purgation

[egypturnash]

So I just deleted my savegames for GTA4. Or, rater, snarled in hate at realizing it has no delete function, and that the closest thing to that would be to start the damn game and drive the convoluted path it insists you take to the first save point, then save a freshly-started game over my saves.

Why? Well, I spent most of the time I was at home this weekend playing the fucking thing. Even though I didn't want to, even though I have art that I want to get done.

I bought GTA2 for the Dreamcast, back when. It was fun, it was hyperviolent in a cheerfully silly way. But I didn't buy GTA3. It came into my life when I found it, and a pile of other obviously-stolen games, under a bush. It hooked into my obsessive side. I had to make myself stop playing it; ultimately it got dumped on the used game store. When GTA3:Vice City came out, I knew better than to buy it - but my room-mate wanted it, and it wound up devouring several weeks of my free time against my conscious choice. When GTA3:San Andreas came out, I had nobody in my life interested in buying it... but later on Rik installed it on his Windows box, and once again, I couldn't resist; I ended up playing the fucking thing. If not for Alicia loaning us her 360 and GTAIV, I would have never gotten the thing. I've never wanted the 3D versions of this series, but put them in my life and I can't, somehow, not play them.

I did not actually enjoy the body of the time I've spent on this series. Oh, there are moments: completing a mission in a delightfully sideways way, causing chaos and fleeing it - or even being run to ground by the cops after a half-hour merry chase across the whole game map. But the actual content? Frustration and snarling, for the most part. Moreso than usual in this latest one, as every single mission is given to you by a complete asshole who it would be a pleasure to kill.

There's this one character in GTA4. This guy named Brucie, this creepy steroid junkie with too much money. He creeps me out in the same ways that guy I did the parking piece for early this year. Like everyone who gives you missions, his dialogue is written to establish him as pretty much a scumbag you want to hurt. You're given no opportunity to do this, until one mission where you have to drive him across the city, then take part in a street race for him while he hollers testosterone-fueled imprecations at you. The instant this mission started and I realized he was a game object, I pulled a shotgun out and let him have it, point-blank. It took three shots before he went down. I then restarted the mission and wandered off to a lonely, desolate beach with him in tow, and shot him again. And restarted again, looking for another interesting way to kill him. Several times. Finally I actually bothered to take him to the car he wanted me to get, to be told about the race. Failed the first time. Killed him again. Tried shooting out the bot racer's tires before the race, got told that wasn't allowed. Killed him some more. Parked a van in front of half of the cars and finally did it.

I did this instead of working on the 9 of Pentacles, which is slowly shaping up to be yet another pretty and evocative image.

Really, this is why I object to the continued existence of GTA. It's this wonderful, deep, inviting game; a wonderful sandbox to play in - coupled tightly to a narrative built exclusively out of the dark side of humanity. GTA3 and GTA3VC sort of walked on the side of parody, but the cartoonish dark humor filtered out and it's just incredibly depressing, yet incredibly addictive. At least for the way my brain is wired.

It's not terrible because "oh no you can get your health back from a hooker and then run over her to get the money back". That's almost a kind of defense against the game's worldmessage: after a while, you stop seeing these bits of code as (symbols of) people, and just see them as game objects; it's the only way to really cope with how much nasty virtual shit your new addiction has you do. It's terrible because it's a little sham reality made to program you to be an asshole. And it's got these addictive hooks all over it to draw you in.

And this is what big-budget video games "for adults" keep turning into. Addiction engines with a "grim, gritty" payload. I think everyone reading this either knows someone who's fallen head-first into WoW, or some other MMORPG, or has done it themselves. I feel like there's a code of ethics that should be in place here, really. There's moral weight in creating a game that you know damn well offers just the right balance of repetition and reward to trigger addiction. Is it ethical to create something like this? Sure, it's profitable, especially if you do it as a pay-to-play thing. But is creating video crack with no clear stopping point what we want from this new medium? As a society, as artists who work in the medium of 'game'?

I never want to have another installment of this fucking game series in my life again. I have too much real stuff to do to let me get tied up in incrementing counters in a save file for a solid month.

Comments

[xyzzysqrl]

You can delete save files from the console management menu. It's in the Dashboard somewhere, in the options. Usually not in game.

Now I have to go play Doom for a while.

[trikotomy.livejournal.com]

Doom! I just rediscovered Doom the other day with the Doomsday (http://www.doomsdayhq.com/) engine. I can actually, like, look up and down with the mouse and change key bindings and have a resolution that isn't than 640x480. It's complete madness. MADNESS.

And then there's that optional 3D thing too, I guess. But dude. Looking up and down. *flails cane*

[wondershot.livejournal.com]

Now I want to play Doom.

What's funny is that I would have been too terrified of this game to play it when it came out. Now it feels so wonderfully hokey.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I was wondering that but I didn't want to try to navigate that and possibly delete all the save files...

[bossgoji.livejournal.com]

This was pretty much my objection to stuff like Gears of War. It wasn't ugliness designed to deliver a game, which is often awesome in a cartoonish sort of way, such as the classic GTA games, or Resident Evil 4. Instead, it was a game designed to deliver ugliness, a pleasant little third-person-shooter which was created expressly for the purpose of showing you an incredibly horrible, ruined world, populated by testosterone-poisoned manly men who seemed to be composed entirely of scar tissue.

This isn't to say ugliness and squalor can't be artistic. Indeed, game developers seem to be very good at making it... too good, to the point that it's becoming the ONLY kind of art you can get in playable format. It's not as though it's IMPOSSIBLE to create a deep, inviting experience in a gameworld that's less utterly crapsack, it's just that nobody seems to want to do so. For some reason(probably because the predominant market for gamers is teenage to young adult males =P), "dark and gritty" keeps getting auto-translated into "deep and interesting" in the minds of game developers.

I miss seeing primary colors in video games.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Well, there's stuff "for kids" like what Nintendo does. And I'm sure someone will point out sports games and/or Simon Guitar Hero. But yeah, it's all that big English-speaking teams seem to be able to do. Probably because of "market forces".

[octantis.livejournal.com]

It does often seem like the dark stuff outweighs the bright stuff, but then again, maybe we're being conditioned to see or attribute more weight to the dark stuff. Okami was a nice example of a bright and whimsical and unapologetically friendly game, and I'm pleased to see it coming to the Wii as well. The music games have become very popular too. Mario Kart is giving GTA 4 a run for its money now. I'm sure there are other good examples.

[bossgoji.livejournal.com]

Very true. Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents are relentlessly positive, and damn fun to boot. Not to mention being utterly absurd.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, Elite Beat Agents looks really fun that way! I actually think I'd have as much fun watching as I would playing, since then I get to watch the Agents break it down cheerleading. :D What's Ouendan like?

[bossgoji.livejournal.com]

Exactly the same, only with Japanese songs. It's the same play mechanics and you don't really need to know the language to do well. In fact, the extremely high import sales of Ouendan in the USA were what led to the creation of EBA.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how nothing big-budget from an English-speaking developer ever seems to be anything but dark!

[silverblue.livejournal.com]

I used to play GTA3. Obsessively. In some ways what annoyed me was the crack-but-no-real-payoff (and there ISN'T any real payoff, you succeed in a mission you go onto the next one. There's no oomf). It wasn't reallythe 'you can't play a female character as the lead by yourself but you can sure fuck and kill them' thing. After all, God knows how many games, movies, books are designed around that. But the thing on THAT side that pissed me off was the legions of rabid fans defending the GTA series as not showing misogyny or violence because it's just 'gritty realism', and you kill guys and that's the same thing as fucking AND killing women AND not being able to play one as the main PC. The game never pretended to be anything other than junk. But god do the fans need a steamrollering.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

In Vice City I would habitually change my skin to Candy Suxxx, running around committing mayhem like that. I couldn't give her a huge codpiece, unfortunately.

[silverblue.livejournal.com]

Hah, that's what my partner and I wanted to do, but I lacked the impetus :D

[jenkatb4u.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of Ragnarok Online. :< The game world was very pretty and at the same time extremely brutal. People could freely loot items dropped in the alpha version. Later on they implemented a better drop system that rewarded the first hitter(that could still be abused with boss-type enemies if enough people were around to divide up the damage dealt and keep it below the threshold where if someONE(key ONE) were to inflict enough points of damage, they'd get first drop rights)

Anyway. One of the big things in the game was customization and showing status symbols with wearable headgear. Ways to either improve your character and show what you have or just look cool. And then they added pets. More accessories. And you actually went out after finding the charm item to do it with. So it's like a game and that Gaia thing all wrapped up into one and the artwork for it is just beautiful besides.

http://www.roempire.com/database/?page=monsters&act=search
(just put in First Letter you'd like and press GO)

So that was my big addiction and also the big burn out for MMO games. At least until City of Heroes came out and I could 'exercise' my creative side again and make costumes. And it still had status symbols. You got your cape at a certain level and your aura effect at an even later level. If City of Heroes did not have costume creation, I would have never played it.

That's what's lacking in WoW for me.

And the reason I'm not playing GTA4 is because I don't have access to it. c.c; And I don't explicitly have FUNNNN playing the games. I sort of get detached and just look at each thing as a goal. A string of goals. Dots! Point to point connections.

One thing I did have fun with in those games was simply exploring them. c.c; Driving around and then finding all the rooftop accesses and trying to see if I could jump around... Which was another thing in CoH that I did. I would try to scale buildings without any special travel powers. And having to learn the layout of the land when I got super-speed in some areas. Having to see everything and my weird obsession to fill in the whole map as though I were some kind of cartography drone.

GTA is full of different gameplay types. It's just. Full to bursting. @.@

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

If you want a Big Huge game with a great deal of freedom and a more positive message, Oblivion may fit the bill. It WILL take up too much of your life, so I can't recommend it if you want to be productive. I got into Oblivion in between big projects, and I wanted the closest thing to a vacation I'm likey to get: a time where I can drink and play video games for a couple weeks guilt free. But I've enjoyed it a great deal, to the point where I put off buying GTA4 because of it. But it's much more open to making your own narrative. if you want to make a girl with blue skin and orange hair and too much eyeshadow that only uses magic and daggers who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, you can do it. If you want to be a Good Person, the game lets you, more or less.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

See, that's the thing. I don't really want a big huge game at all any more. But here I am with stupid GTA appearing in my life due to someone else.

The last large game I played was Psychonauts, and left to myself I probably wouldn't have played another large game until something else that packed full of whimsey and awesome came along.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil top a lot of "criminally-overlooked" lists. And you really can't go wrong with the guy who created Grim Fandango and Monkey Island, I'm looking forward to his next game Brutal Legend, it's right up my alley. :D

[wondershot.livejournal.com]

I got sucked into WoW periodically. I'd play it for a month or two every summer before I let my subscription run out. Like you with the GTA series, I realized that what I was doing was not a whole lot of fun after the first half hour-- it was mostly pointing and clicking, and collecting crap that would allow me to kill things faster. And afterwards, what do I have to show for it? A wasted afternoon.

These two Dinosaur Comics mostly sum up my feelings on the subject.



And...




I am really fond of what RPGs I've played though-- Chrono Trigger (was that really 12 years ago???) and FFX... I'd buy a PS3 for the sole purpose of playing all the Final Fantasy Games, I just don't have time or money right now.

I also love the old graphic adventure games, particularly the ones by LucasArts. The Dig, Full Throttle, Monkey Island (which I haven't played yet, bizarrely enough). They were so pretty, and didn't take forever to finish. You can find the engine that will play those games here (http://www.scummvm.org/), actually.

Can't wait to see that 9 of Pentacles.

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

I've never played any of the games you list, partially as I'm really more of a Zelda/Mario kind of guy. But I know people that have fallen into the game=addiction thing and who have ended up not only wasting huge amounts of time but have wounded relationships and worse because of them. What I find most interesting about your post is that it works so well both ways; it's a very positive review for those that want their souls sucked into said game, and a great warning for those who don't.

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

While it may be too late from this thread turning into a GTA-snarkfest, I'd like to add some context from the conversation we had while you were playing it for your other readers. Specifically, the fact that you and I have radically different play-styles in the game.

Many folks here are talking about the ways that GTA is the same as past iterations but for me, this is the first GTA I could actually play. I am completely uninterested in the sandbox elements. I am playing it like an RPG (as someone said above), for the story content and atmosphere. Jacking cars and going where I don't belong doesn't appeal to me. For me, it's vapid and window-dressing.

What's fascinating to me is how the game encourages you to roleplay Niko. He isn't the generic "mask of the player" that most RPGs use. He is a very different person than I am. He does some very awful and despicable things. He feels sorry for some and not so much for others. Every time I get to make a decision in the game, I do it through the "filter" of Niko - what would he do? Who would he feel closest to?

"Moreso than usual in this latest one, as every single mission is given to you by a complete asshole who it would be a pleasure to kill."

And I would not have been able to do any of the missions had all the players involved been anything less than despicable. I would not be able to play the game if I had been asked to do horrible things by people who were not horrible themselves.

I don't like killing people in the game. I wish you could do a pacific run of it. I felt really bad for the Chinese store owner whose window you break early in the game, but then when Vlad mentioned that the owner was jacking his prices anyhow, it made more of a logical cohesive sense. For those of you later on in the game, when the choice came, I chose Dwayne. Or rather, Niko would have chosen Dwayne.

Now, I have a laundry list of narrative elements where the game falls apart. The first killing that Niko performed in a mission should have meant something. It should have been a line that he finally crossed in America. (I am aware of his backstory.) Instead, it was for a friend of his cousin who simply hands Niko a gun and says, "Watch my back." The relationship with Niko's first girlfriend is very bland and indicative of the misogyny rampant in the game. (You're doing it to get in her pants, rather than because you and she are two lonely people trying to make the best in the city. Yes, I am aware of the upcoming twist.)

I really wish that they would present a future GTA as a Bertold Brecht-type melodrama. It would make the cartoonish elements of the game much more forgivable and I think the atmosphere of the game is perfect for it.

I remember, I told you about when I started my game and just walked around the city, listening and watching, floored by the atmosphere. I didn't jack any cars, try to get to where I wasn't supposed to go. I was trying to understand the character and his world as the character tried to understand his world. And that is where I think the game succeeds admirably.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I got to the point where I felt revolted at both the things I was doing, AND the people I was doing it for.

What mission was it you wanted us to try and get through for you again?

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

"What mission was it you wanted us to try and get through for you again?"

Out of the Closet... and Out of the Closet... Part 2 please.

I've already done the Banshee and NRG900 missions (FAQ). I didn't kill anyone during those.

Many thanks :)

In the meantime, I've been greatly enjoying Lil Cheney's horrific bloodbath through the land of Hyrule on his demon mare Epona.

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

Also, it sounds like you seriously overdosed on a game that wasn't meant to be played as much as you did in one weekend. *hugs*

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Basically, yes. I have no control when it comes to this series. I have problems with large video games eating huge chunks of time because I get locked into them, and this kind of "open-ended sandbox" gameplay is the worst. I don't actually enjoy playing these things for the most part, but if I see it being played the stupid addiction circuit wakes up and I have to play. And I can't stop until I build up sufficient self-loathing.

Which doesn't go away once I stop playing the damn thing, either.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Actually, PP DOES have in game gambling. And just because it is technically impossible to convert PP $ out to real $, doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

The Half-Life series may be more your speed. Smaller, shorter chunks of decent gaming. And Portal should be perfect for you.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I played Portal when it came out. It's one of two FPSs I've actually cared enough about to bother finishing.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Agreed, especially about the rewarding/tedious balance that makes a game addicting. Oddly, I hate WoW but forgive City of Heroes/Villains, primarily for the costume designer.

GTA - all of them... well I love them simply because Orlando traffic is 13miles/hour and sometimes it's just nice to steal a car, make it go as fast as it can and smash everything in sight, then steal another.

Sympathize with the lost time.

[orb2069.livejournal.com]

Kiilllllllllllll FRENZY!

Loved GTA2 and riding around in my fly Ice Cream/hot dog truck, never really cared for the newer ones.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I came up with a solution to the GTA problem, which I'm quite proud of... I flung the disc onto the roof of the building across the way. Problem solved.