I never tried GTA: San Andreas, but I did enjoy what I played of Vice City. It seemed like the most tongue-in-cheek of the series, as you point out, yet somehow contained the satire within that eerie simulacrum of (violent) pop culture that is GTA’s stock in trade.

And yes, maybe you put your finger on what made me uneasy — and finally unable to continue playing — GTA4. It’s such a deeply described world that the distance between my space and its space collapsed; there was no avatarial interval, and the immersion became claustrophobic. I know this makes me a wuss, but, as I said in my post, having turned 42 I allow myself to be crotchety!

That said, in preparation (for buying GTA4, not for Malawi, of course!), I played Vice City and San Andreas before leaving. I was reminded of how much more I like Vice City precisely because of the music. It’s so much more camp and playful, and a giant middle finger to the media effects folk, to perpetrate a horrific act of violence to Hall and Oates. San Andreas added other goodies, but in bringing its music closer to today’s sense of cool, it started to lose me a bit (with some exceptions, as when playing the Country channel). I do worry that GTA4 may make it hard to distance myself with modern music, and a cityscape that’s all too recognizable. And seeing that it’s not possible to mow down a group of hipsters outside a Williamsburg bar or a queue of people waiting to get into an Abercrombie and Fitch, I’m not even sure it’d serve pure cathartic purposes for me, alas.

But I’ll still try it.

As far as the Citizen Kane stuff is concerned, those analogies make a lot of sense and probably would make an interesting book/panel/whatnot. I would just point out that, at least from my perspective (as someone with a bit of a classic gamer bent but not a lot of film snobbery), the Lumiere/Edison stuff is only interesting as an historical artifact or curiosity, and isn’t really something that I would enjoy watching more than once. Pong, on the other hand, is still amazingly fun and infinitely replayable. Personally I’d take the Mario Bros over the Lumiere Bros any day. I guess that’s why I would think that a Citizen Kane is more medium-defining than Half-Life or what have you. In some way the film medium needed the narrative depth that Kane brought to it (and therefore experimental films that go outside these boundaries aren’t nearly as commercially viable). On the other hand, the Wii’s success attests to the fact that the video game medium doesn’t need to be defined by the narrative rules imposed by a game like Half-Life, despite its influence on games like GTA.

Michael, I agree that this might be a kernel for a strong collection. Let’s talk it through at some point in the near future. Are you interested in putting together a panel for SCMS Tokyo?

See, *this* is the kind of question I would be interested in proposing as an anthology as well, even though my interests don’t lie in video games per se, this approach could be something *else* that we might be able to run with…

Funnily enough, last night I shared my GTA woes with a child psychologist who studies abstraction and map comprehension in little kids. She pointed out that my continuing love for things like Half-Life and the Quake series suggests I prefer game violence only when it’s “cloaked” in SF metaphor, while GTA (especially its latest version) is too “indexical” for comfort — playing it is unpleasantly realistic, and I don’t want to engage with it any more than I want to actually drive to NYC and start shooting cops.

You might be interested in this post I wrote some time back on the Wii and its graphic choices. In the meantime, thanks for the tip on Mario Kart!

It’s interesting because when GTA3-type games were first coming out people were saying that video games were finally ascending to the level of film, with immersive worlds and compelling plots. In some ways the Wii is a push in a totally opposite direction, eschewing the near-motion picture quality graphics of the superior machines for simple effects and silly or barely existing stories that could only be turned into films by the executives who greenlit the Caveman sitcom (see: Tron or Doom, even though I didn’t).

I guess since video games are so much newer than film the question is what do we see as the defining “Citizen Kane” of the medium. If it’s GTA, then Nintendo putting out the Wii is like some old filmmakers watching Citizen Kane and deciding they prefer those silent movies capturing 10 minutes of a train moving. If, on the other hand, we see a game like Pong as the video “Kane” (that was supposed to be clever and sound like video game, but I don’t think it worked…), then GTA overcomplicated things and overstepped the bounds of its medium, trying to be too much like a film. The Wii would then be the system that goes back to the roots of what we love about video games, and Wii Tennis is a much more fitting successor to Pong than GTA could ever be.

On the other hand, I’m sure there’s room in the market for both types of gaming/gamers for a while, and this post is quite a tangent…