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Monday 6 October, 2008
Third Session:
At this point, I felt compelled to dally around the city, picking up a nice car to speed the streets, view the parks, narrowly avoid crashing into fellow automobiles, and attempt to obey the law. The tricky part about following the law, especially when you are driving a vehicle, is the control scheme: it is so very easy to accelerate too quickly, and fairly difficult to make turns without banging into a car on the opposite side of the street. Since you, as the player, feel no real accountability, there isn't much to fret if you do indeed hit another car, but there is a sense of frustration with the inability to successfully follow the law.
During my scouting of the city, it's quite clear the developers painted a canvas of overtly stereotypical urbanites. From vagabonds to pimps to jocks, Liberty City is run amuck with a colorful, interactive populace. The sound quips from some of these, especially the seedy park types, are really cliched variants of city punks and the like. Does it stimulate some kind of resentment on the part of the player? I suppose it could. There may be some underpinning psychological tendency to slug a few of these guys, especially if you are negatively drawn to their caricature, but for the most part they are just another piece of the Liberty City clockwork. And each one can just as easily be on the opposite end of my pistol's barrel.
Trudging through the missions always leaves me desiring time to just play around in the world. This is usually why I find myself writing logs concerning the virtual mechanics of the city, and not so much the concerns of the actual game's missions. At the end of the day, I'm not so much bothering myself over the racial, moral, and political dimensions of the game -- while they are certainly present, it's always the playability of an open world that draws my attention than the amateurish attempts at stimulating ethical accountability. I like to play GTA IV facetiously: to me, regardless of my opinion on how morally inappropriate it may be to do in real life, few things in videogames are as satisfying as positioning oneself atop a building and placing the corsair of my sniper tightly around a mindlessly walking pedestrian. And maybe that's the point -- should I feel sick about pulling the trigger and in cold blood murdering some innocent lady dawdling down the sidewalk after work? I sure feel sick writing about it, but when you're in a virtual game world and there are no real world consequences (only the sense of feeling sick and knowing you've done wrong), not much prevents you from enjoying it.
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