Why all Grand Theft Auto apologias are bullshit

[prog]

Or anyway, most of them; I roll my eyes every time someone puts forth the argument that you only kill hookers and run over little old ladies if you want to play the game that way.

This statement is literally true, but it carries the false implication that the game offers you alternative interactions with these non-player characters. Lookie, here are your two options for communicating with any of the random people walking around the game world:

• Ignore them

• Beat / maim / kill them

That's it. The controller doesn't have a "talk" button, but it has an array of buttons dedicated to punching, shooting, and breaking into things.

Your character in GTA is Frankenstein's monster. He wants to talk to the little girl with the flower, but he just doesn't have the facility, and ends up drowning her instead, because his action-range is so limited. Sad.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

This is just a more graphic form of the same issue in a vast number of more traditional games. My kids are big into Twilight Imperium, and one of the things that bugs me about the game is that it's set up to force everyone into an all out galactic war. There just isn't any other option.

I think that's bad gamecraft in TI, and I think it's bad gamecraft in GTA. In both cases the raw complexity of the gaming system could easily sustain alternative goals, but the makers have chosen to rig it for violence. Not that violence isn't fun, but it gets kinda boring after a while.