The Story-Based Sandbox
My eyes are dry and my head is bleary from spending all week totally consumed with work, especially my late-night Grand Theft Auto IV sessions which started a little later than I had hoped because I just couldn’t put The World Ends With You down. I’m filing a review of GTA IV for Paste, and thinking of which tact to take. I agree with N’Gai Croal critique that too many mainstream reviewers spend their time talking about the particular wild experiences they’ve had with the game. On the other hand, it’s hard to resist. The story is fine and the gameplay is – well, it has its pros and its cons, but the game’s real staying power is the way that every simple mission can lead you to stumble across bizarre experiences. Like getting a cab ride home and listening to the driver harangue you the whole way there about banging tourists that he picks up at the airport. Or last night, when a high-speed chase grew comical as the police cruiser I had stolen got more and more banged up and my siren started to degenerate and give off weird, pathetic squawking noises. Who thinks to add all this stuff?
Most game companies, and software companies, hell, most human beings play off an 80/20 rule where your users will spend 80% of their time on 20% of your features, so you should put all your money in there. But with GTA IV, they seem to have spent 80% of their time on stuff that you have a 20% chance of ever seeing. It’s like if the team behind Microsoft Word spent half their schedule on stuff like the word count feature or thinking of funny words that should pass the spellcheck.
At the same time, the game has changed my perception of sandbox games. I used to think of a sandbox as a place where anything can happen, a la SimCity; GTA was a game where you could go off and do whatever you felt like, then come back to the story and the missions at your leisure. In GTA IV, the content is very directed. I’ve felt no urge to veer off the story or just troll around town unprompted: I want to follow the missions, and explore the story and the characters. And yet, as you go about your business, new things just keep happening to you and taking you by surprise. This doesn’t make the game feel open-ended; it makes it feel magical.
Okay. So, I do have some new links this week.
- My new GameSetWatch column talks about pastiche and random stylistic mish-mashes, in the context of Noiku Love 2 and one of my college faves, composer/skronker John Zorn.
- My latest BSG write-up, for “The Road Less Traveled,” was the longest yet – and the grade was the lowest.
- If you pick up the new Paste, I have the back-of-the-book humor piece, an article that combines two noxious trends into one short satire. The article (update) is online here, and this video plays a part in it:
Awwwwwwww! So cute.
Hey, I read your column on Naked City and Noitu Love 2 and commented there, but I’ll repost here:
Well, as you know, I’ve been making a study of John Cassavetes’ films lately, and it’s interesting to compare his work to somebody like Tarantino or the Coens, who work very much in this “Wouldn’t it be cool if..?” mode. Like everyone, I enjoy Tarantino’s movies, but at the same time, I think your metaphor of the illiterate kid tearing pages out of the book is apt. These guys have no moral depth, and they know it. One of the really admirable things about Cassavetes is his ability to concentrate, for a long time, on a very particular, if complex, set of human problems. And that seems to translate, somehow, into a stylistic unity — he’s not jumping around randomly trying to throw in every cool thing he can think of or constantly top himself. He’s focused on what he came here to do.
And to come back to Tarantino, I think his best movie to date is Jackie Brown, precisely because his sympathy for his struggling, lonely middle-aged characters trumps his penchant for pop culture pastiche.
Not sure how that translates to gaming, where the fireworks and the cleverness seem to be the whole point. But something to think about.
Seth
May 10, 2008 at 12:21 am
By the way, here’s a mention of the U of C and Washington Park in a GTA IV review:
http://www.slate.com/id/2191012
The article also makes the game sound like an interesting model of urban economics, kind of a gaming counterpart to _The Wire_.
Seth
May 12, 2008 at 7:55 am
I agree completely about Jackie Brown. One of the simplest things that games (and comics to some extent) don’t do are faces. Cassavetes can spend an entire movie with his actors and try to capture nuanced, authentic human beings just dealing with one another – I want to see Love Streams again (it’s not on DVD yet, I don’t think) for the amazing kitchen table conversation between Rowlands and Cassavetes that sparked the title – but games don’t go there: they’re more iconic. If you can capture the complexity of the human face, you get a lot closer to what one would call “high art” (or high cinema or whatever).
That Slate article was really good, btw. Although I’m still skeptical about comparing GTA to the Wire, both because of the maturity level (GTA is “satricial,” but in a blustery and obvious way), and because of the complexity of the systems they capture. In the Wire, I love how each episode fleshes out more of the city, until you can actually see step by step by step how a decision by the mayor affects a beat cop on the street or a homeless guy living in a basement. In GTA, a lot of the dependencies between the characters and the organizations in the game are pretty much handed to you in the cut scenes. But I’m only about halfway through the story right now, so it could possibly get more interesting.
savetherobot
May 12, 2008 at 11:00 am
… and oh yeah, U of C represent! I love all the coverage of Obama’s early days – I keep reading the names of restaurants in Hyde Park where he met key players in the early ’90s, and wondering if I might’ve walked by or seen him on the street or something.
savetherobot
May 12, 2008 at 11:00 am