Abstract
This article has two goals: one is to establish techniques for content analysis of a virtual environment, Liberty City, as part of a dynamic textual object, Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV). The second is to demonstrate these techniques with an analysis in the narrative of GTA IV as a very modernist, dystopian version of the American Dream. Further, the suitability of the video game as a medium for modernist themes and concerns as exemplified by the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot will be explored. Liberty City is an interactive city which a player can experience, rather than read about, answering many of the questions modernist writers posed to their frustrating, linear medium.
Introduction
In the early part of the 20th century, writers and poets were coming to terms with constructing narratives in a new, “modern” way, in order to represent new “modern” experiences. Among these was the character of modern, urban life. Most famously, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot pushed the boundaries of narrative fiction in order to capture the spirit of the experience, rather than its trivial materiality (Woolf, The Common Reader, 1925b). Those early modern cities, Dublin, London, and New York City, were the metropolises of their day, and their seeming chaos tested the limits of the novel as a medium. From these stream-of-consciousness examples of prose, contemporary depictions of even greater metropolises have evolved. In the Grand Theft Auto series of video games, Rockstar Games have called upon a new medium, with its own rhetorics to simulate the experience of modern urban life in some of the world’s largest cities.
This article has two goals: the first is to explore the formal nature of video games and the second is to perform an analysis of Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) and Liberty City as modernist constructions. The formal structure of video games is an answer to many of the questions modernist writers asked of their medium in attempting to represent the new experiences of modern life. As such, not only does the subject matter of GTA IV’s narrative express a dystopian modern experience but the ontological structure of the video game environment, Liberty City, functions to approximate the experience itself more completely than poetry, novel, or film can manage. The two projects are inextricably tangled, as the reason for the experimentations in form found in modern literature is largely due to the unsuitability of the medium to express the experiences that were the subject matter. Form and theme are not independent in this case, so each impacts the other quite self-consciously. For this discussion, the content analyzed will be restricted to narrative plot events, characters, and the visual/geographical features of the city itself. This is not to purposefully exclude elements such as sound or ethnographic analysis, but merely a matter of scope.
Game Ontology—What Is “in” a Game?
Defining games in general and video games in particular has been a challenge from the inception of game studies and the seminal works of Johann Huizinga (1949) and Roger Caillois (1962). These two works were influential to subsequent texts on the subject, notably Salen and Zimmerman (2004), which is itself an important text in the short history of video game studies. The narratology/ludology debate is an example of a battle for definitions. This study seeks to move past the adversarial tone of that discourse (cf. Wardrip-Fruin, 2004). Focusing tightly on video games has yielded useful results for the criticism of the medium, and I propose a definition here based on an active model concept of video games. Working from Aarseth’s (1997) notion of an ergodic text being made up of interconnected parts, and of the distinction between rules and fiction presented by Juul (2005), I suggest that the video game is a network. Systems thinking and actor–network theory provide a framework for the notion of video games as a collection of “nodes” between which flows of information pass in various relationships (cf. the work of Bruno Latour). The understanding that a machine of this sort must be studied in situ and while “switched on” is of vital importance to the study of a video game (Malaby, 2007; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, pp. 150–248). This fundamental aspect to the video game model is also supported by, and supports, the understandings of procedural rhetoric as outlined by Ian Bogost (2007), where there are particular meanings inscribed into a video game that only become salient when the game is actively played, tested, and experienced.
The player of a video game is a node, and he or she maintains a player model of the entire system mentally, as an understanding of what the game means and how it works. The core of the video game as an object is a triad of machine, aesthetic material, and interface. The code of the machine both establishes the “game rules,” such as winning conditions for a round of capture the flag or a king of the hill, and also the physics of the gameworld. The aesthetic material is best described as the “art” or “decoration” but is fundamental to the video game. Without art, the video game is reduced to code and is probably unplayable; certainly, it lacks the sensual character of art. The aesthetics include visual assets, music, and sound, as well as larger structures such as narrative paths that structure the player experience. This material is governed by the machine; it selects based on input and rules which content to display and how to display it. The machine is often designed in such a way as to deliver that material in concerted effort with a dramatic plot, that is, revealing certain turns of events after a series of challenges have been completed. Juul refers to these as “games of progression” (2005, pp. 67–73). The interface is the physical hardware that facilitates both input and output. In this case, the interface consists of television screen, speakers, and a game controller.
This article will examine the way that a video game, GTA IV,interacts with the player. The video game presents the player with meaningful fiction not unlike the fiction presented by novels or films, but in a dynamic experience that encapsulates certain themes that underlie key modernist texts. As novels, these texts could describe the themes of urbanity and modernity, but as a simulation, GTA IV can demonstrate those same themes. Some of the content of GTA IV is arguably old media for which there are established methods of analysis. For example, significant social satire occurs via radio talk-back shows the player/character listens to while driving (which can take up a lot of play time). Performing a content analysis of the radio programs is a relatively straightforward and productive task. However, one must never lose sight of the actual mode of experience of these radio shows: they are progressively released through pursuit of the game story and play according to the game’s internal logic. While an industrious researcher might be able to browse through audio files of the radio shows in any order, the player cannot. This changes the relationship between the “listener” (or player) and the content of some of the radio shows. For example, if a media scholar who had not played the game were given a copy of the various news reports from GTA IV, the fact that many of Niko’s exploits are reported in the news as they happen may be overlooked.
So when performing a content analysis of a video game, the algorithmic content must not be overlooked. While the radio shows, billboard advertisements, and television are media found within media in a McLuhanist sense, they are not independent of the binding rules of the video game machine. Narrative can also be contained in a video game, but in a special case. In a novel or film, there is but one narrative arc, one series of events that flows through the text. In a video game, events are contingent and so narrative can be made up of a selection of different textual elements in different orders. So, while it is fair to say a narrative may form throughout the play experience, one cannot divorce the narrative from the situated play experience. For example, Henry Jenkins (2004) suggests the term narrative architecture to describe how narrative may arise from dynamic interaction in a virtual space. On the disc, multiple potential narratives exist, but this is not identical to the one single narrative a player will experience and remember as part of the player model.
Finally, a note about scope: this study will be resigned to a discursive exploration of narrative plot events and the visual representation of Liberty City. Explorations of how Liberty City is constructed along ethnographic, postcolonial grounds are mentioned, but not pursued in depth here. The soundscape, including ambient sound effects, voices and the prominence of the radio as part of experiencing Liberty City is also not explored here. Both are omissions made for reasons of length, but could, among many other lenses, receive in-depth treatments of their own.
Analytical Methods and Concepts
As noted above, there is a relationship to be understood between Liberty City and the real world. This contradicts Salen and Zimmerman’s emphasis on the magic circle, which would cut off the video game from real life (2004, pp. 92–99). Isolating GTA IVas a game with no relationship to the culture which produced it is an untenable position, if one pays any attention to the fictional world the game projects. For this discussion, we cannot simply categorize GTA IV as a fantastic escape into nonreality which is entirely self-referential, especially in light the developer’s turn toward realism. These notions of isolation and boundaries must be addressed and modified, so that a video game may be seen as commenting just as seriously on the real world as may a fictional novel. The concept of “reading” or “interpreting” must also be expanded to reflect the player/critic’s position as partly within the virtual world/text.
Alexander Galloway suggests that games can be broadly lumped into two categories, “those that have as their central conceit the mimetic reconstruction of real life, and those resigned to fantasy worlds of various kinds” (Galloway, 2004). At first, this seems a useful distinction, but breaks down in the case of GTA IV, especially since Galloway classifies GTA III as one of the latter, fantasy-based games. As described above, GTA IV moves us much closer to a “mimetic reconstruction of real life” in terms of graphics, physics, and even social interaction with the non-player character (NPC) pedestrians of the city. Furthermore, the wider architecture of Liberty City is clearly a mediation of New York City and surrounding suburbs. Does the fact that this city does not actually call itself New York outweigh the very obvious relationship between the two? Galloway’s understanding of realism extends into the narrative structure as well as the representational and for digital games, the operational or mechanic realism. These concepts will prove more useful than a general classification as simply “real” or “fantasy.” One must also continually look for truth in fiction, and not ignore what might be learned there.
Video games are not only labeled as virtual and imaginary as opposed to real. Gordon Calleja (2010) examines another binary label used to trivialize video games: Their relationship to play, which when opposed to work, is largely defined by its nonreality. This doubly renders video games as an artifact of no cultural significance. After long meditations on the nature of play and escaping reality, Calleja concludes that no medium is in itself escapist, no more or less suited to procrastination or avoidance of some other task. Further, that whether escapism is present or not is not the issue, but rather we must avoid “losing sight of the interconnectedness of both worlds—the ordinary and the wondrous.” Calleja echoes the feeling of Baudelaire and Eliot who both pursued that same connection. For GTA IV, which can function as a tool for distraction, procrastination or simply escapism, there is the palpable link to the real world in virtually every piece of aesthetic material the player is presented with. The video game is truly self-conscious in that it is representing exactly the kind of world in which it sits itself as an artifact, and is reflecting that world quite critically.
As mentioned above, GTA IV contains a number of different media artifacts within the wider video game world. That video game world, Liberty City, acts as a kind of conceptual glue that holds the other content together in a simulation of real space that behaves more or less the way our own reality does. The comprehensive simulation of an “other” place allows an interesting mode of interaction with the video game on a larger scale than simply listening to radio shows: ethnographer or tourist. This is precisely the approach taken by Kiri Miller (2008). Of course, we know that the gameworld of Liberty City is not a “real place,” but what if it were? What could we learn about the people who inhabit such a place if we study Liberty City not as a media construct, but as a place which we visit? Given that video games are generally designed to allow (or force) the player to take direct control of an agent within the gameworld, it makes sense to analyze what becomes visible within the game from that perspective, an analogous perspective to being there yourself.
The descriptive evidence found in this study should be interpreted not only as summarizing a narrative thread but also as travel notes. By adopting variously the role of tourist, ethnographer or flâneur, interesting perspectives can be achieved from within the digital city. For this media text, the act of reading is more active, more exploratory, but will generate interpretable results in much the same way as traditional content analysis. These results can be interpreted and related to the real New York City, just as the messages of a film might. Kevin Schut’s review of representations of history also illuminate this kind of relationship—especially if we imagine future scholars studying GTA IV as a representation of the first decade of the 21st century. History, for Schut, is not the unchangeable sequence of events as they occurred, but rather “the record and conception of the past” (Schut, 2007). So the way Rockstar conceive of New York City today will be represented in Liberty City, or the way the player interprets Liberty City is indicative of their understanding of New York.
Schut also incorporates Jenkins’ (2004) notion of “spatial storytelling,” the manifestation of story material in virtual architecture to be experienced and explored, rather than told through descriptive verbiage. This kind of visual rhetoric relies on the simulation of an intelligible three-dimensional space, which is as much (if not more) like the construction of Disneyland in real space than Tolkien’s Middle-Earth in prose. Using spatial storytelling in a text such as a video game, rather than in a physical space like Disneyland, we can avoid the paradox of overdescription Sterne toys with in Tristram Shandy, and still achieve a kind of Barthesian reality effect (Barthes, 1986). In a video game, visual, aural, and procedural (behavioral) description can occur simultaneously with the advancement of events (whether plot-driven or not) rather than having to halt all action to engage in description. Gonzalo Frasca’s meditations on the difference between Monet’s London with a game-simulated city are useful in understanding why different approaches are necessary (Frasca, 2001). GTA IV implements many of the rule-based claims Rockstar make about how the City in America works, and we are to test and experience them in their model, Liberty City.
These various approaches are synthesized here to examine different aspects of a highly complex media object. The methodologies of “reading” may be combined with the exploratory ethnography and tourism, because the player/researcher is able to organize their interactions with the gameworld in a highly dynamic way. The researcher can, and must, engage with the media artifact in a configurative, self-directed manner. This renders traditional content-analysis methods incomplete—not incompatible, but not able to account for the subjective experience of contingency that is vital in the video game text. Not only can interpretations vary but the contingent nature of the game means the material to be interpreted will actually vary according to player actions. 1 These concepts also illuminate the ways in which a video game, particularly an open-world game like GTA IV is capable of immersing the player in an experience much more like being in the cities described by the modernist writers. For Baudelaire, the particular, unique ephemerality of modern life was being in and of the crowd as a flâneur or dandy (Baudelaire, 2001). This experience frustrated attempts to depict it in linear text. To be both an anonymous spectator within the world and the center of the world is a poetic description of being an avatar in a simulated city. The player is not resigned to reading about the flanerie of another, but can enact his own motion within the crowd.
The player in this case is me. I am an experienced video game player, having completed the story missions of GTA IV twice and spent many more hours wandering aimlessly through Liberty City. For the purposes of this critical interpretation, I returned to the game, to revisit certain locations to observe with closer detail certain aspects of the spaces. The game’s narrative missions were used as a structure to guide my tour, to give it a sequence for presentation here. Liberty City can be toured outside the parameters of the narrative missions, which I actually experience while writing this log—I had already completed the missions, and returned back to the locations described below. The narrative, however, gives greater context mainly through the personalities of important nonplayer characters such as Dwayne Forge, who add significance to the spaces themselves. Thus, the perspective here is a blend of flâneur and reader, one who experiences the space as a wanderer and as an informed player who has already “read” through the narrative overlain upon the open world.
GTA IV, Realism and Satire
GTA IV has a relationship with the real world. One aspect of this relationship is the same as found in modernist fiction or poetry: The text comes from people who are in the world and can always be read as a reflection of their experiences there. A second way is the direct social and political commentary that pervades all the games in the Grand Theft Auto series. With the seminal Grand Theft Auto III, Rockstar opened up a new world, a synthetic version of New York City, where social circumstances were magnified by satire. Increasing in Vice City and San Andreas, this satire was at once presenting the worst of the United States, and demonstrating a painful self-consciousness of those flaws. Arguably, the seriousness of the satire was undermined somewhat by the comical nature of some aspects of both games. GTA: Vice City and San Andreas both suffer something of a distancing effect from their historical context that vitiated the satire. That is, Vice City in particular was developed in the late 1990s and released in 2001, though its subject matter is primarily set in the 1980s. Further, as Bogost and Klainbaum note, the content of the game seems to bear more resemblance to the (hi)story of Miami, as mediated by Miami Vice, Scarface and other television or filmic representations (Bogost & Klainbaum, 2006, p. 162). Similarly, San Andreas is modeled on the late 1990s urban West Coast, (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas) though was developed somewhat later. Again, Bogost and Klainbaum suggest the culture being satirised is more identifiable via the media of that time, in particular the film Boyz in the Hood,as well as “gansta rap” of Ice-T, Tupac Shakur, and Dr. Dre. While these games do undertake useful satire, their seriousness is undermined by the ridiculousness of some aspects of the game. In a sense, they take the comic aspect of satire too far, and scenes whereby a player can beat a prostitute to death with a neon-pink sex toy or fly a jet pack are simply too far removed from the reality that inspire the games.
GTA IV was released in 2008 on the seventh-generation consoles (Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Plastation3) and PC. On its release, it was praised for its realism and several maximum scores from game reviewers. Metacritic lists 37 “critic reviews” scoring the game 100 out of 100. (Metacritic). The list includes reputable review writers such as Edge Magazine, Game Informer, and IGN website. The new Euphoria “behavior physics” engine as well as the raw graphics processing power of the seventh-generation consoles made for a truly sensuous experience. This turn toward realism was further heightened by the artistic decision to tone down the ridiculousness of the earlier iterations of the game in favor of a much grittier and altogether less pleasant aesthetic. From the muted color palette (particularly of the first two island boroughs) to the execution sequences that see Niko look away and hold his hand in front of his face to avoid blood splatter, GTA IV is much less of a fantasy of escape than its earlier iterations.
GTA IV has a peculiar relationship with the real and realism. This relationship is similar to the preoccupation the modernist writers have with realism of urban life. Liberty City, nor London, Dublin or New York, are idealized or romanticized in their depictions. James Donald explores the notion of walking a city with double vision which seems an evolution of Baudelaire’s fascination with juxtaposition and contradiction (1999, p. 180). In modernist literature, the doubling can be between history and present, as for Donald, or between mundane and fantastic. For this study, one can imagine a double vision that views Liberty City and New York City simultaneously. Let us turn now to a closer examination of modernism and where it is found in GTA IV.
Modernism, Literature, and Liberty City
Such a great volume of critical reflection on the work of modernist authors, in addition to the critical writings of those authors themselves, exists, that to propose to summarize it here would be an audacious lie. Rather, this study will nominate a number of prominent themes found in this literature which we will find represented GTA IV. This discussion will refer mainly to the works of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot as examples of modern literature. Themes found in their work as well as their critical essays will serve to highlight prominent features or preoccupations by the modern authors. From this, two aspects will remain the focus: thematic representations of the city and the struggle with their medium these authors display. Each of these are inextricably woven together, as they are in GTA IV also.
In the video game, a subversive critique of the American Dream serves as a narrative skeleton through which the player (and the player’s character, Niko Bellic) experience Liberty City. Both the elements are invaluable to the overall experience of GTA IV: the narrative content that establishes an interpretive framework for the player, which helps to inform the mechanically enabled structure. In a video game, the medium is part of the message, in that its mechanical structure, “how it works” has as great an impact on the experience of playing as the aural/visual and linear nature of film. The formal linearity of prose is as important to Woolf’s (1925a) stream of consciousness style as the content she expresses throughout Mrs Dalloway—and vice versa. Without a linear form of expression, the concept of a stream of consciousness would not make sense, nor even be necessary. In an interesting inverse, the notion of an individual walking through a city serves as an excuse or explanation for the linear narrative of Joyce’s Ulysses(1922), whereas in GTA IV an American Dream and vengeance plot motivate the player/character to move through the city.
Speaking now in terms of theme and content rather than structure, modernist literature, and certainly that of the three authors named above (Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot), tends to be located within capital cities of Europe and America: Dublin, London, and New York. Works including Joyce’s Ulysses and Dubliners(1914), Woolf’s Mrs Dallowayand The Waves(1931), and Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (1920), and The Waste Land (1922) are examples. The great metropolises were extreme departures from traditional rural life, causing entirely new experiences were lived through by the residents. The city itself became a subject for poetry, and in particular its sordid, unpleasant aspects. Eliot explains the realization that his own lived experience as an adolescent in an industrial American city could be the subject for poetry, rather than only classical or canonical material (Eliot, 1965). This fundamental realization he attributes to Baudelaire, who constantly represented inconsistency, contradiction, and irony in his own work. So too Eliot sought a fusion between the fantastic and sordid mundane.
Baudelaire can also explain the realism with which modernism concerns itself. He contrasts the immutable, even divine half of modern art with the half that is “ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” (Baudelaire, 2001, p. 796). In the case of modern poets, this half was the peculiar character of the city and urban life. They are not so much concerned with a particular time period, as with ensuring that artists should immerse themselves in what is real in the here and now, rather than forever seeking to rework what is found in classic antiquity. Ezra Pound’s famous dictum “Make it new,” is a symbol for this attitude—not that the character of the city is somehow objectively superior to that of the pastoral, but that because contemporary life is happening in cities, this is more appropriate for contemporary artists. The nature of urban life, however, frustrates traditional models of representation, particularly canons of beauty and form. Hence, in attempting to approximate this experience, modernists struggle not only with content, but with form, a struggle that leads to formal experimentation.
Visual and Architectural Aesthetics
GTA IV is markedly more grim in its visual depiction of the city than its predecessors. Its virtual environment teaches the player about the nature of the city without descriptive exposition, but with visual aesthetics instead. The following descriptions, then, are translations of the visual/virtual, like the notes of a travel writer. Niko will spend his early time in Broker and Dukes, mediations of Brooklyn and Queens, respectively. These are not the glamour boroughs of New York City. First, in the real world, Brooklyn is the second most densely populated county in the United States, only behind Manhattan. Where Manhattan benefits from expensive high-rise skyscrapers, Brooklyn/Broker endures low-rise tenements, nearly as old as the city itself. The buildings in Broker and Dukes resemble descriptions of the earliest tenement-style housing that was located original on Manhattan Island (Plunz, 1990, pp. 11–20). Historically, legislation regulating the construction of these kinds of buildings was passed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mostly this was to improve standards for density, lighting, ventilation of these multifamily dwellings (pp. 21–50). GTA IV seems to have preserved examples of the older style buildings in the poorer neighborhoods, while updating those found on Algonquin to follow the improved building standards passed in the real New York City.
Easily, the most dominating built landmark in the first borough is the enormous bridge standing in for the Brooklyn Bridge, which rises far higher than any nearby building in Broker. The bridge is a fixation for the culture of the area, so much so that Radio Brokerincorporates the bridge into its logo. 2 This massive structure enhances the feeling of “living low” as a great number of buildings are literally beneath this bridge, and all of them are of lesser stature. Furthermore, in the early parts of the game, this (and all the other) bridge is closed by police blockade, due to the fear of terrorism. 3
Not only are they old, Dukes and Broker are poorly maintained. Most of the buildings and walls are built of brick, and show obvious signs of neglect. Roads have gaping potholes as large as a car. The cement bases of the great pillars that hold up the railway lines described above all show signs of filth and deterioration. Furthermore, significant landmarks paint a picture of age: Firefly Island is a mediation of the Coney Island amusement park. It is described in the GTA IV Liberty City Guidebook (the game manual) as being 100 years old—but it is closed. In Meadows Park, there is a mediation of the site of the World’s Fair buildings. The tall, saucer-topped towers are utterly abandoned, one of the few areas in Liberty City virtually devoid of pedestrians. The towers themselves are clad in corroded metal facades at their base, with weeds growing in the flat pavilion grounds. These two great landmarks demonstrate the aging character of Dukes and Broker, as do smaller examples: the bowling alley is called “Memory Lanes,” or the 69th Street Diner, styled after 50s diners and built out of a railroad car.
The NPC inhabitants of these areas are, like Niko, Eastern European immigrants. As he notes aloud, they “Don’t get very far from the boats they came in on.” This lack of geographical mobility is synchronous with the lack of upward social mobility experienced by real, poor immigrants, as described by Plunz. As New York City grew, the most affluent were able to take advantage of the innovative construction technologies (steel frame, elevators, electricity, and plumbing) by moving to newer, more expensive buildings. The poor and more recent immigrants simply did not have this option, so continued to live in the older buildings in gradually worsening conditions (Plunz, 1990, pp. 50–87). The ethnographic implications are interesting and would be worth pursuing in further study, as the cycle repeats among different ethnicities in different locations throughout Liberty City.
While playing in cooperation with the story, Niko’s first move out of Broker/Dukes is north to Bohan and is arguably even worse. Bohan is a remediation of the Bronx, which, while being less populous than either Manhattan or Brooklyn, is a cultural symbol for poverty, crime, and unemployment. Bohan endures some of the same low-living claustrophobia as Brooklyn, as the oppressive, heavy structures of the above-ground metro railway put some parts of the borough in constant shadow. This is contrasted with the public park land that makes up a surprisingly large amount of the real-world Bronx and is represented (though much smaller) in Bohan. Some of the real-world rebuilding efforts of the Bronx are represented in southern Bohan by building frameworks and half-finished freeway overpasses. The key word that typifies Bohan is derelict. Where the buildings of Dukes and Broker are run down, they are still being used. In Bohan, there are whole streets of battered buildings, businesses, and housing with roller shutter doors pulled down and boarded up windows. There are many old and abandoned industrial sites around Bohan as well, increasing the feeling of discomfort and poverty. The one business that operates in Bohan with the eye-catching neon lights (all the more eye-catching amid the dingy brown of this borough) is the Triangle Strip Club. The sleazy sexiness of the night club is picked up again in the neon pink miniskirts that some of the prostitutes throughout the game wear. The relation to this unfulfilling sexuality in Eliot’s “one-night cheap hotels” in Prufrock is striking.
On Algonquin island, the Northwood “Gov. Greg Johnson Houses” project consists of six enormous and identical public housing tenements, one of which Dwayne Forge lives in. There are seven other, smaller housing blocks that share a different design. The 20-storey houses sit across an expressway from heavy industrial dockyards, making the whole area a depressing, inhospitable place to live. These buildings reflect the style of real-world public housing projects of the 1950s, where enormously tall towers were constructed, cheaply. Philanthropic building construction had a long history in New York City, and designs tended to be thought through at great length and were often justified with a dimension of social engineering (Plunz, 1990, p. 88). These “towers in the park” were the result of an evolution away from the tightly packed tenements of the previous century (represented in Dukes/Broker), but introduced their own sets of problems. Plunz describes razing a slum of tenements to build a series of tower projects was “ensuring one ghetto was replaced by another” and had the knock-on effect of dramatically increased crime in neighborhoods already affected by crime (Plunz, 1990, p. 273). By constructing towers with a small footprint, a park-like space was opened up between them, though their exact purpose was often vague (Plunz, 1990, pp. 270–276). In the case of GTA IV, the grassy spaces between the projects are actually fenced off, a demonstration of their ambiguity—pleasant in theory, but too lovely for the decrepit residents to be allowed in.
The interior of Dwayne’s apartment may be the single most depressing place in all of Liberty City and is exacerbated by the feelings of sympathy that Dwayne stirs. The narrative events and characters combine with the environment here to create strong resonance. Invoking Heidegger, Donald writes “Space is less the already existing setting for such stories, than the production of space through that taking place, through the act of narration” (1999, p. 181). Exploring the apartment would not create the same emotional experience in a player who had not also experienced the narrative-guided relationship with Dwayne. The following prose description of the visual scene seems reminiscent of the imagery in Eliot’s poetry, as if a film director were to use Prufrock as stage notes. The apartment is in an awful state of disrepair with a smashed kitchen that lacks a refrigerator, bathtub half full of dirty water with cigarette butts floating in it, the bedrooms each have a bare mattress on the floor and blood-stained pillows. The walls are peeling and covered in graffiti in between the sleazy posters for various sex clubs and magazines. Some of the graffiti is eye catching. Though difficult to read, some clearly says “RIP bro, we’ll always remember you.” The question here is does that refer to Dwayne, or would it refer to a previous tenant who was also killed?
Given that when I explored this apartment (the first time), Niko/I had only just killed Dwayne, one can imagine the second explanation, further intensifying the history of suffering. That history is given a face if the player has played through the relationship with Dwayne. Dwayne’s apartment is a “place” by Harrison and Dourish’s equation “Place = Space + Meaning” and Yi-Fu Tuan’s definition of place as “space with history and meaning” (Bogost & Klainbaum, 2006, p. 163). The history is 3-fold: the past residents who have painted graffiti messages on the walls as well as the now completed history of Dwayne’s life there and the real history of the housing projects. The meaning is bound up in the player’s experience of Dwayne, in what he means to the player and the narrative: whether or not the player feels culpability in that history, how Dwayne may fictionally represent myriad real people.
Characters and the Crowd
Turning away from the architectural construction of the city, another important theme in modernist literature is the inhabitants of the city. The process of making new, realistic (or non-idealized) representations leads literature away from classic romantic heroes for example, and toward the much more pessimistic everyday lives of unremarkable individuals. Many of the spaces within the city are depersonalized; so too are the “herds” or masses of people which move mechanically through them. The mode of stories such as Dubliners, Ulysses, or The Waves is of a self-aware individual existing amid a sea of unenlightened, commercial masses. Again we may return to Baudelaire and his dual concepts of flâneur and dandy, who both rely on being singular within a crowd for identity. The flâneur swims through the crowd, bathing in the indifference the masses show him, and rejoices in the princely ability to spectate. The dandy is not exactly an opposite, but takes pleasure from being superior to the crowd, astonishing but never astonished. Though Baudelaire seems to bestow upon the dandy the attitude of superiority, even the flâneur feels princely, and relies on the feeling of his own self-consciousness among a crowd of “not-I” that are somehow less self-conscious than the flâneur. These characters, even those who are self-aware enough to count as either flâneur or dandy, are hardly the heroes of classical or romantic literature. The balding, thin man in Prufrock is a far too realistic a character to be idolized.
There are three kinds of characters in GTA IV. One is Niko, the active player/character who is the protagonist of the narrative. The second are the important characters involved in the narrative, such as Niko’s cousin Roman, Faustin, and Gravelli, important quest-givers and powerful men in the city, or Dimitri, one of the antagonists. The third is the standard, civilian nonplayer character. These are the nameless masses that wander or drive the streets throughout Liberty City. Referring to the narrative context of a subverted American Dream, we may begin with Niko. If the archetypal hero of an American Dream narrative is an honest, hard-working but naïve foreigner who escapes a simple, primitive country life to come to the industrial New York City to join the profitable, egalitarian American workforce, Niko is none of these things. First, he is a criminal and a veteran of the decidedly modern Balkan wars. He is a former people smuggler not escaping the hopeless agrarian toil, but organized crime bosses. Arriving illegally means that not only does Niko circumvent the iconic Ellis Island but will never be able to openly join the workforce, and so will always exist in the underground. 4
Despite all this, we find that Niko is in fact unremarkable among his milieu. He is a criminal among dozens of criminals in the NPC cast. From Vlad to Faustin, Little Jacob and Elizabeta, the MacCreary family and several Italian families, everyone Niko deals with is a criminal of increasing magnitude. Even the UL Paper character, supposedly a government agent, works directly with the mafia dons. Not only is Niko a nonhero because of his criminal past, but he is not even that remarkable a criminal. His unremarkable character is typical of a modernist protagonist. The heroes of those stories are rarely much above average, though they are typically wealthy in Woolf’s work. As heroes, they do not act in any remarkable ways, or have adventures beyond walking through their home city as Leopold does.
Niko is remarkable in one way that must move this discussion from narrative content to the structural form of video games. Niko is the player/character, and as such, differentiated particularly from the masses of NPCs that wander the streets of Liberty City. These superficial robots could not be a more apt incarnation of the undifferentiated masses described by Eliot or Woolf, unless Rockstar were to actually only use one visual model for every citizen in the city. The NPCs have a kind of life, but there seem to be only a handful of stereotypes: police officers are a special case with special AI, some NPCs are armed and will fight back if Niko attacks, while others will run away. Yet in a city of hundreds, perhaps thousands of NPCs, even a dozen different “kinds” will create an obvious repetition of the sort Woolf describes in mechanical terms:
…the soundless flight of upright bodies down the moving stairs like the pinioned and terrible descent of some army of the dead downwards and the churning of the great engines remorselessly forwarding us, all of us, onwards. . .. (Woolf, The Waves, p. 148)
Eliot too comments on the mechanical, predictable nature of the predictable march of the masses:
Or trampled by insistent feet At four and five and six o’clock (Preludes, L41–42)
The NPCs of Liberty City actually are programmed mechanically to move in a certain pattern, based on a predictable logic. Niko, alone among them, is self-aware, in so far as he is only able to do what the player decides. If we allow the player to step inside the world, conceptually, the player alone is a self-conscious flâneur among the crowd, or a dandy who truly is superior to the crowds surrounding him. This mechanical, literal superiority Niko possesses can easily lead to an exaggerated version of the contempt that Woolf’s character Neville shows for the lower classes:
“When there are buildings like these,” said Neville, “I cannot endure that there should be shop-girls. Their titter, their gossip, offends me; breaks into my stillness, and nudges me, in moments of purest exultation, to remember our degradation.” (The Waves, p. 64)
Though for Niko, it is rarely “tranquility and order,” but wonton destruction that is a result of exultation. Niko has the ability to gun down or run over endlessly recyclable NPC characters for as long as he can outrun the police and military. What Niko cannot do, like many of the characters in modernist texts, is communicate with those NPCs.
Communication and Conclusions
If one is writing aboutthe breakdown of traditional methods of communication, how can one use the traditional method of communication to do so? This is a deep ambivalence that has led to experiments with form and technique in modern writing. Woolf’s stream of consciousness style “enfranchised her from the unwanted linear structure in which an omniscient narrator moves from points A to B” (Lee, 1977, p. 93). Further, Woolf questions the nature of linear narrative and the novel, when life is so clearly not “like this.” She seeks to escape from the tyranny of plot, comedy drama, and a love interest (Woolf, The Common Reader, 1925b) and believes: “It is precisely the task of the writer to go beyond the ‘formal railway line of sentence’ and show how people ‘feel or think or dream . . . all over the place’” (Lee, 1977, p. 93). The narrative thread in Ulysses is as much focused on the physical movement through a city as the dramatic presentation of plot events and is the description of an experience known as player-driven or emergent narrative in game studies (See Jenkins in Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan 2004; Juul, 2005, pp. 157–159; Salen & Zimmerman 2004, p. 539). Yet, despite the best efforts from these modernist writers, poetry and novels, in their traditional form, are inevitably linear. Experiments with the form moved through the wandering content of Tristram Shandy through to B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates which was published without binding to allow rearrangement of pages in any order. This breakdown of structure indicates the frustration with narrated order that fragmented the novel into smaller units, but would logically lead to further breakdowns: pages to paragraphs, paragraphs to sentences, sentences to words, and eventually words into letters—a complete loss of meaning.
The interactive city allows the material, ideas, imagery (visual and aural, though not yet tactile or odors) of such great concern to the modernists to be explored rather than narrated. The language of Woolf in describing Joyce’s writing style is just as appropriate to describe immersion in a virtual city:
Mr. James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. (Woolf, The Common Reader, 1925b)
When playing outside the structured narrative missions, no convention or order to which events occur in the open world of Liberty City exists. The experience can only ever be remembered “as atoms as they fall upon the mind, in the order in which they fall,” rather than in the order in which a narrator prescribes. The fact of experiencing Liberty City is that huge tracts are ungoverned, unguided by the tyrant narrator/author. Even when playing through missions, the minutia of events can be wildly different for different players and upon subsequent play-throughs by the same player. The vast array of possible sequences of events, even within the structured missions, seems reminiscent of the unpredictability and uniqueness of experience Woolf describes.
The linguistic nature of reading is transformed into interpreting the scene, the circumstance, rather than the sentence. Like film before it, video games present imagery as it would look, and also causes it to behave in the way it would behave, according to the designer’s vision. So instead of being forced to narrate dozens of wandering, tangential narratives to express the idea of uncompleted, tangential, and diffuse experience, video game designers can simply make them possible. Instead of using descriptive prose to present a realistic, unromantic city, designers use architecture and tell that story through the space. Instead of writing about undifferentiated masses filling the streets, Rockstar populate the virtual city with virtual people that run like clockwork.
The narrative missions exist in concert and tension with this environment, emphasizing the modernist themes. Using a sufficiently disenchanting rebuttal of a commonly known narrative as a framework, Rockstar have enacted a project begun by the modernist writers before them. The game shows not only that the American Dream narrative is a myth but also that the city has no particular interest in the narrative of any one individual. Once Niko defeats his nemesis—in itself a hollow, meaningless act—the city is no easier for him to live in. He is no more successful, no less a criminal, no less an under-dweller. Of course, there is a tension between the notions of linear narrative missions and free-roaming in the open world, but that tension is an inverse of the same tension in a stream of consciousness novel. The incredible similarity in the language of literary critics such as Virginia Woolf to the arguments made in favor of ludology in game studies belies the 70-year gap between the two. For Woolf and the other modernists, it is not the goal to tell better stories with better narratives, but to better capture the experience of life by escaping the concept of narrative entirely. Life is not a series of “gig lamps symmetrically arranged,” nor headshots and high scores; “life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (Woolf, The Common Reader, 1925b). If only more video games were as an incessant shower of atoms representing life, rather than only ever appeals to a base competitive urge.
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
The author was in receipt of an Australian Post-graduate Award scholarship during the writing of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.