GTAV is a complicated game. It really does fall in between Watch_Dogs and Saint’s Row IV for me - there are bits of it I loathe with a passion, and yet every hour I’m wowed by the sights, sounds, and simple experience of being in a city as well realized as San Andreas. There are a million little touches that no other developer would ever bother to implement. There are also a million little jabs that seem to exist solely to punch down at the poor, at women, at racial minorities, at trans people, etc. The best metaphor I can come up with is that the game’s a sort of a river of sewage with some genuine gold inside of it - if you can look past the fact that you’re sifting through human shit the gold might be worth your while. There’s no denying the sense of a creative vision here, but there’s also no denying that creative vision’s cowardice and inability to commit to anything more than “everything sucks and everyone’s stupid.” I just wish this engine, this budget, this talented team, and this game could be harnessed to make something that didn’t reflect a spoiled 14 year old’s world view. Ah well.

Here’s the YouTube link! And the script is after the jump. As always, the script doesn’t match perfectly with what I ended up speaking into the mic.

The most striking thing about Grand Theft Auto 5 is how much playing it feels like visiting a real place. Most games sculpt their environments as a space for gameplay first and then try to dress themselves up like a real place afterwards. But GTAV is committed to its universe in a way few other games are. Where Assassin’s Creed or Watch_Dogs litter their world with spires to climb and chests waiting to be unlocked, Los Santos and the greater San Andreas area don’t feel like they exist for you, the player. They exist as a place where people live and work and play. Simply walking around you get a sense of income brackets and the zoning laws and the history of each city block and mile of highway. It’s where the game’s desire to mock the real world works best - a lovingly recreated TCL Chinese Theater or the Hollywood sign or a stereotypical sketch of a small town dive bar or beachfront condo do wonders to sell the sense of place by tapping into iconography without being outright parody. It is, frankly, an embarrassment of riches when it comes to being a high fidelity world - the fact that I can pull off the highway, walk into a minimart, then peek into the manager’s room to see a scheduling chart at this level of fidelity is nothing short of astounding.

And while the environmental design does most of the heavy lifting to prop up the illusion of San Andreas, there are a bunch of other touches that reinforce it. The GPS cuts out while you drive through tunnels, for example. There are some radio stations that fall out of range when you drive from the country to the city or vice versa. There are workers taking smoke breaks behind stores, tourists dotting the beach and pier, and bikers hitting the trails near Sandy Shores. The game’s so steadfast about the space itself being physical and lived in that you can’t easily quick travel - like in GTAIV, you have to hail or call a taxi, and if you want to skip the drive to where you want to go you need to pay extra. It’s such a beautifully realized place, and it clearly wants you to experience it that way instead of a video game map or collection of levels. It’s why my favorite things to do in the game are just people watch or take pictures on my phone or sit in my car in the rain and listen to the radio and above all just generally be there, in San Andreas.

But it’s a fragile illusion. You know how a 3D model can look great in screenshots and horrible in motion? GTAV looks gorgeous in motion but terrible when interacted with. They recreated the look, the feel of cities are built and run, but not the systems. It’s a wonderful miniature model of a city - an animated model, even! - but as soon as you try to touch it the illusion shatters. For example, I spent a moment after escaping the police admiring a sunrise over the mountains. Looking behind me I could see Los Santos. Nestled in the shadow of the valley it still looked like night time the city. A coyote crawled across the landscape as the sun lazily hugged the horizon. For a brief moment the game echoed Proteus; it had me admiring the really simple beauty of nature. And as I sat soaking in this gorgeous sight; this sense of appreciation for the natural order… this happened. [Mountain Lion Attack] Welcome to Grand Theft Auto V, where beautiful rainy nights in the city give way to Trevor pooping behind a dumpster. Where attempts to enjoy some music on the beach can escalate quickly to a brawl. Where following a stray cat gets me death threats. Where beautiful sunsets have to be punctuated with dick jokes, where the amazing amount of TV and film and radio content to consume is littered with lazily written, lowest common denominator, sexist, racist junk. It feels at times like Rockstar has amassed an army of some of the most talented artists, animators, and programmers around and had them toil passionately day after day to create something that is at first beautiful until you pull out and realize it’s a dickbutt. It is at once a stunning recreation of modern Americana and a collection of poop and sex jokes that remove any gravitas the game might otherwise have had.

But it’s not conflicted; it’s intentional. And that is, I think, the problem that eats away at the heart of Grand Theft Auto V. It feels like it’s horrified of having genuine or sincere moments despite being clearly capable of them. And it’s not just dumb environmental jokes or NPCs prone to combat - it takes the same calloused approach to its characters and story; it tries to bury any earnestness with gratuitous offense. GTAIV took its protagonist way too seriously - except when it wanted to be an outrageous and offensive satire. It was operatic and heavy unless it wanted to be irreverent and sophomoric. GTAV tries to fix this by turning down the goofiness about one notch and the drama about four or five notches. Instead of a man traumatized by war crimes who also commits hilarious acts of violence, we instead focus on the interpersonal drama of three unstable criminals as they do horrible things to the city, the people around them, and each other. This helps unify the tone, and the game no longer feels like it’s bouncing back and forth between Spaceballs and Scarface. But that unified tone does lean decidedly comedic; and as a result the cynicism-cum-nihilism that has calcified the heart of the game’s humor ekes its way into the narrative as well.

Look at the torture scene. It is, perhaps, the closest the game comes to a whole scene of actual, snarkless commentary. The game effectively uses its mechanics and its narrative to frame the government as capable of some truly evil stuff, as it forces Trevor to hurt a man - like, really hurt him - in order to get information about which man Michael should shoot. And the government won’t really tell us why they want him dead other than some handwaving stuff about terrorism. And the information we get is extraordinarily vague - after multiple types of torture all we get is that that he’s a left-handed, bearded Azerbaijani who smokes. But that’s deemed enough to force Michael to take a life extrajudicially, and afterwards you find out the man was likely a philanthropist, not a terrorist. The game feels like it’s punching up at a valid target that is, unfortunately, an increasingly apparent part of the landscape of Americana, especially in wake of the torture report earlier this year. But then Trevor drives the tortured man to the airport, and all that stuff about torture stops being subtext but becomes literal text as Trevor rants about government oversight and the value of torture as cultural catharsis rather than meaningful information gathering tool. Meanwhile, the tortured man we felt empathy for is turned into a joke as we laugh at how much he’s being ignored and hurt by everyone from the IAA to the FIB to Trevor. (Sarcastically) That wacky Trevor just left him at the airport - can you believe it!? Everything has to end in a joke or a one liner or some reassuring, winking nod to the audience that whatever’s happening on screen doesn’t really matter.

None of this is helped by the game’s open world nature. The open world approach to storytelling is anathema to pacing, plot cohesion, and to a degree player empathy with characters. The game has a love of cinematic language but not of cinematic structure; its pick-whatever-mission-you-want design is decidedly ludic. The game loves to borrow iconography and cinematography from film. It’s why one of the face buttons on the controller is used for a borderline unplayable cinematic camera. It likes slow motion, it likes to play with framing and depth of field and field of view, it seems keenly aware of camera placement and diegetic music and desires to tell its story through those methods as much as through its mechanics. But what it doesn’t particularly care about is pacing, character arcs, or narrative structure. There’s not a singular story in Grand Theft Auto V; there just are a series of threads that come in and out of focus. Are we setting up the criminal heist today, or are we fixing Michael’s family, or are we doing something for the FIB, or are we dealing with Michael and Trevor’s past, or hanging out with Lamar? The player’s ability to choose a mission means the game tends to jump between all of those and more, and it robs each of them of any singular importance. They’re all important when they happen. But none of them are so important that they have to take precedence over helping strangers or going on a shooting rampage. Ultimately the narrative is much like the buildings and the TV shows and the radio stations and everything else in the game: a way of pushing a collection of themes and motifs that get hammered home mission after mission, murder after murder until you decide to stop playing or until the content runs out.

Other than the open world not being used for much, mechanically the game is… fine. It exists. Really, it’s actually a very safe game. GTAIV experimented with a social system where friends would occasionally want to do things with you, and if you neglected friends for too long your relationship would decline. GTAV has paired that back to being a way of delivering additional character building. It’s also refined car handling from GTAIV. But that’s about it. It does everything just well enough to not be a problem, but it doesn’t really do anything well, and it certainly doesn’t take any risks. You can shoot, you can drive, you can take cover, you can fly, and you can do a few other random interactions with a context-sensitive button. The breadth of places you can do those things, and the vehicles and weapons you can do them with, is impressive. The mechanic set itself is just bog standard video game stuff, though. GPS directions and cop evasion still takes place on the minimap, so much of the game is spent staring at a small grey rectangle rather than the impressive environments you’re in. There’s the character switching mechanic, but aside from being impressive from the amount of content that required it isn’t all that systemically interesting. It’s mostly used to make sure the player is always doing the “cool” thing on a heist or a mission and you can’t deploy it tactically or in the open world. The “game” part of the game received just enough attention to be functional, but the emphasis was clearly put on the world and its themes.

And what are those themes? What is the supposed “satire” that GTA insists on derailing its genuine moments for? The game has vague ambitions of poking at the American dream, the American view of capitalism as a moral good, and even the greater whole of Americana itself. But it never really aims for that. It tackles those subjects in fits and spurts with one off jokes and one-liners, but the bulk of its comedic energies are spent on cultural detritus. And yeah, you could make the argument that cultural detritus is the embodiment of modern Americana, but the game never tries to make that strong of a statement. It’s just more comfortable parodying disc jockeys, commercials, and reality TV than tackling big heady issues. But more than the need to make the jokes themselves, it’s the vulgarity, the ugliness of the jokes that spawn from every corner of the game world that shatters the illusion of San Andreas by way of their artifice.

Like, remember when Lazlow was the straight man in GTAIII in a city full of goofy weirdos? But now Lazlow has been turned into a caricature of a douchebag and there is no straight man. If there is it’s the three protagonists, whose views are the only ones allowed to exist with minimal snarking and anger. And when the only people your game takes seriously is three murderous narcissistic men, that’s gonna cause problems. The whole game is seedier and more cynical than it’s ever been, and that’s saying something. And that results in some uncomfortable racial humor and a lot of really lazy gay jokes, but nowhere is the game’s cynicism more apparent than its treatment of women. Let’s look at some highlights. Grand Theft Auto has always had trouble with the ladies, but at least in, say, GTAIV characters like Michelle or Kate had bits of sincere relationship building. Now in place of a dating minigame there’s a strip club where you can convince women to take you home and sleep with you if you massage them while the bouncer isn’t looking. Like, yeah, it’s that bad. Women in this game are either cold, shrill, obnoxious people who makes demands of the player, or they’re passive and borderline agency free sex objects.

If GTAV is satire, it isn’t good satire. Occasionally it finds a worthy target and hits all the right notes to paint an amusing Mad Magazine style parody- the LifeInvader mission, for example, does a wonderful job poking at the shallow, youth obsessed, IPO driven tech culture where empty speeches and the right clothing matter more than a meaningful product. But parodies like those are the exception. Most of the time the game just takes a thing that exists, like a beer commercial, throws a lot of sexist and racist jokes at it, then dresses it up by pretending it’s satirizing modern american consumer culture.

I hated Watch_Dogs. The whole thing was terrible and plastic and disposable but just assumed you loved it because it offered the same crappy gameplay as Assassin’s Creed or GTA. It didn’t care what it was about because it was a white guy in a trench coat shooting stuff - you love white guys in trenchcoats shooting stuff. But GTAV is different. It doesn’t feel plastic or hollow at all. It feels like it does exactly what it set out to do, by building. And it cares about its characters, even if it doesn’t want to openly admit it. The game takes time to give each character their own cell phones and vehicles and circles of friends and safe houses and default radio stations and clothing and hair options and character switch vignettes, and each one says a little something about the current protagonist.