No matter how hard I try, I can’t separate what I make with Grand
Theft Auto from what Rockstar made with it. Not now, not in 2008, not in
2001.
V
For a moment last month, it looked like I was going to write a
freelance review of the GTA V PC
release. The thought was exciting and terrifying. I’d tweeted about the game
before, back when it had first released, but I never had the space (or the contract assignment) to realize a
final long form piece that developed a more comprehensive read on the game.
Those early tweets weren’t groundbreaking,
but I stand by them. What a beautiful, mean game. What a gorgeous, cruel world.
I liked the heists, I cringed at the homophobia. I loved the soundtrack, I
hated the torture. And these blemishes were both stitched into the game’s story
and dribbled out across the world. Unavoidable. Inescapable.
But I couldn’t just write the review that I would’ve written about GTA V back in 2013. The PC port brought some
new stuff: The Rockstar Editor, which lets players capture and cut together
footage into short films; Director Mode ties into that editor, offering you
options to play as different characters (including animals) and adjust numerous
variables so you can get just the shot you want for your clips; Custom
radio stations, which include station identifiers and radio bumpers. There was
also the stuff that rolled out on other platforms, but long after I’d stopped
playing: a first-person mode with physics that were more like Far Cry 2 than Call of Duty 4; Expanded features in GTA Online, from new character customization options to unique,
cooperative heists. Features on features on features on features.
So, of course, I spend my first night with the PC release GTA V’s ignoring these and doing
something I could’ve done in the first week the game came out: I explore the hilly outskirts of Los Santos with my friend Jack. We find a corner where
there were no gross signs, where no one was punching down, where we could avoid
the dialog written by people who were dedicated to the notion that to shock was to impress.
We pose for photos at the game’s replication of the Hollywood
Bowl. We jump off of roofs and into pools. We drive around and listen to music
together.
Then, somewhere downtown, we swing past a parking lot near one of the
tunnels that runs under the streets of Los Santos. My eyes pass over the
beige pavement and to a tunnel, perpendicular to the lot, its fluorescent
lights giving the back wall a haunting glow even at noon. And then, all at
once, I also feel the moment four years ago when I swung into that same parking lot in Los Angeles. My friends and I were
on our way to see an Important Guest Lecture at a nearby theater, and we were
filled with the strange energy of an obligation you know you’re lucky to have.
And I feel that energy now, in 2015, too, and for a brief moment my mind
does a tumble. Not quite déjà vu but
not just nostalgia, either. The light was the same, and the lot—at just
this angle, with the tunnel in the background, and the warmth, and a friend in
the car and—
A sort of time travel, I think.
I spend the next three days trying to find the real parking lot on
Google Maps. And it’s so clear—the lights, the heat, the car, the distance to
that fountain around that corner where there was that convenience store? You
know? And I can’t find it. I look and look and look and I can’t find it.
And maybe it’s gone, right? Maybe there’s a building there now.
Later that week, I drive back there alone in GTA
V, and I just sit and watch the day pass by so I can see it in the right
light, and there it is. And I think about the last five years, the move from
New York to California, the move from California to Ontario, Canada. I think
about the parking lots and people I’ll miss five years from now. And I think
about the parking lots and people I’ll forget.
IV
Five years ago, I left New York because the economy fell out from
under me. In the years that followed, when I was too broke to visit the city
that had become my home, I retreated to Grand Theft Auto IV.
Do not get it
twisted, no game could capture the complexity and vivacity of New York. But
when I sat down in the little beer garden in the game’s not-Astoria, I’d turn
up the sound and let the sounds of surrounding strangers soothe me. I’d
walk up and down faux-Prospect Park. I’d catch sight of the skyline from Rockstar’s rendition of Jersey City, where I’d lived for a year just after college, and
I’d think about my rides into work on the little Jitney buses. Other games had
offered a simulacrum of Manhattan, but GTA
IV offered the peripheries of what most folks on the planet think of as New
York City.
There were experiences that I wasn’t looking to recreate, though.
For
a while, when I first moved to New York in 2007, I worked in the World
Financial Center. Suits and ties I couldn’t really pull off, and angry clients, and executives who fired women for taking maternity leave. The place was adjacent
to ground zero. I walked past the dust every day.
Everyday, I told people (and myself) that I was unfazed by the location, by the corporate culture, by the way the (brown)
workers who provided the most value for the company were crammed by the dozen
onto a low level floor while the administrators, technocrats, and executives
had privacy and breathing room up on floor 30 or 40 something. (I definitely didn’t tell people how much it made me hate myself that, somehow, despite being in a support staff position, I was
up there with them). I looked down on
cranes and construction hats from the lunch room and tried to convince myself
to keep the gig.
Finally, I complained to my boss, and to some friends, and family and in what I think they thought of as encouragement, I was reminded that this is what I wanted. It was New York, right? It was worth it, I was told.
It was worth it. It was worth it. So I stayed in place and at the same time drifted away from that family, those friends, and myself.
And then, like the parking lot in GTA V, I slammed into this past I’d preferred to forget:
I’m (finally, years after everyone else) playing The Ballad of Gay Tony. I’m glad I waited: It offers me a way to revisit Liberty City as someone other than Niko, who I’d soured on by the end of the base game. And I’m so glad to be back.
It’s still early on still when I’m led to confront a criminal
acquaintance at a nearby driving range before chasing him down through the
financial district in a golf cart. And then—It is a sudden moment, twisting around the
corner of southern, domed tower of the World Financial Center. And there it was
for just a second. A heavy second. The corner of the building, and the long,
low stairs, and the Hudson river. This
was not remembering friends. This was not a singular, thrilling night. I’ve never looked for this
place on a map.
There is a genre of horror that emphasizes the terror of
non-Euclidean geometry. Halting lines and squared-circles. But our own geometry is
terrifying enough. Strange angles can’t convey the weight that familiar ones
can. I haven’t gone back to GTA IV since.
What is it that lets these games do this to me? They aren’t
photorealistic, really. Maybe they’re a textbook example of how “realism” isn’t
the only sort of naturalism. There are other, emotional naturalisms that aren’t
about representation of shape and light and color, but about feeling and psychology and history.
At their best, these games do more than force us into a single
vision of the world. They let us fill in the gaps, let us pick up the brush to paint our own image, whether naturalistic or absurdist or baroque or grindhouse or something that can’t be reduced to filmic or art historical terminology or or or…
Through a combination of the director mode, the online play, and (of course) mods,
there are tools to turn Grand Theft Auto
V into something else. Put the whole city under
water. Explore the world as a deer. Enact your biker
gang fantasy (including hierarchical dress codes).
In some ways, this isn’t
even new. Rockstar has been giving us a palette to play with for 15 years now. Now,
we have director mode, but back in 2001, we had cheat codes. Beyond that, when I
first saw GTA III’s open world, the whole
thing felt like a cheat code or a living palette. “You mean I can go anywhere?”
Yeah, sort of. But I’d spent more time in some places than others.
III
It’s late October 2001 and I’m practically vibrating at work.
Dad
still owns his clothing store in that mall on the Atlantic City boardwalk. I
know it’s just about closing time because the noise of people in the mall has
quieted down enough for me to hear the Daytona
USA machine in the arcade next door—Daytooooona,
let’s go awayyy. I get the nod from dad and practically sprint down the
hall towards KB Toys where, I hope, they won’t card me when I ask for a copy of
Grand Theft Auto III. They don’t. So that
night, I disappear into Liberty City and find a corner where I can try to aggressively forget the last eight weeks.
I’d spent the last two months working at dad’s store after school
and on weekends, watching and re-watching the footage—that footage—on the
store’s TV. Those familiar angles, and man, he and I were just there a month
ago. Jay-Z’s Blueprint played in the
background all month. The takeover, the
break’s over nigga / God MC, me,
Jay-HOVA / Hey lil’ soldier, you ain’t ready for war..—and I wasn’t ready
for war, no, but on TV we were gearing up and I didn’t have the words yet to
really voice a coherent complaint. They did do this to us, right? Them? I could
hear it, I was on the edge of a response, and I’d find one soon enough but at
that moment I was still in shock and not quite confident enough to speak up.
The day it happened, I was one of the ones that didn’t believe it.
It was during the first session of my high school Current Events class, and the
teacher had a history of being cagey and interesting and “tuned in.” So I smirked and shook my
head when the broadcaster on the radio talked about a tower coming down. I turned to a friend with a look on my face like I knew a secret he didn’t. “This is probably some radio drama, like War of the Worlds, you know? He just wants to see how we’ll
react.” But then other students in other classes—ones who didn’t have Mr. Cochran’s
third period class—they’d heard the same thing. And then the announcement.
That afternoon, when we all knew what was happening, I was in a
car on my way to northeastern Pennsylvania. My great-grandfather had just died a
day or two prior, and the funeral was on the 12th. But all I could
think about was my uncle and his partner, whose train lines passed right under
it all. No one could get hold of him. We drove through Philly and I don’t think
I’ve ever studied a skyline so seriously before or since.
My Uncle and his partner were fine, if shook. They had the story
you heard a lot that year: “I missed my first train, and if I hadn’t…” “I got
off a stop early to get coffee, but what if…” I’ve heard people say that these
stories are a working-through of survivor’s guilt, and yeah, okay, I see that.
But they’re terrifying in their own right, too: A reminder that so much is
contingent on chance.
I’ve spent the last few years decrying different sorts of power
fantasies, especially those that—with an illusionist’s grace—at once erase the
risk of failure while simultaneously assuring us of our prowess. I’ve insisted
that we should let ourselves experience media and then be critical of it (and
of our own responses). But the work of that criticism is only half-done if we
end at “This is how I feel” or “This is a power fantasy.” We should push it to
“Why does it make me feel this way?” and to “What context does this fantasy exist
in?” and “To what ends is this being put to use?”
My fantasy unfurled itself on that one corner on GTA III’s version of Liberty City,
specifically on Staunton Island, the game’s metropolitan second section. You
know, that corner?
Let’s see, from memory:
It’s Christmas morning, and I’m still 16, and my parents are still asleep. I do what I always do when I want to kill time now: I boot up GTA III.
I leave the hospital and go south, or at least… it feels like I’m going geographically “down” from there. The sea is off to my left, at a distance, and in front of me, a construction site. Metal scaffolding and temporary, blue walls separate me from the dirt and
ground and the skeleton of a building. Below and to the left there’s a downward slope, then a little curving highway and a tunnel, I think?
(I described this corner to my friend Cameron Kunzelman, who recently finished a critical let’s play of the game, and he knew exactly what I meant: “You know that construction area? On the second island? There’s a highway nearby.” “Yep. Where the Columbians are.” “Right. Well, for a period of time it’s them + the Yakuza + someone else even, maybe?” “The Yardies are there too.” “Right! Right!” And then Cameron linked me directly to a video with the corner I meant. Watch, at 3:13 as he is slammed into by the SUV. That’s the spot.)
And here, in this corner, violence. Not
violence against me, but violence I can watch. Violence to spectate safely (and,
sometimes, to influence.) Those factions fought over this territory endlessly. For the majority of the game, there was no permanent ownership, just an endless shifting back and forth of current occupancy. All over this empty lot filled with girders and dust. Where the contingency of life in general is maintained, but my continued life particularly is assured. And when my
life does come under threat, the cheat codes can come out to protect me. To transform this place into what I need.
At the end of the game, the Columbian Cartel leaves the area. I’m so disappointed. I loved that space of conflict so much. I’m 16 and I love seeing little computer
people interact with other little computer people. I liked it in The Sims, where each person felt defined
and discrete, and I liked it in Syndicate,
where a mass of indistinct human bodies moved through the urban flow. And I
love it here, in GTA III, even though motion and violence (and fluid combinations of these) are the only verbs the little
computer people knew.
In 2015, that corner is fascinating to me no for different
reasons: For the naked, steel beams of the construction site, and for the conflict
between caricatures of international ethnic groups, and for how those tie to the context of Fall 2001. These days, I can’t seem to separate GTA III from the time of its release—from
that Jay-Z album, from that trip to Pennsylvania, from my awkward teen pacifism.
I think I read the “Cuts
and Changes” section of the game’s Wikipedia page twice yearly. Darkel, a
transient revolutionary character, was left on the cutting room floor. A
mission that had you bombing civilians, too. The cop cars—once clearly the blue
and white New York cruisers—became generic black-and-whites.
Oh and the Dodo, how could I forget the Dodo—the only pilotable
aircraft in the game? A plane with snipped wings which didn’t so much fly as
surf or fall strategically. It’s not clear if the Dodo
ever had the ability to fly normally,
but the urban myth at the time was that the wings had been removed so that
players couldn’t recreate any of the events of that September. What is known, that Wikipedia section
reports, is that there had been a “(now abandoned) mission to loft the plane
high enough in its brief flight and reach new areas of the city.” Gone. Let’s not even encourage the players to learn how to glide the damned thing around.
It’s perfect. It’s a sort of mirror version of Teen Austin working
through the event by standing at that corner watching random (no, algorithmic)
acts of violence over and over again. But instead of confronting violence,
Rockstar’s devs tried to erase this one taboo version of it. It’s like a Star Trek story, or something a Superman villain would do: “Planes did
us great trauma on a long, Fall day,” they bellow, “Now they are consigned to fall
forever.”
To One
The truth is, I haven’t lost the love for GTA’s situated, controlled chaos. But now more than ever, I love
what’s in the periphery of the violence more. So, yeah, I like the new multi-stage
heists, where each player takes on a different important role in the
proceedings. But even more than that, I love that we have to convene together
in someone’s apartment to plan the thing out, and that when we’re done, we get a great scene of our characters just being together, relaxing,
celebrating.
But once the scene is over you can’t go back inside. The doors—like
many to the interior spaces of Los Santos—lock behind you.
And that’s the lesson: This isn’t our world, really. We can climb the hills and take
photos and record little movies and listen to our own music while we do it.
This is fantastic. If the original release of GTA V was a museum filled with works made and curated by Rockster, then
this PC release is a palette and a canvas. But while we can paint, we can’t
bring our own colors to paint with. The palette is limited. And you still have
to hang your painting in GTA V’s
museum.
Which is why (again, now more than ever,) I’m frustrated with how they
contextualize the violence through boring, attention seeking stereotypes and shitty jokes—not just offensive jokes, but poorly conceived jokes. Unfunny
unless you agree with a broken premise.
A friend’s response to these sorts
of jokes is perfect: Ask the comedian to explain what makes it funny. And so
I’d love to sit the writers down and ask “Hey, you know how during the set up
for the first Online Mode heist, Lester (an NPC built on the premise that ‘lol
nerds’) recognizes that your characters don’t speak (which is actually, briefly
clever) and then transitions into a joke about them ‘being on the spectrum’? Well, what’s the bit there? What’s the punchline? Is it ‘haha autism?’ Is it ‘haha
awkward nerds?’ I just really gotta know.”
You learn a lot about a comedian by
learning what jokes they won’t tell, what lines they won’t cross, and I can’t
help but to think back to 2001. Planes. Nope. Revolutionary homeless
populations? Not a good fit. But in 2015, we have transphobic billboards and
caricatures throughout the city because apparently that’s quality material.
I want to handwave this stuff away so I can focus on the car
chases and the machinima and the mods and the multiplayer time wasting. But no
matter how hard I try, I can’t separate what I make with Grand Theft Auto from
what Rockstar made with it. Not now, not in 2008, not in 2001.
But I also can’t seem to separate my life—and moments of
maturation—from the series. Because it’s 2009 and I’m writing a review of GTA: Chinatown Stories and I’m amazed
someone would pay me to write 1900 words about a DS game. And it’s also 2005
and I’m in the basement of my college Student Center, in the game room, chasing
around my friend in Liberty City Stories’
“Hit List” mode, and “Dum
Maro Dum” is playing and it sounds incredible, but—maybe for the first
time—I wonder what I mean when I say a song sounds “exotic.” And it’s 2002 and
I’m anxious in my friend’s bedroom, wondering why he’d hang out with someone
like me, watching him edit our crappy short film on his computer while I spin through GTA 2’s cyberpunk sprawl on my laptop. And it’s 2001 again, and I’m there, and
Philly is behind us, and I sigh and take out my Gameboy Color in the back seat
of the car and I start playing Grand Theft
Auto. I read recently that GTA III would
be coming out soon for the PS2 and I cannot wait for it. It seems so big. I
heard you could do almost anything.
And it’s May 27th, 2015, and I’m writing this on a bus
to New York. I’m carrying this computer, Merritt Kopas’ Videogames
for Humans, a copy of the tabletop game Burning Wheel Gold, a microphone, a pen, and some clothing. I’m about two month from my 30th birthday. And I
have some idea what comes next, but really I just…
This is my final Patreon post. For now anyway.
I cannot thank you
all enough for your continued love and support. The last few months have been
incredibly stressful, and your money has allowed me to write pieces (even indulgent pieces like this
one) that I wouldn’t have been able to. And, just as importantly, you’ve helped
me to pay my rent doing by that.
But now I’m going to have someone else helping me to pay my rent.
Starting on June 1st, I’ll be joining Vinny Caravella and Alex Navarro
in Giant Bomb’s East Coast office. Maybe you already know that because you’ve listened to this week’s Giant Beastcast. I’m thrilled and excited and anxious and a
billion other things. (Multitudes, right?) I have lots of challenges ahead, and I’m excited to
tackle them.
So, now that I’ve got some steady employment, I’m shutting down my
Patreon. But please, please, please, consider leaving the money in the
ecosystem. Find someone else to support, because there are so many other
incredible writers, thinkers, and creators who are just as talented and
deserving as me, but who don’t have steady income. So take a peak at some of
the folks I’m supporting, but don’t stop there. Phil Kollar made a pretty great
list over on his blog a few months ago, and there are tons of great people on
that list too. And if there’s someone else you think should be supported, please comment below with a link.
I love you all. I hope I can do right by you in the future. And, if you have it in you, I hope you can help keep me honest.
-Austin Walker