Looking just at GTA4’s story, our playtesters also bemoaned the lack of meaningful consequences. Not only can Niko never die, in practical terms he never runs low on cash or any other resource. From a moral perspective, the most interesting – and therefore most disappointing – resource is Niko’s relationships. Among the player’s major tasks in this game is to nurture Niko’s relationship vis-à-vis his business associates, girlfriend(s), and above all, family. Though hardly innovative (see: dating games), the presence of a relationship mechanic in GTA, given its genre, is profound. The problem, according to our reviewers, is that the developers failed to realize the promise. You can have Niko improve his friendships by hanging out more with his buddies, and good relationships lead to in-game benefits (in other words, they matter), but except for a few notable moments, Niko’s commitments aren’t pitted against each other.

Perhaps the greatest enemy of meaningful choice is an overabundance of resources. If two options lead to the exact same results, there’s not much to distinguish the two. (Kant might disagree, but games and gamers have a strong utilitarian bias). Similarly, if resources are essentially infinite, choices that lead to varying amounts of resource awards are also essentially indistinguishable. Consider by contrast the Splinter Cell hostage scenario discussed in our last session: the player is forced to harm his reputation with one of his two employers no matter what he decides to do (though some choices are more Pareto-optimal than others).

To be fair, GTA4 does present several similar moments, but there don’t appear to be serious consequences of choosing between killing someone or letting him go. (Caveat: none of us has reached the ending yet, of which there are supposed to be two). Perhaps this means the player is free to make her own interpretation. Or, in the case of our reviewers, it ends up feeling empty.

Overabundance has some interesting effects on gameplay. Consider the infamous GTA example of paying a prostitute for sex, and then killing her to get your money back. In GTA4, visiting such prostitutes restores Niko’s health when he’s injured, but it’s hardly the most efficient way to do so – buying a hot dog is both cheaper (in the game) and far more efficient (for the player). Thus while it’s still possible to pay a hooker for sex and then murder her to get your money back, the game mechanics give you no good reason to do so. In which case, why leave the mechanism in? It’s as if the developers just wanted to provoke and (as Peter surmises) invoke nostalgia. Then again, Kant would remind us that truly moral choice require immoral options.

As for relationships as a resource, Eric found that late in the game he had accumulated so many friends that he spent most of his playing time fending off phone calls and running stupid errands. This is realistic, to be sure (curse you, Facebook!), but a game that relies on the limited resource of a player’s own patience rather than something internal to the system is always at risk of inducing boredom. This seemed to be the experience of our playtesters, who bemoaned the lack of more meaningfully bounded gameplay. But GTA’s market success implies that the majority of mainstream gamers perhaps prize that wide berth of freedom, including the freedom to bore oneself.

GTA4, viewed strictly from a narrative, “playable movie” perspective, does offer a coherent moral worldview, one in which the bonds of kinship trumps other personal commitments. It’s not a universalist worldview but rather one tied strictly to, as Helen Haste emphasized, the conventions of a known and well-understood genre. Condemning any of the GTA games for “teaching” evil behavior would only make sense if players were unable to recognize genre play – a danger that some research suggests is both overrated but, perhaps, most possible for people who sit far outside the portrayed culture. As Helen pointed out, stories such as Hansel and Gretel convey their moral messages not because the audience confuses fantasy with reality, but they construct a system encompassing both worlds. (“The moral of the story” is abstracted from the specifics of the narrative: Hansel and Gretel doesn’t, I imagine, teach children about pushing old women into ovens!).

If GTA4’s characters take seriously their strong, maybe even stereotyped code of honor, there’s also a clash with the game’s sandbox recreation of New York City. Once the brutal edge of the Euphoria Engine wears off, Sam observed, the open-ended aspects of the game take on a cartoonish feel (Matt specifically cites South Park): running over pedestrians goes from sickening to interesting to flat-out convenient (given that the game’s physics make driving safely almost impossible). It’s another example of the game’s schizophrenia: what it tries to say departs from what you do.

(gk)

The GTA formula melds two types of gameplay – a rules-based “sim” and a plot-based “story” – into a proven, potently popular, amalgam. Yet sim and story also sit in tension: is the player gaming the rules or the role? As with the character/avatar split, our playtesters felt torn between the two. The tension, it seems, proceeds from the fact that very little in sim mode feeds into story mode, and vice versa. For example: considerable energy goes into maintaining Niko’s relationship with his girlfriend. But having Niko dally with prostitutes seems never to affect that relationship. even though Eric both dreaded yet wanted to see such a plot twist unfold. If the game aspires to having a “social physics,” this is a part of the game where gravity stops working.

Of course, as Josh Diaz pointed out, meshing ruleplaying with roleplaying is no simple task as a matter of both design and computation. Theoretically, player choices within the open ruleset should affect the course of the story. Such a meshing eludes our current technology and technique. The more open the rules, the more possibilities a designer would have to account for – in a fully open system, the player might kill off a character who’s critical to the plot later. (Thus in many games the main characters are strangely immortal until the plotline needs them to die). The designers of GTA4 upped the challenge by erring on the side of openness. As Matthew points out, they stretched out the system to make the gameplay “bigger.”

What’s at stake here is that when critics and developers address the “morality” of a game, they’re generally talking about the game’s narrative level. At that level, the player’s avatar has killed another character. But the level of gameplay or system, the player might merely be engaging in manipulation of the game’s physics engine to score points. Playing Halo 3 with your buddies is more like playing tag than engaging in a street shootout, because the most literal on-screen narrative (guns and ammo) is far less important than the system (physics, teamwork). So well- or ill-intentioned efforts to inject “moral content” into a game can be undermined by the game system itself.

GTA’s critical and commercial success suggests that there’s something to learn from its design about weaving together story and system. For one thing, GTA does offer a way out of the problem of the “railroad” plotline that plagues the adventure game genre. Merely providing spatial movement in open but inert environments is a tease: look, but don’t touch. (This was one reason I couldn’t finish The Longest Journey). GTA took the opposite perspective: touch; better yet, trash! Given GTA’s origins as a “sandbox game,” this dimension of freedom is unsurprising. If there’s a failure of execution in GTA4, as our playtesters seem to feel, perhaps it’s because this legacy obligates Rockstar to offer an even stronger, and even more tightly-integrated, storyline. The game isn’t just competing with other diversions for the player’s attention; it’s also competing with itself.

So, then, a hypothesis: perhaps situating a linear story within a sim makes that story — and its moral dimensions — more palatable? And a corollary: maybe empty freedom makes story constraints all the more meaningful? After all, eventually most GTA4 players tire of stunt jumps and get back to advancing the career of Niko. And, as Matthew points out, GTA4 cleverly unlocks new “verbs” within the sim as the player advances the story, offering new dimensions of experimental freedom as the plot progresses, essentially offering rewards for going to the next stop on the plot’s train track.

(gk)

GTA4 received strong critical acclaim for its gritty storyline and characters. Niko, the protagonist, isn’t a blank avatar for the player to inhabit and shape. Rather, he’s a character with a backstory, personality, and his own motivations. Have him kill someone on your way to an early mission and he expresses disappointment in himself, not unlike the hero of a Greek tragedy bemoaning the fate the gods have dealt him. The player is invited to respond to him as alternatively sympathetic and off-putting as his story and history unfolds.

Among the game mechanisms we’ve discussed that encourage moral engagement, probably the most difficult is offering opportunities for reflection. A character with his own views and a modicum of free will, potentially at odds with the player, could serve as a mirror to the player’s choices – a puppet that can question the puppeteer.

But despite the rich possibility in this schism between Niko-as-character and Niko-as-avatar, Doris found the experience “schizophrenic.” She found it hard to reconcile her own motivations with Niko’s. Sam concurred, despite going out of his way to “inhabit” Niko’s character. Matthew suggested that perhaps Niko and his story become a bit of an “ideological salad bar”: so as to appeal to the broadest spectrum of gamers, the writers create a character with an often-conflicting mix of motivations and traits, letting each player latch on to those aspects that explain the character’s actions and the story’s meaning in the most satisfying way.

(gk)

When we first fired up Grand Theft Auto IV on Wednesday night, the gameplay experiences we demonstrated – running over pedestrians, being thrown out of your car, getting into a fistfight with random strangers – elicited gasps from our somewhat mixed audience of gamers and newbies. But I found it telling that, by the end of our conversation, even the newbies seemed to grasp the images for what they are: ragdoll physics played for gags. The short half-life of Euphoria illustrates Sam Gilbert’s chief complaint with the moral world of GTA4: “Through repetition, actions become meaningless… consequences are few and minor, and meaning and investment drips away.”

The next few posts are a reconstruction of the conversation our playtesters (Sam, Doris Rusch, Matthew Weise, together with Josh Diaz and Eric Robinson) had with the full group. (I should note that I (Gene Koo) have not played GTA4 yet to any serious extent, so I’m relying on y’all to correct my mistakes). I was particularly excited by the new folks at this gathering that included Helen Haste, Barry Fishman, and Scott Siedel, all of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Dave Peth of WGBH.

1. GTA4: character and avatar
2. GTA4: ruleplaying vs. roleplaying
3. GTA4: values at play
4. GTA4: choice and consequence
5. GTA4: reintegrating the divided self