if its random, or if he does this once he likes you enough to share this part of his soul. It deeply affected the way I experienced the game, though, and its the closest a GTA game has ever come to bringing me to tears.

This was one, however, in a constellation of personal, unique experiences that carried me through the story and gave it life and resonance. Niko wasn't as sympathetic as I expected him to be in and of himself. He did some horrible things that shocked and angered me in the course of the story. By the end, however, he wasn't the same man. The universe that Rockstar has crafted for their games conspires against him at every turn. "Oh Danny Boy" was probably the most fitting theme I could apply to my experience.

One of the taglines at the Rockstar website for GTAIV is "Welcome to Liberty City: Where the American Dream Goes to Die."

The series has always satirised American culture; our conspicuous consumption, our rampant hypocrisy, our obsession with sex and violence, but GTAIV is the first and so far only installment in the series to say something true about the logical outcome of a life of violence and crime. This is how I expected to feel when I finished Mass Effect and Bioshock, but didn't. I'm happy to say that I was really pleasantly surprised by this.

*I'd read that Rockstar had endeavoured to flesh out the denizens of Liberty City in this game, making wanton murder distinctly less satisfying (unless your a sick bastard who thinks that making your targets more realistically human enhances the "fun"). It's true. I got a lot less out of killing people, although that did not at all stop me from putting bullets in anyone who grazed me with their bumper and caused me to lose a quarter of my health just before a mission, necessitating a reload or save. It also didn't stop me from running them over if they couldn't figure out running to the side when I was speeding to keep up with a target. I really didn't just kill people for the thrill, though, and if the tried to crawl away I let them go (unless they were still holding a weapon).

Previous GTA games have been populated by shallow, cartoonish parodies of people who were easy to think of as less than human. There's a solid argument that can be made, considering the very real violence that is a common feature of the lives of many sex workers, that providing incentive for that kind of behaviour is socially irresponsible, no matter how shallow your caricature of a prostitute might be. Many people, even some gamers, misunderstand the role of sex workers in the game, though, as providing you health. Honestly, ever since Vice City, it's been easier to save or grab health power ups than commission a prostitute to sit in the passenger seat and stare out the window for ten or so seconds. Previous games have even provided ways for your to earn a bigger life bar, so even the health bonus previously conferred by paid-for-sex becomes superfluous and a big waste of time and energy. Killing them afterwards has also been misunderstood as something you are somehow encouraged to do. Prostitutes don't necessarily give you your money back. Like most pedestrians, they just carry a random amount of cash. Most of the time it isn't worth the effort to chase them down and risk attaining a wanted level and losing that health bonus you just spent two minutes getting.

After watching IGN's horrifying pastiche of sex with and murder of prostitutes, and being as horrified as every other thinking human being, I can assure you that my stats will show that I have spent $0 on sex in my game. I've spent a bit on dates, which have sometimes led to sex, but I've spent more hanging out with my "buddies" than my "girlfriends."

I just wanted to make it clear that I'm not unaware of the games remaining flaws, or its place in a culture of sexism, homophobia, and other important and equally detrimental -isms. It's worth talking about. That it is satire does not excuse this. That it is still an incredible game with incredible writing and a world full of surprises and great experiences does, however, make it worth playing.

For anyone still reading, I'm going to add for my own edification that although I started the series with the third game (I watched someone play the second game once, but I suppose that doesn't count), this is only the second one that I've played to completion. GTAIII I believe I may have played until I unlocked the third island, but became so frustrated with that I gave up (in spite of having a strategy guide on hand). Vice City was one of the first games I ever beat by myself, and I allowed my boyfriend to beat San Andreas for me (although, in my copy of the game, I certainly performed the the lion's share of missions and level grinding). This may affect my opinion somewhat. I may feel a deeper attachment because I am unreasonably proud of myself.