Grand Theft Auto 5: The Ferrett Review
I thought much more kindly about Grand Theft Auto once I realized the developers of the game actively despised me.
This fact was conveyed to me by Tom Bissell’s amazing review, which may be one of the best pieces of videogame writing I’ve ever seen. In it (among other many salient analyses of how videogame culture works), Tom states that Grand Theft Auto is, in fact, a large parody of its audience, and implies that actually, the developers don’t seem to like us all that much. Why else would they keep giving us boring tasks like mopping floors and driving twenty minutes across town to get to a mission?
The truth dawned: Rockstar’s entire genre is actually punishing us, in a way. They know how to make a fun game, no doubt. But what they’re doing is saying, “Okay, fuck it, the goal of Grand Theft Auto is not to make our customers happy, it’s to see how many hoops we can make them jump through for our amusement.” And once I began to internalize that idea, the concept that actually all of GTA 5 was basically one grudgefuck for an audience it actively loathed, Grand Theft Auto became enjoyable.
Because despite the frothing of reviewers everywhere, GTA is an ambitious game with substandard controls. It’s full of terribly designed missions: how do you learn to fly a plane? Not by taking the flying tutorials; no, those aren’t available until you’ve done the flying mission. And the flying mission has a literal three-minute segment where you soar over the ocean, gracefully headed towards home, and then crash on the runway because landing is tricky and you can’t read the little pop-up hints. And so, if you’re a bad flier like me, you wind up playing the same fucking mission for eighteen minutes, spending three minutes to get to the inevitable fuck-up at the end.
But that’s okay. That is, like Harlan Ellison’s AM, the way the game designers are taking out their aggression on me.
Grand Theft Auto 5 never quite becomes a game as I understand it. It is, in fact, an endless series of tutorials, many of them shoddy. Every mission is pretty much “Follow the instructions, and if you deviate from them in the slightest your mission is over.” Right up to the final mission, you’re chasing a dot on the screen, you’re learning how to squeeze the mop, you’re learning how to use a parachute. You’re always following orders from a God, and that God is cruel.
Because as noted, the tutorials aren’t particularly helpful. They’re all in small type, arriving when you’re distracted by other things – yes, let’s make you read things when you’re chasing a boat down a freeway! – and failing to comprehend them in time gives you insta-mission failure. In fact, pretty much anything gives you insta-mission failure. Take a wrong turn while chasing the celebrity? Insta-mission failure. Even though your travelling companion told you to turn right, this wasn’t the correct right, and now after following directions you will be chastised with the horrid blue “MISSION FAILURE” screen, you must do it again.
But that’s okay, because the game hates you.
The point of Grand Theft Auto is not to explore, really, it’s to see how closely you can conform to Rockstar’s demands. You do precisely what they say, or you don’t do it at all. And there’s a certain grim pleasure in getting through it, because the new and upgraded mission checkpoints mean that every mission is doable with enough repetition, so there’s not an actual challenge to it. The same could be said of Saints Row, but Saints Row wants you to have fun.
Grand Theft Auto, I’m convinced, is nothing but subtle hatred. I mean, they give you this grand and glorious landscape, meticulously detailed, and then on every mission they force you to glue your eyes to the little navigation box in the lower left-hand corner. They’ve surely seen other games where directions are given with cartoonish arrows pointing down streets so that you don’t have to take your gaze off the road, all so that you can appreciate the alleyways and mini-malls, and won’t crash into other cars while straining to see the GPS.
But no! Aware of all the alternatives, Rockstar said, “Ah, fuck ’em, let ’em stare at a tiny map for seven-tenths of the game.”
The thing is, you are rewarded for all of this by some fascinating characters and rampant creativity. I like Michael, the bored and whiny ex-criminal. I like Franklin, the ambitious hood guy. I am compelled by Trevor, the psychotic, even as I pretty much hate him and the idea of him. And you get some wonderful dialogue and character interaction, and each of the missions are amazingly skillful in the writing. There are only a few core mechanics – go kill someone, go chase someone – but Rockstar is an absolute master of wrapping those repetitive goals in new ideas, so when you’re chasing someone for the fortieth time it feels fresh because you’re driving a bus on an assassination mission, or chasing a boat to get your kidnapped son, or beating some psychotic woman in a race you never wanted.
You’re doled out rewards. The game is just enjoyable enough to make it up for its many flaws. And, I suspect, much of the rabid fan base is Stockholm Syndrome in action; if you’ve dealt with all of this tedium, you eventually come to believe that this was a wonderful game, perfect, because you jumped through all of these hoops and you couldn’t have done that for no reason, could you? No. The game must be wonderful, without flaw, because you endured all of this.
But Grand Theft Auto’s ambition is endless, its execution flawed. Even the storyline turns out to be a disappointment; as much as I rooted for Franklin and Michael in the beginning, they have no character arc. Franklin’s lesson is that if he remains slavishly devoted to the incompetent remnants of his past, he will discover himself, and Michael’s lesson is that if he just keeps killing and making heists he will regain himself. Literally the entire tale is “Just keep on keepin’ on,” and while there are a lot of eddies and fun sidelines, there’s no real climax except for the endings which are, by the game’s own logic, the bad ones. The individual writing is beautiful, almost pristine, and the voice acting is hands-down the best I’ve heard in any game, but does it assemble into a coherent whole? It does not.
And as has been noted a thousand times before, it’s a little weirdly anti-woman. Yes, all the characters in GTA are overblown and bizarre, but some are at least sympathetic; the game tries mightily to give Trevor some understanding, implying a very bad past full of betrayals and abuse. Yet while the game will attempt to justify a meth-making, violent psychopath’s motivations, there is not one woman in the game who makes sense at all. They’re all shrews, intended to cut down the male characters, and they are only acceptable when they begin to bend to their wills.
Grand Theft Auto 5 is a lot better than GTA 4, and I suspect that’s all most people wanted. But it’s also not as fun as the GTA 3 lines, because there are fewer crowds to plow through, and it just seems harder to create massive mayhem. I wanted to blow up twenty, thirty cars, and I had to work far too hard to engineer such an environment.
Grand Theft Auto dislikes you. It’s mocking you for playing it. And there’s stuff worth there to play, very worthwhile, but one senses that they’re making you dig through the muck on purpose to find the jewels within. If I had to give it a rating, it’d be a B, maybe a B+ – some much-needed fine-tuning could have made this the best game in XBox history, but really, would Rockstar have wanted to make it that easy for you?
Three Things I Hate In Roleplaying Games (That Other People Love).
What I’m about to list are things that some roleplayers clearly get off on; they’re embedded in the DNA of almost every game, feature prominently in modules, and are generally repeated so thoroughly in so many games that I can only assume that they’re really popular among a large subset of players. But this is all stuff I jettison the instant I get into any game, the stuff I’m continually surprised to see popping up again, and it just makes me wonder.
Being A Banker.
A lot of modules assume the players will keep track of their wealth, down to the last copper piece. They negotiate frantically for an extra 5 GP, are thrilled to find an additional 4 GP in the flowerpot, and later on have to hire a coachman for 10 GP.
Whether I’m a GM or a player, I hate that crap.
I like knowing my players are wealthy, or poor, or whatever, but having to track every expenditure against their baseline is the D&D equivalent of balancing my checkbook. “Oh, my rations cost me 2 shins a day? Do I want to splurge and have a nice meal for 5 shins?” And to me, that’s just an annoyance that gets in the way of my roleplaying – suddenly, I’m not Thundersmash the Barbarian, but Thundersmash the Wage-Slave, frantically counting pennies to see whether I can afford a new set of gloves.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind playing poor. My current Mage campaign has me playing a notch above a homeless person, and that’s great; I’m fine, living in squalor. And some of the best campaigns have been that sort of race against poverty, where you’re starving and need this job, because otherwise you’re not sure you can make it through the winter. Victory is so much sweeter when it comes in the face of poverty.
But abstract the details. Tell me my belly aches from hunger, tell me how cold it is outside, show me the sneers of the noblemen passing me on the street. I don’t want to have to continually keep the medieval equivalent of Quicken at hand.
(Likewise, keeping track of every single inventory item. Fun in videogames! But just assume that if I’m a thief, I have a rope and some spikes. I don’t want to manage a huge list of Things I Carried, all as a “gotcha” so when it turns out that no, I did not remember to add “quill and ink” to my mage’s inventory, I can write absolutely nothing at all. Don’t get me started on somatic components.)
Puzzles I Am Expected To Solve Personally.
Look, if I wanted to do logic puzzles, I’d sit down and do a goddamned logic puzzle. Really, Mister GM, I haven’t been aching to solve the Towers of Hanoi one more time – and if I did, I wouldn’t want to do it with three other players debating the correct solution with me.
This is a classic D&D tradition, and I don’t mind it when it shows up in modules like The Tomb Of Horrors, which was basically a big middle finger from Gary Gygax to every ninetieth level wizard/assassin/cleric. Tomb of Horrors was basically there to screw over cocky fourteen-year-olds who’d abused the rulebook, and so in certain circumstances the long tradition of giving the players something frustrating and impenetrable is fine.
But I play characters. Who are routinely either smarter or dumber than me. They are not me. And so when you say, “Here’s a bunch of levers and switches,” it yanks me right out of all of this fine character-headspace I’ve built in; I don’t think anyone in the history of roleplaying has ever said, “How would my elf solve this puzzle?” – no, they go, “How do I solve this puzzle?” and then suddenly I’m basically spending time in real life doing things an iPad could literally do better. Time that I am not losing myself in the pathetic grade-school power fantasy that I came here to intellectually whack it to, goddammit.
Not to mention that half these puzzles are total BS in-game, too. The GM has to devise an elaborate reason why someone would spend hundreds of thousands of gold pieces on elaborate levers rather than just slap a magical lock on it with a passphrase, and usually has to put in cryptic “clues” handed to you by passing merchants or stuffed in lockers so you have a hope in heck of solving it. By the time you’re having the clues of “A to B, B to C, C to A again” then you’re basically acknowledging that there’s no real good in-game reason, you just wanted a puzzle.
Nothing wrong with puzzles. But they bring the game to a halt while I have to solve them, and if we don’t get them we’re usually not advancing the plot, and a third of the time it boils down to “Oh, make an Intellect check” anyway. So my preference? Don’t.
Mapping Out Exact Distances.
This is why D&D 4th Edition lost me.
As noted earlier, I come here for the roleplaying. I want to immerse myself in the visuals created between a DM’s descriptions and my own mental interpretations therein, and write a tale between the two of us. And I enjoying holding all of this glorious idea-landscapes created in my head, and then….
…I’m a doofy plastic piece on someone’s Cheeto-strewn coffee table.
Look, I’m not opposed to miniature wargaming. It’s a perfectly nice hobby. But when I’m roleplaying, I want to lose myself in swashbuckling, emphasizing the Rule of Cool – if I’m two feet short of my allotted move but it’s a great chandelier swing, I think that stuff should happen. I don’t want to constantly measure distances to ensure that I’m within range or not within range, and to see whether that stone wall is half a move away, and how are these guys?
I appreciate the tactical portions of the game. But keeping track of my guys with pieces feels like I’m playing some sort of embarrassing preadolescent chess, moving the big-boobed leather woman around, and it feels kind of shameful, seeing how my grandiose dreams have boiled down to these teeny silly bits that are going to be swept away the next time the cat jumps on the table. Plus, then I’m more concerned with rules than I am with flavor – and to my mind, if I’m going to do something that complex and flavorless, why not just play a computer game where all of that is handled for me automatically, rather than this slow pause while we all roll dice and do math and determine things?
Look. When I kill the demon, I want to imagine fire gouting from its chest, dying wings flapping, the terror on its face as it realizes a mere mortal has ended its existence on this planet.
What happens in real life is the GM tips the plastic toy on its side.
It’s not the same.
Just Like Starting Over: Getting Into Podcasts
This dog I have, she needs walking. Which means for at least forty minutes of my day, I’m outside.
I don’t know what to do with myself.
The good news is, all this walking is good imagination-fodder for my stories and Numenera campaigns. And as opposed to pacing in small circles in my backyard muttering to myself – the traditional wellspring of my ideas – I now do the socially more acceptable version of walking a dog and muttering. Which is great, because when you’re chanting, “A feral libertarian Disneyland! With sports drinks!” over and over as the idea takes root in your mind, you really need a puppy as a distraction.
But there are days the brain is fuzzy, and for those I think I need podcasts.
Which is weird. I have not traditionally liked podcasts, because I have television when I’m programming, and I have music when I’m driving, but walking at a dog’s pace is just not the right beat. Voices seem like a good idea to me.
I don’t know where to start.
Which is weird. Podcasts have been around for at least ten years now, they’re common, and I am a techno guy. I can create a fully-functionable website from scratch in half an hour. I can sling jQuery and Memcached and MongoDB with the best of them to create really massive user experiences at Starcitygames… and yet when it comes to this extremely popular thing, I don’t even know where to go or what to do.
Which is not to say that I won’t learn. I’m sure it’s easy to subscribe podcasts on iTunes – one subscribes, right? – and certainly it can’t be that hard finding them. I’m gonna look for a Numenera podcast first, to see if I can find something that inspires me in my game. But it’s just weird that for all of my mad techno-skills, there are a lot of things that people do commonly, trivially, that I now require the online equivalent of a “For Dummies” guide to make happen.
In some areas, I’m bleeding edge. In others, I’m way behind the curve. And it’s just weird to go from “Master of Twitter” to “Grandpa, wondering how I get The Podcast on this here Apple Phone” within seconds.
How Do I Give Away This Frightening Masculine Power?
Kameron Hurley has a really good post on how women’s issues don’t count until men talk about them. Go read it.
…now.
In a sane world, that would be my link, and everyone would, in fact, go read it. After all I’ve just all but told you, “She says something so well and beautifully that I’m taking up an entire blog post in my personal space to inform you of it. This should be the signal that, in fact, it’s pretty much a blog entry of mine, written by someone else, only a link away.”
But I know from talking to people that unless I make a big old blog post in response to someone’s post, regurgitating large chunks of what they said better, a simple “Go read it” doesn’t do it. Few click that link. I have to make a mini-essay out of it to convince you all that yes, she’s really written some amazing stuff, and then more of you go read it.
But then sometimes – no, actually, many times – I write about feminist topics in this way, people will link to me, as though I was the starting point in this issue, and more than a couple of times I’ve seen more discussion on my half-chewed meanderings on some woman’s topic than exists on that woman’s page. And that vexes me. Because Kameron’s whole point, which is correct, is that for a lot of people, the problem does not exist until a friendly white male comes along and explains it to y’all. And even after I’ve made it official, somehow it often becomes my crusade in the eyes of many, as opposed to the essay that started it.
Which tasks me. It tasks me.
Look, I don’t blame people for making me write things as a mini-essay; you endure my endless blatherings, obviously you like gouts of words, clearly you want more salesmanship before you move your mouse. But there are times when I try to drop focus on someone else, and that more-than-often gets people discussing my essay as though it were the primary bit, and when that happens it’s almost inevitably about some sort of women’s rights thing. Which makes me wonder whether I’m assisting the problem by trying to link to this shit, or merely deepening subtle biases.
So from now on, when I link from here, I’m gonna do the sales pitch for you, but I’m going to preface it with She Said It Better. Which means that when you see that, I’m writing the essay entirely as a way to get you to pay attention to someone else, and you should know that this whole essay is a disposable sabot to impel you towards better words. Those words should be the primary focus in any subsequent discussion.
Now shaddap and read Kameron. She Said It Better.
What Bothers Me About The Government Shutdown
Interestingly enough, on some level I became actually sympathetic of the Tea Partiers’ efforts after reading Ross Douthat’s analysis of how the right has never actually gotten what they wanted. All the right’s ever wanted was a smaller government, and what they’ve gotten has been “increasingly size at a slower rate,” which is kind of like going on a diet and only gaining five pounds a year instead of twenty.
So on some abstract level, I get the shutdown: it is, in a way, the liberal fantasy we’ve dreamed of having, bold politicians who’ll say, “This is what we want, and we will accept no less!”
…then I look at what they’re actually doing, and I really hate every aspect of it. If the Republicans would own this issue as “We’re going to make America fiscally responsible if it kills you,” then at least I’d respect them. But they know that for all of America’s griping, nobody wants less government when it affects them – they only want to cut things for other people. The reason the Republicans have never significantly stemmed the growth of government is because Americans actually like government a whole lot, they just don’t like it when the benefits aren’t flowing in their direction.
So what we get instead of an honest debate is “OBAMA WON’T NEGOTIATE!” (which is bullshit, as the Republicans have literally made obstructionism the core of their movement), and “OBAMACARE IS WORSE THAN SLAVERY!” and basically their big stick comes not from a bad budget, but from stopping a healthcare program that they admit they have no alternatives to and repealing would leave a lot of people to die.
So in theory: I’m for it. In practice, it’s extremely shitty and petty, and irritates me, and I hope it destroys the Republicans in the way that Jimmy Carter destroyed the Democratic party for almost two decades. (It’s already costing them, as David Frum has pointed out.)
But what bothers me most about it is this: in many ways, the shutdown is kind of a Republican victory. Because nobody wants to be a dick about, you know, an outbreak of salmonella, we’re quietly re-opening the bits of government that are most needed. And as liberals, you’re in a quandary: the best method to show exactly how much government regulation is actually needed is to let everything go to hell and then, once the bodies are strewn across the landscape, point out that all this happened because the Republicans thought this sort of thing was frippery.
Yet you don’t want to kill people. So you cave and re-open whatever seems necessary at the time, without ever really acknowledging the good these things do.
In that sense, I feel like we’re following a four-year-old around who’s insisting, “STOVES NOT BAD, MA! KNIVES NO HURT NOBODY!” and yanking his hands away from the burners and blades as he screams that his friends say nobody needs your protection. Yeah, it’s making the kid safer for now, but it’s also not teaching him the lesson that yeah, in fact, we don’t stick our hands in the burners for a reason, and there’s a part of me that wants to let the kid get a nice, solid blister so he’ll stop yelling at me for being so mean about the stove.
But you don’t want a blistered kid and you don’t want people hurt. So you quietly push him away from the stove, and wonder if there’s a better way. There probably isn’t.
All you can kind of do is hope that one day he’ll either listen, or get hurt in a way that doesn’t do too much damage. But even if he gets hurt… you’re pretty sure he won’t learn.