(This essay is at least partially in dialogue with Cameron Kunzelman's piece on Grand Theft Auto's Conservatism, which I largely agree with.)

Grand Theft Auto is a videogame series about cities. As someone who has played innumerable games that take place in cities and who has extensively read literature in urban studies and design for my dissertation research in the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech, I can say this with confidence. The city serves as a platform for everything that takes place within its boundaries. The essence of each game is not its characters, or its story, or its jabs at popular culture, but rather its urban structure. Everything extends from the premise established by the city.

Grand Theft Auto works because cars are brought into close proximity in a dense environment. A GTA is at its most broken when suddenly you are left without a vehicle, whether because none are spawning in the streets in the middle of the night or you rolled your pickup in the San Andreas countryside and must choose whether it's better to walk or load a recent save.

Despite its cinematic trappings, Grand Theft Auto III is actually quite similar to its top-down perspective progenitors. Keeping with its namesake, it's very much a game about cars. Unless you absolutely have to, it's usually a bad strategy to exit a car. Cars serve as weapons, smashing into other vehicles or enemies on foot. Cars act as body armor, protecting the player harm. Cars aid in traversal, collapsing the expanse of space. And the city, with its wide streets and narrow blocks, reflects this.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a game about using the city to evoke a sense of time and place. It relies heavily on media references, its soundtrack is firmly grounded in its era, and its visual aesthetic oozes an imaginary moment in Miami's history. Significantly, the game's opening portion is set along the backdrop of South Beach, which proves far more recognizable than downtown Miami. The long roads of Ocean Beach and Vice Point lend themselves to the facades of real estate and opulence. Little Havana and Little Haiti, on the other hand, provide the contrasting reality. As the player follows Tommy Vercetti's narrative trajectory, it's revealed that much more so than GTA III this is a game about managing space.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is about scale. Its three cities and connective countryside are an ode to mastering the PlayStation 2's hard- and software. It doesn't have abrupt loads like Vice City and its draw distance is usually impressive. The expanse of space focuses the narrative on mobility. First, CJ must escape (and is ultimately forced out) of the tangled web of his neighborhood and Los Santos. The countryside is then put into stark contrast with Los Santos, followed by a city that could not be any more different than L.A. San Fierro feels more like Liberty City (fitting, then, that the trip to the East Coast is inserted here fact check'd: you go to LC in Las Venturas). The game's missions escalate in ridiculousness as it moves into Las Venturas, a reflection of the absurdity of this hyperreal dessert oasis. And yet this all leads to a return home, the result of which is lacks the denouement of a nicely packaged story impossible to tell because of the large expanse of space.

Returning to Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto IV, shifts in technology allowed for a city with greater verisimilitude that could tell that classic American story: the insignificance of the self-made man. The more realistic scale of the buildings lends a weight that compliments the heavy story told of Niko Bellic's attempt at making it in America. But unlike San Andreas, whose scale supported preposterous scenarios, the density of Liberty City acted like a collapsing star, drawing the world in on itself with narrative gravity. Constrained by greater realism, the design patterns that worked in the PlayStation 2 era games proved untenable. Of course, because the name remained the same players expecting chaos and destruction had to seek their open-world freedom in Saints Row 2, The Saboteur, and later in Just Cause 2.

So it should be no surprise, then, that the new Los Santos speaks for itself. It touts its size, a fact of which was part of a marketing reveal. Its parody of modern society is a vestigial appendage. But this itself speaks to our current moment. If you can't be Louis C.K., you might as well be Jeff Dunham. Being a good comic takes work. Being a great comic takes work and skill and luck. Los Santos isn't about work and skill and luck, though. It's about work. It's no surprise that the game is conservative, it's already too exhausted by its own existence to be progressive.

The game opens with Franklin doing his job as a repo man. Michael is effectively a retiree who is forced back into the scummy offices of tech startup culture. Franklin has to operate a tow-truck. Michael has to get the right pair of shoes to begin a mission for Lester. I played an exhausting game of tennis and then took my dog for a walk. Los Santos details an urban space unlike any other to date (with perhaps one exception). Its impressive detail demonstrates just how much cityness the game hopes to exude. It has turns lanes. It has parking spaces! Buildings are distinct from one another and its texture is evocative.

We've spent centuries detailing the adventures of the cities in novels, photographs, and films. But we've also spent centuries writing of its drudgery, mundanity, and oppression. When the game opens, Los Santos is already too big. Similarly to how I felt about Liberty City in GTA IV, I don't imagine conquering this environment: I imagine hoping to survive it. Knowing that its complex machinery could chew me up and spit me out. It's no wonder it seems illogical to purposely gain warning stars and cause mayhem—I have to help my wife and friends out of a jam. I have to navigate the tangled mess of freeways to track down a shipment of grenades that always seems to be headed in the opposite direction. In this Los Santos, all I can hope is for Franklin, Michael, and Trevor to emerge with whatever it was they want from life. And if I can steward them into something moderately positive, I will call it a job well done.

I’ve seen some hate for events like E3 and I can fully sympathize. It’s a bunch of major corporations waging war for your money with ostentatious and often insincere presentations of consumerism. Yet, when you’ve grown up with a hobby you’re so invested in with both time and money, E3 proves to be a kind of exchange. The consumer asks, “what are you going to give me in return for what I’m going to give you?” The great anxiety yesterday, which culminated in Sony’s deft marketing move, concerned a certain level of dread for the consumer-producer exchange. Microsoft, with their draconian mandates about used games and security check-ins, attempted to dictate the terms of the exchange. Granted, the producer always has the upper-hand in these dealings, but there was no room for negotiation.

So when Jack Tretton took the stage and announced that there would be no restrictions on used games and that the console need not be always online, the tension was broken. The consumer backlash against Microsoft had furthered a broader negotiation with videogame consoles in general. Criticisms that “we were applauding something we already have” are not fair because the second those restrictions were announced they became the new fact.

When someone with power says they are going to take something away, it has been effectively enacted even if it has yet to be implemented. Consumers were indeed fighting for something they had already lost. And Sony could just as easily gone along with Microsoft, pulling in extra revenue for themselves and their developers, but they took a gamble that it would be in their best interest to continue doing business in a familiar way. It was not an act of good, just a gesture of goodwill.

Sony’s gamble, as I’m sure it will play out, took the upfront cost of this lost potential revenue stream and deferred it to a time further down the road when a significant portion of its sales will be non-transferrable, non-resellable digital purchases. In the end, Microsoft and Sony will both end up in the same digital world as Steam, GoG, iOS App Store, and Google Play. We were so relieved at the announcement during Sony’s press conference that we forgot to ask about the catch, which says a lot about where the biggest part of the industry might have taken consumers.

I like E3. As I explained to a pal on Twitter yesterday, whose comment “nothing like a press event to reveal that everyone in the world is an expert in the ecology of video game development and marketing,” prompted me to consider the reaction of the many of us following along at home, E3 is much like a cooking competition, a mystery movie, or a political debate. We have a knack for following these narratives logically to an often illogical conclusion. These marketing events are created with drama in mind. And, as the respondent, Sony was in the position to close the conversation.

We enjoy predicting the ending because our prediction has no real bearing on anything. The Internet gives us all the power to be pundits for a day, which at once shows us how silly the prediction game is and yet what it takes to make a living doing it. We both know everything and nothing about the games industry. We know what we need to know and are completely ignorant of how these things actually work. But if you Tweet a guess (like my assertion that Persona 5 would be coming to the Vita) and it’s right, it’s an amazing feeling. And, if you’re wrong (which I obviously was) there’s no negative outcome. But professional analysts get paid for being right more often than wrong. The fan succeeds with 1 out of 10. The analyst succeeds with 9 out of 10.

With so much money at stake, industry events are necessarily competitions for a limited resource. In an ideal world, they say, we would all just have small, fast, inexpensive computers that hooked up effortlessly to our televisions to guarantee flawless software compatibility. But isn’t that mostly what a console is? A dedicated box whose promise is ease of use.

We waver between our desire single-use and convergence devices. We wanted phones that were just phones until they proved they could play media and browse the web almost as well as anything else. The consumer negotiation with Apple has always been that despite iOS not being as robust as Android, we accepted the limitations in favor of the benefits of a smartphone that “just works.” Whenever I use Advanced Task Killer on my Nexus 7 to cure the ails of slowdown, I think there may in fact be something to Apple’s pledge.

The benefit of the computer for games is that it is not only easy to develop for but that it’s easy to publish on. Even without Steam Greenlight or Desura, a game creator can put an installer on their website or publish to the browser. It’s not that we want to use Photoshop on our television, it’s that the “walled gardens” of the consoles don’t have a publishing outlet to support this kind of work. It’s not the hardware that is the barrier here—the things inside a PlayStation 3 are capable of running a web browser with Flash—it’s a policy issue with the software.

So instead of lamenting the console has a restriction, might we not consider it an inexpensive oasis that, with enough support, could eventually be a place to play these games? It’s a tough battle, considering we already have desktop and laptop computers that do that, but it’s an attractive prospect. We like PCs because we they already do the things we want. But would a Good Old Games channel on the Xbox One begin to change your mind?

This is the exchange. As fans of these things we call videogames we constantly negotiate our expenses and desires. Games are not free. Well, some are, but as has been shown time and time again, people with skill appreciate being paid for their efforts.

So, with limited funds we do endless calculations about value: ”I’ll buy this when it hits $40, one $10 game gave me hours of satisfaction while I was burned by another, I’m only going to spend $15 in this free-to-play game...” We build game collections like portfolios, letting the 100+ hours of Skyrim offset the cost of a 5 hour FPS campaign. Just as movie studios and game publishers finance the little movies with the big ones, those of us fortunate enough to have the disposable income to spend on our hobby, our passion, defer risk when making purchases.

E3, in many ways, is just a point in time for consumers to begin plotting the long journey of their dollars. Yes, we get excited for certain games, some of which will change drastically and some of which may never come out. But excitement over one console or the other has less to do with the drama of corporate rivalries and more to do with which of the things that you were likely to buy are you more likely to buy. So, yes, it’s a consumerist capitalist affair and those folk who boycott coverage are probably more savvy than the rest of us, but so long as it continues to produce games we actually want to play, it will continue to be a part of the whole videogames ecosystem.

In the end, the Twitter stream and Facebook feed of commenters who watched the press conferences don’t actually matter. We tend to lend them more credence because they’re written down and published somewhere, but really it’s just the online equivalent of chatting with a friend on the couch while watching something. One month from now we’ll all feel different. Six months from now even more so.

And, in five years, when this has reached its natural conclusion, we’ll look back and say “of course!” But we will always do well to remember that moment of anxiety when things could have (and still can) go one way or the other.

It has been a long while since I've posted to the blog. But this new Quest system has inspired me to come back and earn a few points. So what have I been doing all this time? 
  
First, I finished my Masters degree in Digital Media at Georgia Tech and started in the PhD program. I study games! Specifically I'm interested in the construction and experience of space and place in games. It's way rad. 

Second, I wrote a book. Well, co-wrote, I should say. It's called Newsgames: Playing with Journalism. Fellow student Simon Ferrari and I joined Ian Bogost in compiling and synthesizing the research we spent the last year doing in regards to "newsgames," that is, games used for journalistic practice. Some, such as September 12th,  look like editorial cartoons. Others, like Beyond Good & Evil and Dead Rising, show us what it's like to be a photojournalist. Games like Budget Hero look like infographics and visualizations that have goals, while John Kerry's Silver Star is a third-person shooter intended to document and re-create Kerry's swiftboat mission in Vietnam. There's a wide range of topics covered in the book, and a wide range of games to match. [Would you like to know more?] 
 
Third, the Low Score podcast continues strong! We've recorded over 40 episodes and I recommend you give it a listen! We're no Bombcast, but we're no slouches either. 
 
That is it for now!

I'm in the second year of my Master's program in which I'm fortunate enough to get to study games with some really smart people (both professors and students). I had been stressing because I had spent all this time in the program and still had no idea what to write my thesis about. Obviously it was going to deal with games, but nothing was really jumping out at me. So I sat with a pad of paper and brainstormed all the topics I had been thinking about.  It included things like humor in games, the abstract avatar, the circle/sphere in gaming, and how to make engaging games about serious topics. None of those really excited me, though.

I thought back on a paper I wrote last semester on The Darkness and was reminded that my culminating seminar paper during my undergrad work dealt with the city in film noir. So I pitched the idea of doing research related to the city in the video game to my advisor and she encouraged me to roll with it. I'll kick things off with books on architecture and urban spaces while compiling a list of games I think are representative of the myriad of city-based titles. I hope to find out the following things: how cities are represented in games, how these representations reflect our culture, the influences of popular media on design, and the narrative and gameplay affordances of the city space. I'm starting off broadly so that I may find a more interesting question to turn into my thesis.

It's going to be a damn lot of work, but I'm up for the challenge. I may be drawing on the wisdom of crowds to help with my research so stay tuned!

Low Score Episode 04 "Kevin is Smug"

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Low Score Episode 05 "A Very Braidy Podcast"

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Low Score Episode 06 "Make it Work"

Not even the start of classes can stop Bobby from beating a game and buying three others. And now that he's finished with Mass Effect he and J can finally discuss it! Meanwhile J has an interesting cerebral response to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare being that it's the first FPS he's played where he's really out to kill real looking humans in war. Is this an untapped area of game design and story?

But be not discouraged, for Bobby wants to go to war with everybody in Civilization Revolution and blast off to space where he can kill alien dudes in Galaga Legions.

J's come back around on Bionic Commando: Rearmed and explains why not liking the game probably means you're doing it wrong.

What other adventures await our heroes? No idea! But you should listen anyway.

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So I started up a new game blog for both school and as a compliment to a project that has kind of fallen by the wayside. For my first post I talk about Galaga Legions and explain not only why I enjoy it but why it fits squarely in the Galaga tradition. Read it, won't you?

27 Years Later: How Galaga Legions Fits In

Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer recently pointed readers to the Versus CluClu Land blog run by Iroquois Pliskin (Metal Gear?!). Both of these authors write intelligent pieces about videogames—something I used to do often but have slowed down on while doing game studies in grad school and juggling all sorts of other outside projects. Every so often I read a post that sparks me to respond and I wanted to share one of those with you today.

Iroquois Pliskin writes about moral rewards in games and points to an article from Patrick Klepek on the MTV Multiplayer blog in which he asks four game developers who they chose to kill in the Playboy X / Dwayne feud in Grand Theft Auto IV. *SPOILERS AHEAD*

Pliskin contemplates the meaning of rewarding certain choices and says attaching a reward "represented a failure of nerve on the part of the designers" in creating morally ambiguous situations. Pliskin also notes that walkthroughs can be used to help game players learn the outcomes of their decisions without having to take risks.  Go read the article and then read my response on the Versus CluClu Land blog or right here below:

The use of walkthrough to make moral/gameplay choices is a very poignant one. Toward the beginning of the game I looked at a guide to see what the result of my choice of to-kill or not-to-kill was going to be, though by the time I got to Playbox X / Dwayne I had stopped referencing outside material to make my own choices.

This observation raises a handful of questions. The first relates to the use of walkthrough. While walkthroughs are not cheating, they do lay outside of the game's gameplay/narrative structure that you laid out. It's extra-narrative and extra-mechanic in terms of the game's world, but has become an ever-increasingly important part of the game industry. After all, Rockstar gave Brady Games the material needed to have their strategy guide published the day the game came out. And game publishers are also aware of the tenacity of the game playing public and their quick GameFAQs submitting fingers. This begs the question of how many people actually look at these walkthroughs when it comes to making moral decisions. If it is indeed a lot, then something needs to be done to make these decisions more surprising and impactful.

Another question is revealed in terms of decision-reward structures. If you're not looking at a walkthrough and choose to kill Playboy X and are rewarded for doing so does this necessarily show a bias for the "right decision" in the game. I felt that Rockstar has set up that bias in terms of narrative already. It's really hard to empathize with Playboy X. He lives outside the way of life with which Niko has aligned. The heavy-handed narrative from Rockstar seems to imply that getting Playboy X's apartment shouldn't be considered a reward so much a not getting it is punishment. This of course may just be my reading of the game, but I felt that the designers had a general trajectory for Niko's character even though it was "open" on the surface.

People get down on Grand Theft Auto in this area because they expect "open world," whereas I've found that the GTA games are anything but. Grand Theft Auto games allow freedom on one axis of your gameplay/narrative structure, but the latter is much more finely controlled. Sure CJ can fly around on a jetpack to the top of Las Venturas buildings and snipe people from the roof, but that open play will not progress the game, as you've written. It's up to the designers to strike the balance of what moves the game forward.

So what do we do about this climate of decisions affecting gameplay. Should all games look like Knights of the Old Republic with an alignment system that changes the narrative? Does a different-but-equal reward system mitigate the inherent problems with moral decisions in narrative? What about randomly or procedurally generating results so that everybody's gameplay experience is slightly different? Or is it okay to reward decisions based on the ideology of the game?

What's most important is that game designers try all these different things so that we continue to have a wide variety of game playing experiences.