Extra Lives (22 page)

Niko’s real pathos derives not from the gimcrack story but how he looks and moves.
Vice City
and
San Andreas
were graphically
astounding by the standards of their time, but their character models were woeful—even by the standards of their time. The most vivid thing about
Vice City
’s Tommy is the teal Hawaiian shirt he wears at the game’s open, and
San Andreas
’s C.J. is so awkwardly rendered he looks like the King of the Reindeer People. Niko, though, is just about perfect. Dressed in striped black track pants and a dirty windbreaker, Niko looks like the kind of guy one might see staring longingly at the entrance of a strip club in Zagreb, too poor to get in and too self-conscious to try to. When, early in the game, a foulmouthed minor Russian mafioso named Vlad dismisses Niko as a “yokel,” he is not wrong. Niko is a yokel, pathetically so. One of the first things you have to do as Niko is buy new clothes in a Broker (read: Brooklyn) neighborhood called Hove Beach (read: Sheepshead Bay). The clothing store in question is Russian-owned, its wares fascinatingly ugly. And yet you know, somehow, that Niko, with his slightly less awful new clothes, feels as though he is moving up in the world. The fact that he is only makes him more heartrending. The times I identified most with Niko were not during the game’s frequent cut scenes, which drop bombs of “meaning” and “narrative importance” with nuclear delicacy, but rather when I watched him move through the world of Liberty City and projected onto him my own guesses as to what he was thinking and feeling.

Liberty City, many game reviewers argued, is the real central character of
GTA IV
, and here they were not wrong. The worlds of
Vice City
and
San Andreas
, however mind-blowing at the time, were also geometrically dead and Tinkertoy-ish, with skyscrapers and buildings that looked like upturned Kleenex boxes. Their size and variegation were impressive, but surfaces held little texture and lighting and particle effects were distractingly subpar. Virtually every visual element of
GTA IV
’s Liberty City is gorgeously realized, and I have never felt more forcefully transported
into a gameworld than while running across Liberty City’s Middle Park in orange-sherbet dusk, taking a right turn onto the Algonquin Bridge and seeing the jeweled ocean glisten in the hard light of high afternoon, or stepping out of a Hove Beach tenement into damp phantasms of morning fog. The physics that previously governed the world of
GTA
were brilliantly augmented as well.
GTA IV
replaced the zippily insubstantial, slippery-tired cars and motorcycles of
Vice City
and
San Andreas
with vehicles of brutely heavy actuality. While the crashes in
Vice City
are a ball,
GTA IV
’s car crashes are sensorily traumatic, often sending a screaming Niko through the windshield and into oncoming traffic. Running over a few stick-legged rag dolls in
San Andreas
is always good for a nasty-minded laugh, but running people down in
GTA IV
often leaves your bumper and headlights smeared with blood—evidence that gruesomely carries over into in-game cut scenes—and the potato-sack thud with which pedestrians carom off your windshield is, the first time you hear it, deeply disturbing. Liberty City is also more eccentrically populated. While there are plenty of people walking about Vice City and San Andreas, the character models are repetitive. I came across the latter’s shirtless, red-Kangol-wearing LL Cool J doppelgänger so many times I started shooting the dude out of general principle. Liberty City’s citizens have far more visual and behavioral distinction. (The bits of dialogue you overhear while walking down the street are some of the game’s funniest: “You know,” one cop cheerfully admits to another, “I
love
to beat civilians.”) Discovering who panics and who decides to stop and duke it out with you when you try to steal a car is one of the
GTA
games’ endless fascinations. When a Liberty City guy in a suit unexpectedly pulls out a Glock and starts firing it at you, you are no longer playing a game but interacting with a tiny node of living unpredictability. The owner of one of the first vehicles I
jacked in Liberty City tried to pull me out of the car, but I accelerated before she succeeded. She held on to the door handle for a few painful-looking moments before vanishing under my tires in a puff of bloody mist. With a nervous laugh I looked over at my girlfriend, who was watching me play. She was not laughing and, suddenly, neither was I.

GTA IV
’s biggest advance from its predecessors was the quality of its apocalyptic satire. (The
GTA
games are not made by Americans and probably could not be made by Americans. Volition’s
Saints Row
series, the most popular American-made
GTA
imitator, all but proves this, offering a vision of American culture that is unlikably frat-boyish and frequently defensive.)
Vice City
and
San Andreas
are too often content, satire-wise, to amuse themselves with stupid puns. While
GTA IV
has its share of pun gags (a chain of Internet cafés called Tw@, a moped known as the Faggio, an in-game credit card called Fleeca), and a number of simply dumb gags (its Statue of Liberty holds not a torch but a coffee cup), many of the haymakers it swings at American excess and idiocy make devastating contact. Much of the best material can be heard while listening to commercials on one of the game’s nineteen radio stations. An Olive Garden–ish restaurant chain known as Al Dente’s promises “all the fat of real Italian food, with a lot less taste and nutrients!” Broker’s emo station, Radio Broker, uses “The station hipsters go to to say they’ve heard it all!” as its call sign. WKTT, Liberty City’s conservative talk radio station (“Because democracy is worth suppressing rights for”), has as its Rush Limbaugh one Richard Bastion, a man given to pronouncements such as “Knowing you’re always right
—that
is real freedom” and “Sodomy is a sin—even if I
crave
it.” One of my favorite things to do in Liberty City is to retire to Niko’s apartment and watch television. A brilliant cartoon show called
Republican Space Ranger
offers one of the most Swiftian portrayals of George W. Bush’s foreign policy to be found in any medium: The Rangers’ spaceship is shaped like a giant phallus and guided by an “insurgescan;” after annihilating a planet the Rangers do not even deign to visit, they commend themselves for “freeing mankind.” The game’s spleen shows most splendidly with Weazel News, its barely exaggerated version of Fox News. One Weazel newscast opens: “In a bloody terrorist attack that will surprise nobody…” At the crime scene itself, the on-the-spot reporter tells us that it is “a madhouse! We’ve got policemen signing book deals and firemen holding hoses and being photographed for Christmas calendars!”

Is Liberty City a metaphor for New York City, an imitation of New York City, or an exaggeration of New York City? The strength of Liberty City—a carefully arranged series of visual riffs on how New York City
looks
and
feels
rather than a street-by-street replication—is that, almost instantly, it becomes itself. As you learn Liberty City’s streets and shortcuts, you are reminded of various real-life places—the cobbled streets of the Meatpacking District in the Meat Quarter, the shadowy concrete canyons of Midtown in Star Junction, the long weedy avenues of the South Bronx in South Bohan, the sterile pleasantness of Battery Park City in Castle Garden City—but these approximations quickly molt their interest. Soon you are thinking,
Oh, I need a new car, and can steal one from that Auto Exotica dealership right around the corner from here
, or
I can pick up Molotov cocktails near that Firefly Island bowling alley
, or
If I call Little Jacob right now, he will meet me in that alley by Star Junction Square, but if I call him two blocks from here, I’ll have to find him underneath the East Borough Bridge
. I lived in New York City for close to a decade but have never played
GTA IV
while living there. To my delight, I found that
GTA IV
made me less homesick for the city. For me, Liberty City is an aggregate of surrogate
landmarks and memories and the best way I have—short of reading a novel by Richard Price (whose
Lush Life
was one of the two novels I actually finished in the last year)—to remind me of what I love about the city it mimics.

To anyone who has not played the
GTA
games, this may be hard to swallow. What many without direct experience with the games do know is that they allow you to kill police officers. This is true.
GTA
games also allow you to kill everyone else. It is sometimes assumed that you somehow get points for killing police officers. Of course, you do not get “points” for anything in
GTA IV
. You get money for completing missions, a number of which are, yes, monstrously violent. While the passersby and pedestrians you slay out of mission will occasionally drop money, it would be hard to argue that the game rewards you for indiscriminate slaughter. People never drop that much money, for one, and the best way to attract the attention of the police, and begin a hair-raising transborough chase, is to hurt an innocent person. As for the infamous cultural trope that in
GTA
you can hire a prostitute, pay her, kill her, and take her money, this is also true. But you do not have to do this. The game certainly does not
ask
you to do this. Indeed, after being serviced by a prostitute, Niko will often say something like, “Strange. All that effort to feel this empty.” Outside of the inarguably violent missions, it is not what
GTA IV
asks you to do that is so morally alarming. It is what it allows you to do.

GTA IV
does have ideas about morality, some of which are very traditional. Many of the game’s least pleasant characters are coke addicts, for instance. Niko is never shown imbibing any illegal substance, and when he gets drunk and plants himself behind the wheel of a car, the dizzily awhirl in-game camera provides an excellent illustration of why drunk driving is such a prodigiously bad idea. Finally, one surprisingly affecting mission involves Niko
having to defend his homosexual friend Bernie from some thuggish gay-bashers in Middle Park. These are something less than the handholds of moral depravity.

Indeed, one criticism of
GTA IV
has to do with its traditional morality. Niko is shown during framed-narrative cut scenes to struggle with being asked to do such violent things, but while on furlough from these cut scenes Niko is able to behave as violently as the gamer wishes: Ludonarrative dissonance strikes again. But the game
does
attempt to address this. When Niko hits an innocent person in a car, he often calls out, “Sorry about that!” A small concession to acknowledging Niko’s tormented nature, perhaps, but an important one. (Neither Tommy nor C.J. ever shows such remorse.) I chose to deal with
GTA IV
’s ludonarrative dissonance in my own way. While moving through the gameworld, I did my best not to hurt innocent people. There
was
no ludonarrative dissonance for me, in other words, because I attempted to honor the Niko of the framed narrative when my control of him was restored.

There is no question, though, that
GTA IV
’s violence can be extremely disturbing because it feels unprecedentedly distinct from how, say, films deal with violence. Think of the scene in
Goodfellas
in which Henry, Tommy, and Jimmy kick to death Billy Batts in Henry’s restaurant. Afterward, they decide to put Batts’s body in the trunk of Henry’s car and bury it the forest. Of course, Batts is not yet dead and spends much of the ride to his place of interment weakly banging the trunk’s interior. When Batts is discovered to be alive he is repeatedly, nightmarishly stabbed. The viewer of
Goodfellas
is implicated in the fate of Billy Batts in any number of ways. Most of us presumably feel closest to Henry, who has the least to do with the crime but is absolutely an accomplice to it. Henry’s point of view is our implied own. Thus, we/Henry, unlike Tommy and Jimmy, retain our capacity for horror. Henry’s
experience within that horror is the scene’s aesthetic and moral perimeter. In
GTA IV
, Niko is charged with disposing of the bodies of two men whose deaths he is partially responsible for. You/Niko drive across Liberty City with these bodies in the trunk to a corrupt physician who plans to sell the organs on the black market. Here, the horror of the situation is refracted in an entirely different manner, which allows the understanding that
GTA IV
is an engine of a far more intimate process of implication. While on his foul errand, Niko must cope with lifelike traffic, police harassment, red lights, pedestrians, and a poorly handling loaner car. Literally thousands of in-game variables complicate what you are trying to do. The
Goodfellas
scene is an observed experience bound up in one’s own moral perception. The
GTA IV
mission is a procedural event in which one’s moral perception of the (admittedly, much sillier) situation is scrambled by myriad other distractions. It turns narrative into an active experience, which film is simply unable to do in the same way. And it is moments like this that remind me why I love video games and what they give me that nothing else can.

An alkaloid drawn from a South American shrub, cocaine has been used by human beings for at least a thousand years and spectacularly abused for quite a bit less than that. Its familiar form as a white powder is yet another product of Teutonic ingenuity, for it was a German scientist who isolated the fun, psychoactive part of cocaine. An Austrian named Freud was among the first to study it seriously. (His initial findings: Cocaine was
terrific.)
Until 1914, cocaine could be legally purchased in US drugstores, parlors, and saloons, and was most often prescribed by doctors as a cure for hay fever. “Cocaine,” Robert Sabbag tells us in the smuggling classic
Snowblind
, “has no edge. It is strictly a motor drug. It does not alter your perception; it will not even wire you up like the
amphetamines. No pictures, no time/space warping, no danger, no fun, no edge. Any individual serious about his chemicals—a heavy hitter—would sooner take thirty No-Doz. Coke is to acid what jazz is to rock. You have to appreciate it.
It
does not come to
you.”