Rockstar: Creators of the Best Videogame Ever (Just Not Yet)

Ever since I watched Charlie Brooker's Channel 4 documentary How Videogames Changed The World I've had one line stuck in my head. As part of the show Brooker described pick no. 24 of the list (No. 25 being Twitter, which was a fantastic choice by the way) The Last of Us as "an HBO boxset in videogame form". I actually kind of like that description, it sounds more specific and less generic than declaring something "the Citizen Kane of videogames" as bad journalists continue to do whenever a mainstream title pretends to have a story. We should probably update it a little more though; let's say The Last of Us is the "HBO Amazon Instant Video playlist of videogames."

No wait; let's not say that at all! Because despite being a legitimately fantastic piece of 21st century entertainment, in regards to videogames "arriving" and breaking out as an art form The Last Of Us is not the answer. It is a fine action-adventure experience, with well-designed encounters that play out organically through stealth and strategy accompanied with a well-paced story and decent writing. However, it was also a first party exclusive for the PlayStation 3 backed with truckloads of Sony cash, so it needed to make sure it could make entire convoys of cash upon release as well. So it was about zombies, and the story played it a little safe, and the ending was a lot limper than it should have been so it wouldn't sully any attempts at a sequel.

Ultimately, what we got was a really good action videogame with a pretty good narrative stapled to it. Naughty Dog chose to do the majority of the major plot and character developments through non-interactive (this includes any Quick Time Events) elements, cinematic camera sweeps and of course cut-scenes. The story and gameplay were tied together by the technical finesse of an incredibly talented developer in building the world where they both exist, but they still largely felt more like pen pals to each other rather than the fiery passionate lovers they should have been.

There's no way to mention this game without being branded an artsy hipster and having dudebros instantly Ctrl + W out of the tab (high five Chrome users!), but Ico sure did care about building a relationship between two characters in a way that only a videogame could. I should make an appeal to the dudebros and mention that I don't actually like Ico that much; but it still conceptually interests me to this day. I find its genuine attempts at making us care about the relationship between two characters through hand-holding and irritating block-pushing puzzles more interesting than shooting some dudes in the face, having the game force me to slow to a casual walking pace for some dialogue, then shooting some more dudes etcetera. Not to be a jerk Naughty Dog, and I'm not even criticising the story itself, but if you're finding that whole "videogame" part of your videogame is getting in the way of your story maybe you should try to tell the story differently maybe!

Now I actually will be a jerk and quote myself from three paragraphs ago, The Last Of Us is "a legitimately fantastic piece of 21st century entertainment" and I have no beef with it. What I do have some beef with is the reaction that came with the game, the sort of unbelievable essays and blogs filling the e-waves about how magical it was and how everyone in the universe was reduced to tears and DEM FEELS BRO. There's also the matter of this promotional picture that is literally just a picture of protagonists Joel and Ellie surrounded by all their perfect review scores. I'm not knocking Naughty Dog for using that as part of their marketing, they did after all have convoys of cash to make for Papa Sony, but when Batman: Arkham City pulled the same thing with its Game Of The Year edition the gaming community just pointed and laughed at it.

Here's the thing, The Last Of Us hit and rocked the videogame world, but the videogame world is not all of culture. While grown men wept at "dem feels" and submitted their own perfect 100% user reviews to Metacritic, the rest of the world sort of let out a "meh". Here's where my issue with the "HBO boxset in videogame form" line comes in...I want that to be true, and hell maybe The Last Of Us genuinely is the closest thing to it...but it just isn't true. Did you guys even watch the first season of True Detective? I know people will get instantly defensive when they read this, because I definitely used to as well, but here in videogame town we don't have anything that is that good. The reaction to The Last Of Us almost smells of giving up to me, like our opinion of it is "HEY! Someone made a videogame that has similar writing and presentation as a television show and it's kind of good too! WE MADE IT!" NO. We still have so far to go! We should be celebrating The Last Of Us as a great development in gaming culture not necessarily as a landmark achievement that validates us all.

Don't take that last paragraph as some kind of attack on the medium, I have definitely spent more time in my life playing videogames than reading, watching TV or going to the movies, but that is fundamentally because the potential of interactive fiction interests me a lot more than non-interactive fiction. With that said, I will always find myself drawn more to the pieces that use this interactive element to their advantage as much as possible over those that don't, even if when they are as fantastic as The Last Of Us is. Have I mentioned enough times that I don't actually hate The Last Of Us yet? Has that come across? Oh well, let's just count that as me saying it again and I'll just move on now.

Here's something I shouldn't have waited until the word count entered the thousands to mention: Rockstar. Ever since I first heard the concept of "the HBO of videogames", Rockstar are always the company my mind jumps straight back to. Broadly speaking, what would you associate with a typical quality HBO show? Solid writing, fantastic character development, an immersive well established setting and fundamentally adult entertainment ("adult" here is a reference to the sophistication required of the viewer and not boobies/blood etcetera, although there is usually also plenty of that). So what we need here is a videogame that is the equivalent of that inside its own medium and not simply trying to emulate it like The Last Of Us was. When we have something like that, then we can celebrate the true arrival and legitimacy of videogames within popular culture, until then there's still work to do.

With the fantastic polish and attention to detail Rockstar put into the setting of basically all of their games in the last decade (excluding the god awful Manhunt games. Just as a little side note, any compliments I give to Rockstar products as a whole self-insert the phrase "with the obvious exception of Manhunt" in your head as you read it) combined with the character focused story arcs of Grand Theft Auto IV, LA Noire and Red Dead Redemption it looked like Rockstar were serious about working their way to something that good. Videogames becoming more than videogames is a concept that's getting increased discussion all the time; more people are rolling their eyes at the Call of Duty’s and the Battlefields along with the general hurricane of hyper violent dudebro shooters that plague the mainstream market. Pseudo-art games like Bioshock come out and some people suggest "Hey, I bet something like this would be awesome with no combat in it!" then The Fullbright Company release Gone Home and prove all those people right. We are daring to dream here! Our tongues are pressed against the glass ceiling and the condensation sure is starting to taste like sweet sweet progress.

Then Rockstar release Grand Theft Auto V, a silly videogame for cynical jerks, and now the dream only feels further away.

I should clarify once again before I start getting e-mails from reactionary fanboys about how I support baby cancer or whatever, no I didn't hate Grand Theft Auto V. I played it, I played the heck yeah out of it, the attention to detail to the map was even better than ever, it made me laugh a couple of times and I'm not going to say I didn't enjoy some of the missions. I beat the story mode within a couple of days and then wasted a few more days doing god-awful sidequest stuff just as an excuse to keep hanging out in the world. And I'll tell you what, if it had a matchmaking system that didn't sniff its own farts I probably would have never stopped playing 8 vs. 8 cops and robbers style games online. Grand Theft Auto V was yet another technical achievement for Rockstar North, it just wasn't a design achievement in the way GTA IV was.

I find Grand Theft Auto V inherently disappointing because so much of its failure comes from giving in to the reaction to Grand Theft Auto IV; a game that in many ways the world wasn't ready for. Oh sure, everyone lapped it up at the time, critics splouged all over the graphics and as ever consumers got caught up the hype. So everyone played it, but not everyone really "got" it. There were the obvious Rockstar pluses, high levels of polish, great world building, variety of missions and so on and so forth; along with the great work that went into creating a huge open and explorable sandbox that also functioned as a collection of set-piece orientated (mostly) well designed missions.

There were negative views of other aspects of the package though, a lot of people didn't like the grittier tone, or how you couldn't look around and just find a jetpack in some bushes any more. Internet meme culture was starting to bubble up out of the pits of hell and people openly mocked the relationship system in the game, because man, that Roman guy sure did want to go bowling a lot. I don't want to be confrontational here, but was getting phone calls in GTA IV ever ACTUALLY that annoying? Did it seriously pain you to have to occasionally hit the B or Circle button every so often? If you didn't care about the relationship system there was no punishment for ignoring it whatsoever, and you could even put your phone on silent for god's sake. Then there are weird common complaints that often come from people who pretty much exclusively play videogames in their spare time and little else. Complaints such as "why do all the cars feel so heavy?!?" Because it's a car you jerk; when so much attention has been put into making Liberty City almost like a real place don't you think it would be jarring if Rockstar dunked F-Zero style driving or something into the game? I think the cars feel great in GTA IV (and even better in GTA V), and I have actually passed my driving test in real life too so I'm a state-recognised authority on this, so there.

Here's the thing though about GTA IV being gritty and depressing and whatever; I would actually go so far to say that it's actually the most optimistic entry into the series. Without going too deep into Niko Bellic's character which is a whole essay in of itself, he is an angry man with a scarred past coming to America to escape his past life and buried in that somewhere is some satire about the "American dream" and so on. As events develop Niko finds his past makes it difficult for him to adjust to social relationships, his desire for revenge leaves him empty inside even when he finally achieves it, and his choices rooted in anger and selfishness lead to the people closest to him suffering the consequences of his actions in extreme ways.

You were actually a character in that game, maybe even a potentially real person, and you were free to interoperate that character however you wanted. GTA IV did a decent (not good, and certainly not great) job of contextualising the violence within the story; usually Niko was killing people in self-defence in situations that escalated beyond his control, or doing bad things for reasons that he had clear personal motivation for, or at the very least killing people who were significantly bigger jerks than he was. You were presented with a character with social anxieties who struggled to connect with other people, and had the ability and the psyche to kill people but not necessarily the willingness to. The subtle difference between Niko and other GTA protagonists is that it was just as easy to believe that he wouldn't kill someone as much as it was easy to believe he would go completely psycho. The true spirit of an "immersive open world game" lies somewhere within this little detail.

Grand Theft Auto IV wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I absolutely love what it was trying to do. Here's one of the more stand-out lines from GTA IV that does a decent job of summing up of Niko Bellic's struggles as a character:

"After you walk into a village and you see 50 children, all sitting neatly in a row, against a church wall, each with their throats cut and their hands chopped off, you realize that the creature that could do this doesn't have a soul."

 So Rockstar gave you a character with that back story and put in an entirely ignorable relationship system to allow you to explore Niko's own sociopathic nature with an entire collection of different colourful (and sometimes not so colourful) characters. You could ignore that, you could hang up on your stupid fat cousin and go shoot pigeons in the park by yourself instead, but it's there. A videogame lets you explore a characters own struggles and shortcoming at your own leisure in a way that a movie or TV show never could. Don't get me wrong, in regards to GTA IV Rockstar get like a C+ for execution, but there are seeds of LITERALLY THE BEST THING EVER there. Instead, it was laughed off by the same sort of people who claim the series is better if "you just ignore the missions dude!" and just wreck things, but as stated above, 2008 wasn't ready for what Grand Theft Auto IV was trying to do.

Ultimately, what I really like about GTA IV more than anything, and the reason why I say it's more "optimistic" than other entries in the series is because it fundamentally believes in people. Money, revenge, violence, aggression and selfishness bring Niko nothing but misery and emptiness, only when he begins to allow other people back into his life does he begin to find potential for happiness. The ending (regardless of which one you get) is perhaps a little too miserable, I'd say a little hypocritical also, but GTA IV was definitely on the right track towards something amazing.

Then five years later Rockstar release Grand Theft Auto V, an equally high quality product, but one that has a burning contempt for all the human beings within its world and more importantly...the ones playing it.

Grand Theft Auto V is the videogame equivalent of a douchey white male teenager thinking he's above all of popular culture while simultaneously respecting the most horrible parts of it (in other words, me around about the time GTA IV came out, I'm not really sure anything has changed really other than not being a teenager any more). The sort of person who, for example, thinks he's so clever for watching 5 seconds of The Jersey Shore and proclaiming "OMG! This show SUCKS; I hope all of them die." Not realising of course that shows like The Jersey Shore are perfectly produced to get that exact reaction, and that the show itself is sneering at the cast as much as the audience is. There's the target audience of people who genuinely like that sort of thing who provide a fanbase, then there's all the jerks that will roll their eyes at it and talk smack about it to look cool on Twitter. When that starts happening, shows like this stop being "popular" and become cultural events; so even people like me who have literally not seen more than 5 seconds of The Jersey Shore will talk about it for a paragraph in a post about videogames. Television producers don't only see these people coming; they're counting on them.

Sorry if that seemed a little too tangential, but I can't stress enough how genuinely awful the "satire" in GTA V is. Some reviewers praised it because it attacks "everything" about Western culture and "leaves no prisoners" (this is not a real quote from anywhere, but I'd bet real money that someone used those exact words) which translates to me as "there's a lot of it so therefore it must be good." GTA V takes lazy jabs at issues such as social media, reality TV, terrorism, torture and feminism (incidentally Rockstar, your decision to go for multiple characters that you switch between was already mostly gimmicky, there really wasn't any reason you couldn't have made one of them a woman) but that's all they are: lazy jabs. GTA V has nothing to say about these issues other than simply mentioning them, pointing and laughing, then moving on in the least provocative way imaginable. GTA IV wasn't exactly Stephen-Colbert-at-the-Whitehouse ballsy either, but at least there were some real jokes in it. GTA V, for all its efforts, only has one thing to say to us: People are crap; life is crap, so let's just kill each other I guess. Also LOL. 

Maybe this is something no-one ever thinks about, and maybe it doesn't matter any way; but has it occurred to anyone how badly GTA V is going to age? San Andreas is currently 9 years old but it feels like it's 30, it's almost unthinkable now that it was getting 10/10 or even 99% reviews and being held up as the benchmark for all videogames. At least people remember San Andreas for its RPG elements and other weird little additions, what will anyone remember GTA V for once its no longer technically impressive and we have an actually playable version of Grand Theft Auto Online? The torture scene? GTA V is a product of its time and future historians will scratch their heads at the response to it. But once again, this probably doesn't matter, plenty of great games have been products of their time, so let's get back into the meat of GTA V.

There's also the cynical choices in both playable characters and the story. The storytelling focus of GTA IV was swept away almost entirely, there's still a lot of talking (and a lot of it is still decent too!) and cut-scenes and whatever, but it's kind of just a bunch of stuff that happens. Honestly, I've beaten the game's story mode in its entirety and I wouldn't even know where to start summarising the narrative as a whole, I guess the best you can hope for is go through it character by character. First there's Michael, an ageing white guy (super appropriate for this game actually) who's frustrated by his life because he has no relationship with his horrible family, and he feels guilty about his privileged lifestyle because he got it through doing bad things. His "arc" is wrapped up him returning to his past lifestyle to do even more bad things, and then trying to stop doing those bad things for the sake of fixing his relationship with his horrible family. Then there's Franklin, the straight-faced man who's supposed to be a nice guy or whatever, but much like CJ from San Andreas the game completely undermines any attempt at making him sympathetic. You can try and make Franklin as normal as you'd like Rockstar, but the second a human being starts shooting people they don't know in the head, for the sake of other humans they barely know for some kind of non-specific financial gain they have officially entered the realm of psychopathy and I'm not going to like them. 

Then of course there's the main attraction: Trevor, the "nutty" one. Presumably Rockstar went for a character that was "crazy" and "random" because that's their vision of the average Grand Theft Auto player, so they wanted to create an avatar to compliment that. There's a huge paradox here in terms of balancing the free roaming nature of a "sandbox" and actual game design, stick with me here because this might get a little abstract.

In the possibly fictional land of "Australia" they have a well-intentioned but nonetheless incredibly stupid law where it is ILLEGAL to not vote. Not voting in an Australian election will get you a fine of $20, granted 20 dollars of Australian money is probably only enough for a Chupa Chup and a hand job on the bus home, but you can still get a criminal record for this. This has always struck me as incredibly undemocratic; surely the right to vote and an obligation to vote are vastly different things. Forcing a citizen to vote shackles them to a system they might not support, or to vote for one of the options even if one feels none of the options represent them. For me, not voting is an admission of ignorance, and sure you can say being ignorant at the time of an election is socially irresponsible. But forcing me to vote won't make me less ignorant, so what next, you make a law forcing people to go to town meetings to listen to party manifestos or something? Is this starting to sound creepy at all yet? It gosh darn should be. 

But that's what Rockstar is doing by presenting you with Trevor in Grand Theft Auto V; they're forcing you to vote for something you might not necessarily support. Maybe you won't want to play GTA V like a psychopath, maybe you like the idea of going for long strolls or opting for taxi rides everywhere instead of stealing cars, but Rockstar have opted to make this choice void. Even if you did try to hang out in GTA V as if it was a real place for a little while, Rockstar have already declared that Trevor is just "random" and "CRAZEH" and any roleplaying either way is completely irrelevant. You are irrelevant.  A true "sandbox" is a living city should allow the player to interoperate the character however they see fit, not make them into an impossible-to-relate-to murderer right out of the gate and slap them on the back. "Don't worry bro, just go nuts and be horrible, it doesn't affect our narrative anymore because now the entire game is about people who are horrible and nuts anyway!" Oh...nice...I guess...

Again, I don't hate Grand Theft Auto V as a videogame; I just find it endlessly disappointing and a little frustrating. The shooting is better, the driving is better, it looks great and the city is realer than it’s ever been. But the fact that all of this is being used purely as a backdrop to a mean-spirited, psychopathic, incredibly cynical and misogynistic "satire" about horrible people who have no aspiration in their lives other than to shoot people for money makes me feel that maybe the entire videogame industry needs to go flush its head down the toilet and think about what it's done. In 2008, Rockstar started off their franchise game with a short driving stage establishing the relationship between two characters and their aspirations for the future; in 2013 they started the game with criminals shooting 200 cops in the face. That's the progress we've made in five years apparently. 

I criticise Rockstar, and I have focused primarily on the differences between GTA IV and V, because as the title suggests I believe in them. I'm just worried that Rockstar are starting to not believe in themselves any more, and maybe that cowardly bit of self-doubt that made them put cover shooting in L.A. Noire and have the game end in a sewer setting gangsters on fire (for god's sake) has overtaken the entire company. The release of a new main entry Grand Theft Auto title is a cultural event now, not even Mario or Zelda can claim that anymore, so if there's one franchise that we should be hope to highlight some of the more positive elements of the games industry it may as well be that one. They don't need to appeal to the horrible dudebro demographic by making games like GTA V; they already have everyone's attention. Sure some jerks laughed at GTA IV, but everyone looked at it, and people still got excited for the next one. All things considered did the experimental elements of GTA IV really go that badly at all?

Maybe you find the earlier discussion about the juxtaposition between Niko Bellic's depressing character and the optimistic nature of including relationships unconvincing, maybe that was just an accident. But that's also a big part of the reason to get so excited about Rockstar as a developer; they create worlds with such a high degree of polish that sometimes accidental genius can crop up just by random things rubbing against each other like that. They've proven with Red Dead Redemption they can produce strong narratives that take place somewhere that the player might actually want to go to. They've proven in Max Payne 3 they can make games that centre around a really strong core mechanic. And now with Grand Theft Auto V they've outdone themselves again in terms of creating fantastic worlds. 

We have the world now Rockstar, what you need to do now is find ways of exploring that world, and not just rely on wowing us with sheer scale and craftsmanship. Make more buildings enterable, make more things more interactive, design more story missions to have branding paths and alternative methods of execution (incidentally, GTA V is insanely restrictive in this regard and has some of the dumbest fail states I've ever seen in a videogame). I'm not suggesting that a series like Grand Theft Auto should have no violence in it, that would obviously be ridiculous, but there's no reason why it shouldn't make more sense and there's definitely no reason to not have alternatives to violence; at least in some situations!  I think that's all I have to say about Grand Theft Auto for now, I just hope GTA VI will take more inspiration from IV than V is all I'm saying, but more importantly I hope it's good enough to make both of them completely irrelevant.

At time of writing, another E3 has just passed and it was yet again an endless parade of meaningless violence, stab wounds and buff white dudes holding a lot of guns...so maybe videogames still aren't ready for "the dream" that games like Gone Home are reaching for just yet. Then again, games that got a ton of buzz on Twitter were things like Cuphead and No Man's Sky, and people sure did love that Nintendo conference, maybe some people just lack the imagination to see what the future could be. Maybe it just genuinely doesn't occur to some people that it would be entirely possible to see a completely non-violent videogame with the level of polish that a Grand Theft Auto comes with. Shooting dudes in the face is a pretty good game mechanic, I just wish more people would realise it's not the only good game mechanic. Imagine Rockstar taking all their tools and making something like Game of Thrones, or True Detective, or maybe even The Last Of Us. In his writings' Tim Rogers has made several references to wanting to see Rockstar make their own romantic comedy, and my god I love that idea, and I don't even like romantic comedies.

Even if Rockstar do just want to make Grand Theft Auto VI even jerkier and more dudebroier, that's fine with me I guess. I've never made a billion dollars in a weekend before so they're way smarter than me. I just hope they don't lose that ambition in all their projects, I hope whoever believed that the company could produce a videogame that was more than "just another videogame" around the time GTA IV was in development hasn't been demoted to janitorial services or something. There's still so much work to do and I honestly believe they were on the right track for a moment there. Companies like Naughty Dog, Valve and TellTale Games will be right on the frontline with them, but if anyone (mainstream) is going to crash through that glass ceiling in a way people would notice and begin the TRUE next generation of videogames it's going to Rockstar. 

Either way, I'm doomed to pay attention to all their projects until the day I die (unless they announce Manhunt 3, in which case I would probably just retroactively edited this piece into one massive sad face and smash all my videogame consoles with a brick) in the possibly futile hope that they'll make something that all of us can legitimately be proud of. Until that day comes, hopefully at least they'll steal someone else's matchmaking for Grand Theft Auto Online so I can actually start playing it again, gosh darn it.