dessalles

I’ve only just started digging into Grand Theft Auto IV, so I’m not gonna offer much of a review here; but I thought I would throw out a couple early notes…

With Rockstar’s decision to model the game world after New York City, the one thing myself and many others were eager to learn was how the GTA experience would differ for those already familiar with NYC. What I’m finding is that Liberty City doesn’t build on any functional understanding of New York as much as it appeals to my emotional appreciation for it. It’s very much an artistic impression - “it’s like a painting” as a friend put it.

However, with that said, the environment’s intricate detail and unbelievable richness demands comparison and inspection. And the first thing I did upon setting foot in Broker, Liberty City’s answer to Brookyln, was hijack a car and attempt to connect landmarks, streets and neighborhoods to their real-world counterparts. There are plenty of connections to make, almost all with a brilliant satirical twist; however, Rockstar understandably, though disappointingly, resisted the temptation of mirroring the exact layout and geography of Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs. All the major parks, monuments, bridges and buildings have their place, but you won’t find yourself killing drug dealers outside your local bodega at any point in the game.

In Sunday’s NYTimes, Dave Itzkoff offered a fantastic account of the process he went through to come to this realization:

Having been lulled into believing that I really was in New York, I made the mistake of trying to find my own Alphabet City apartment within the game. I walked down to Chinatown — that took only a few seconds — found what I thought was Houston Street, and made my way to where Avenue A (and my apartment) should have been. […]

It was as if some unknown natural disaster had recently touched down and attacked only the portions of New York that I cared for most deeply. My city — at least, the parts of it that I thought of as my city — no longer existed.

[…] the problem with G.T.A. — one that will in no way dissuade me from playing the game until my digits are raw and aching — is that the more fully you are pulled into Liberty City and the more closely you inspect it, the more you are reminded that it isn’t a city at all.

The neighborhoods do not blend into one another so much as sit next to one another. The traffic varies just enough from one area to the next to convince you that a place is inhabited, but eavesdrop on a pedestrian long enough, and you’ll find that he doesn’t eventually go home to his wife and kids — he just keeps walking and talking in a continuous loop.

It’s not the game’s fault that it can’t perfectly replicate the infinite variety of New York. But it sometimes comes so close to pulling off the illusion that it invites you to look for the imperfections.

His disappointment sounds like a textbook plunge into the theorized Uncanney Valley, except in this case the city is the character in question.

Similarly, Ed Levine’s New York Eats, a local food blog, started identifying the real-life restaurants and food-related landmarks of Liberty City:

The “Steinway Beer Garden” is obviously a stand-in for the Bohemian Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens, where neighborhood locals and packs of roving hipsters swarm to swill grog on warm weekend afternoons. The virtual version even shares a name with nearby Steinway Street.

I’ve recently found myself in talks about advertising in videogames, and what’s interesting about GTA IV is all of a sudden those ad opportunities are localized. In GTA, player’s are expected to spend time in the various bars, clubs and attactions of Liberty City. Would a local bar owner pay to have people take their videogame dates to a videogame incarnation of his business? Obvsiuoly national retail chains might be a bit hesitant about letting gamers kill criminals/shoppers in their stores, but I’d imagine local business might be a bit more receptive to the idea. Anyhow, I find the thought of a city’s small businesses petitioning to have the next installment of Grand Theft Auto set in their city a nice counterpoint to the outrage of NYC poilitcians.