I was chatting with Mary Jane at Forbes last night about GTA IV, and over the course of discussing the way the game unfolds we actually stumbled upon what I think has long been the true genius of the GTA franchise. For all the talk in the press of the nasty stuff that the game enables you to do, very little of the discussion ever goes beyond that. As I mentioned yesterday, the vast majority of GTA coverage tends to be of the mechanics, and it's clear that what GTA really excels at is giving you the freedom to do whatever you want. Just because you can do something though, doesn't mean that you have to.
The true genius of the franchise is that it makes YOU the monster, rather than presenting you with a monster to control.
There's nothing making you run down pedestrians. You don't have to shoot the cops when you're trying to escape from that warehouse. There's nothing that says you have to get your jollies from hookers. Sure, you do have to take out the bad guys, and there are some terrible things served up as part of the narrative, but the truly monstrous things are, for the most part, purely voluntary. The franchise has been doing this since the early days, but the depth that Rockstar has brought to Niko's character makes it far more apparent. He is a reluctant monster. A recovering monster who only really becomes evil when you direct him to be so.
The genius of GTA IV: The Monster Is You
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 by John Davison
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6 comments:
That's a very interesting to say. I'm only about two or three hours in myself, so I can't really comment about how much Niko's character develops or anything. However, for the most part, during the early stages of the game, he doesn't seem to possess the same "in character" visage GTA has always had with Tommy, Carl, or even No-name. It really illustrates how this has always been GTA's thing and how shallow people's taste can be.
Would this revelation been more apparent if there was a type of way to see how evil you are ala KOTR, Oblivion, FABLE or MASS EFFECT? Maybe Niko could start growing horns, or people would run away from at his sight.
Juan
Er...I think you kind of missed it. It's not a "revelation". GTA4 is illustrating even more how the "monster is the player". Apart from Oblivion (which could be seen the same way in a few aspects), all of those other games give you a pretty clean cut line between good and bad and you play the game accordingly always. People tend to just run around blowing shit/ up in GTA (i.e. people actively seek out Fable's horns whether they're there or not). This game also uses a great deal of "choice" as well compared to the other games...particularly interesting where GTA is a game where you are inherently kind of always doing "bad" things.
Interesting you bring up Fable and Oblivion, because I'm playing GTA IV (the first one in the series I've really played) as a role playing game. I wanted to see what the game would be like if you didn't just go the more "typical" route of killing at will and running over pedestrians. I drive slowly. I stop at red lights. I did steal a car, but I needed to get to Roman as fast as I could, because he was in danger.
It's making me very, very sympathetic for Niko. We're trying so hard to stay on the straight and narrow, but it's getting harder and harder.
I have been playing a straight arrow type, kinda like the character played by Vitto, from "Eastern Promises" hopefully doing bad for the ultimate good. Not sure if this is what the makers of GTA4 meant to do, but I like the option of it.
There's a way to get out of the warehouse *without* killing the police? If you mean the mission where (Spoiler? big surprise, there are drugs in the game's plot) you have to retrieve the coke then I couldn't work out a way of doing it and actually surviving without killing at least three policemen who appear at short range.
I'll probably play through the game again when I pick up the PS3 version so I'll try to find the other way.
I generally play GTA causing as little mayhem as possible, as it makes life much easier, and in the new game it makes me feel really guilty if I accidentally run someone over!
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