Grand Theft Auto IV in retrospect: it sucks, and a Pulitzer winning novelist agrees

The first and perhaps last videogame I ever went to pick up at midnight was Grand Theft Auto IV. While it would appear that GTA's success has hinged on its unchecked id raging away in a world without consequence, the real reason the Grand Theft Auto games became bona fide successes was that it truly set a new paradigm, the sandbox style of gameplay. GTA drops you in an open ended world where you are left to do for the most part as you please, constrained only by the geography and physics of that world. It was just as fun wasting hours harassing pedestrians or trying to jump a motorcycle between two skyscrapers or even for that matter obsessively stalking the landscape learning what might be hidden on a rooftop or alleyway - or heck, sometimes just to get a great view - as it was to advance the narrative. That's the real heart of GTA's success: it essentially gave us a set of action figures and a limitless playset to wreak havoc with, urban spaces so well defined we learned them like real cities.

It's this limitless set of possibilities that truly remains the reason for GTA's success. The bad boy aspects, with all that oft reported maiming of hookers and driving down innocent pedestrians we could sort of excuse for such beautiful gameplay. The crime milieu the game was set in was so crude and the satirical veneer painted over its pseudo America so over the top that one didn't have to take it so seriously.The height of the GTA series remains for me Vice City. By transposing the gameplay to a ludicrous and stylized cartoon combination of Scarface and Miami Vice everything cohered: the mass murdering your protagonist must take part in made sense with all the excess of the 80s around him, and the soundtrack was a work of genius.

But the gaming press, still adfit, still writing about quality as a subset of numerical values, they were praising GTA IV to high heaven. This game, they said, finally combined those aspects of the GTA series with something truly meaningful. This was videogaming's Godfather II, its Sopranos. The story resonated and forced you into hard moral choices. And the thing truly was a work of art. Artist Tom Sachs even went so far as to call it the defining artwork of our time despite never having played it and showing a limited sense of what turning on a videogame entails. Now that's lofty hyperbole.

But I was a believer, because three previous installments ranked not as my favorite games of all time but definitely as some of the most fun; a good time in GTA makes you impose narrative, not the other way around, a random adventure contained within the game rules becoming a boring story for your mates. And the gaming press, again, was ecstatic.

Having now completed the game a few months later, or at least finally closed the narrative that grounds it, I can say easily that I am even more embarassed I picked it up at midnight than ever before. And thankfully more sanity abounds. In what I can only call the first truly great piece of games criticism, Junot Diaz, he of the incredible The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao sets everyone straight.

Grand Theft Auto IV is the most incredible creation of an urban environment ever witnessed by humankind grafted onto some of the shoddiest, most backwards, confused, hypocritical gameplay and narrative. Game creator Sam Houser likes to repeatedly talk about how he's come to realize his games do one better than the movies or television at telling these stories. While its hard to argue with the series' financial success let's be honest while admitting the games offer fun... The storytelling in GTAIV is so shoddy, with a such a ridiculously stupid notion of free will and player choice that it doesn't even come close to the moral complexity of a single episode of the Sopranos. This is a game to wit in which a melodramatic scene plays out where one gets to take part in that long standing movie cliche: the hero who has the villain finally in his sights and has every great motivation to pull the trigger on them, but can be a better man and walk away. And if one does, and really thinks this has consequence, guess again, because the story is going to put you right afterwards into your character having no choice but executing hundreds. Even better, the game purposely defeats your choice with personal tragedy immediately thereafter, as if to say that your choice had no consequence other than furthering the shoddy story. And what a pretentious stab at crime epic this is, which does start rather promisingly enough, with you from the Balkans having come to America to take part in the immigrant experience and seek revenge. That angle quickly devolves into cliche as you yet again deal with the Italian mafia. Yawn.

What's apparent is that this hubristic view of having conquered the cinema business means that the games' designers have spent most of their time writing and creating cutscenes that combine the expletives of a Martin Scorcese crime epic with the aesthetic of a Thunderbirds puppet show. Imagine Team America World Police as directed by one of Tarantino's lesser clones from the mid 90s. Because it feels like an awful lot of effort went into that silliness while a lot of gameplay from the previous chapters has been removed. The art direction is fantastic, for certain, but there's a great disconnect with the adult nature of things from the rather hilarious motion capture grafted onto what look like wax mannequins designed by Ron Mucek. At least they're clothed.

The hard part in writing all this is that the environment of Liberty City is truly stunning and no one has ever created from scratch such an involved, lucid simulacra of a city ever in any medium. It's astounding. But that spell is broken by things that were not problems in lower tech iterations of the previous games. Cabbies and pedestrians convincingly go about their lives, making small talk. Until you hear the cabbie say the same thing every five seconds, and every cabbie nearby doing the same. Or the time I entered a building and everyone within looked exactly the same, which was at least surreally funny. Every time you flick to a different radio station odds are vast that you're likely to hear the exact same dj banter you heard only minutes ago.

Stupid gameplay decisions abound. You still have to hit the A button to run anywhere with any sense of convenience, which leads to carpal tunnel syndrome. You still have a tendency in firefights to target innocent pedestrians half a mile away from you when a thug is shooting you point blank in the face. And for whatever insane reason for a game called Grand Theft Auto, car handling is a nightmare in this one - perhaps it was meant to be mastered, but its just not fun to drive in this game. Or the fact that the story need be furthered by phone calls after every mission, calls that can get disrupted by random traffic or doing something innocuous like getting out of a car. And for all the majesty of every corner of Liberty City being tremendous, the place feels emptier and less involving than ever before, because so much is inaccessible and there are no real rewards for your own initiative. For every homicidal fantasy acted out there were people who play GTA like good samaritans, doing things like driving ambulances to hospitals with sick people. All of that has been stripped from the game.

Worst of all is the so called element that was supposed to expand and surpass the emotional involvement of a movie: the friends system. You meet characters and befriend them. You spend the majority of your time now in GTA, if you want to keep these friends, answering their calls in the middle of drive bys, having to take them at inopportune moments to the same pool hall for the fortieth time. It is constant and neverending. Pretty soon GTA IV has turned you into an embittered social curmudgeon who wishes your phone would stop ringing, just so you can, you know, play a fucking video game.

GTAIV is imbued with the worst kind of pretension: it believes in its grandiosity when offering mere churlish, childish approximations of older, slower less interactive mediums. A debate rages as to whether games require less cinematic story bits than ever before. GTAIV actually for the first time makes me agree. Games will not surpass cinema by doing what it does on its own terms - it has to surpass cinema by doing things cinema cannot. And never before has the moral confusion of the GTA games been so clearer than when it tries to impose a character upon you with silly plays at sentimentality and sympathy for its lead character. It's a stupidly jarring thing to watch "you" question all this violence only moments later to have to become a homicidal maniac in order to further the story. It's another thing on a whole other level entirely to ask for a true love interest with tragic dimensions in a world where you can go beat women up in a strip club or a mission which has you beating a kidnapped woman. This is what the gaming press would have the mainstream press believe one ups the movie theater. There isn't a single moment in GTAIV with the clarity of moral confusion exhibited currently in a movie about a millionaire who dresses up as a bat.

Saddest of all, GTAs strength, its city, is the result of an unashamed one hundred million dollars in production costs, minimum. Trumpeted loudly by its developer. That will buy you one great city. But as with other mediums, a ton of cash never buys a better story. In praising GTAIV endlessly the gaming community has backed Rockstar's dominance with a vote of consumer confidence that I dearly hope does not affect games to their detriment. It's a staggering narrative, moral, gameplay leap backwards that I can say is not ultimately worth your time. One can only hope that Rockstar can see past the rapturous praise and piles of cash to offer us a next iteration that spends less time forcing us to do and be things and more time letting us play.