HubBub#17: GTA3 - Dial M for Mature

[Sean Tudor]

Andrew,

I just wanted to say I enjoyed your latest column. You raised some very good points about GTA3.

Personally, I think GTA3 is the best thing to come along for mature gamers since sliced bread. Why shouldn't there be games made for adults ?

HubBub#17: GTA3 - Dial M for Mature (http://www.gamesdomain.co.uk/gdreview/depart/jun02/hubbub16.html)

Cheers,
Sean.

[Met_K]

Brava, excellent article.

[Murph]

One of the girls I work with and I have been debating about this game for like two weeks, now, on and off. I just forwarded her article. :)

[Anonymous]

I agree. These are my dominant thoughts on the game as well.

However, I think it is a unfortunate that such great content and design is masked by, lost in, all the hype and controversy. While this game is mature in all the right ways (as we discussed in the old forums) it is also mature in a load of obvious and unencouraging ways. The question is whether the lesson the market learns from GTA3 is that ambitious, non-linear, design and smart content is the great goal or whether doped out cop-killing rampages and stereotypical graphic shock content, regardless of gameplay design and aesthetic styling, are the key to massive sales.

As for GTA3 as RPG? Nah. Not really. It does offer some great roleplaying elements such as freedom to explore and experiment but it lacks the ability to chose a role and live it. You're going to be a punk and the moral and narrative choices you make have no measurable impact on the world or the character - which is also why many CRPGs really aren't RPGs for that matter.

[Lunch of Kong]

"the lesson the market learns from GTA3 is that ambitious, non-linear, design and smart content is the great goal."

According to my friend Sherry, the lesson is that it's okay to abuse women as long as you have great gameplay.

[Bub, Andrew]

Thanks guys,
Amanpour, who I haven't seen yet on this board (this makes me sad), will no doubt consider me a defector. I still agree with him about the more loathsome qualities this game has but I was totally unprepared for how much I enjoy the missions. The game is just so varied and well put together, I'd forgive almost anything at this point.

It's also an interesting (not necessarily accurate) way to judge a person's character by watching them play this game. My uncle only rampages. He never plays the missions. I pity and kind of fear him because of that....

Anyway, I just finished Part Two of the article, which should go up later this week. It's about the RPG aspects and, I think, it's a good read.

Hey, how about a few Haikus from you guys? Email them to me.

Roger, tell Sherry that I've abused far more men in this game than women. But if she's talking about that hooker angle, well, I don't actually use that option (it's silly and offensive) so I agree with her there. But also tell her, yes, great gameplay does forgive a lot. GTA3 doesn't force you to abuse women, it's an option only. It's offensive that it's there, but the game is too good to simply dismiss it because of offensiveness, in my opinion.

That would be like dismissing a film like A Clockwork Orange for the rape scenes. Reservoir Dogs for the violence. Last Temptation of Christ for the Jesus gets it on fantasy at the end. Or Eminem for the... well for the lyrics.

[Met_K]

Er, more like disregard Eminem because he can't write, nor sing, nor make music.

[Supertanker]

Amanpour, who I haven't seen yet on this board (this makes me sad), will no doubt consider me a defector. I still agree with him about the more loathsome qualities this game has but I was totally unprepared for how much I enjoy the missions.

Yeah, where is Amanpour? Anyway, I found that as I played through the game, I tried harder and harder to minimize civilian casualties. If a stray shot hits a police officer, you have a serious chance of blowing the mission. Even hitting a pedestrian as you race from one spot to another can raise your wanted level to an unwanted level (har). If something needed blowed up real good, I'd rather use an expensive rocket than a free grenade because I could aim the rocket better.


But if she's talking about that hooker angle, well, I don't actually use that option (it's silly and offensive) so I agree with her there.

If you use a convertible (and don't Banshees rule?), it skips the squeaking suspension animation and just instantly gives you 125 health, regardless of how injured you are. As soon as you stop in an acceptable location, the hooker just gets out and leaves. Combined with the free body armor for finding enough hidden packages, I cruised around most of the time with 225 hit points.

I thought it was a good bit of polish that hookers are only in certain parts of town at night.


That would be like dismissing a film like A Clockwork Orange for the rape scenes. Reservoir Dogs for the violence. Last Temptation of Christ for the Jesus gets it on fantasy at the end. Or Eminem for the... well for the lyrics.

This is what I keep telling people. I combine it with the comments of Judge Posner in that Indianapolis decision where he discusses the role of violence in literature, and that there is no proof that playing a violent game causes any more bad behavior than a well-written violent story.

[Alan Au]

Grand Theft Auto III
You can play any way you like
Or just blow shit up

Grand Theft Auto III
A living, breathing game world
If it moves, shoot it

Grand Theft Auto III
Contains so much violence!
Kind of like TV

Grand Theft Auto III
Breeding future criminals?
Hey, it's just a game

- Alan

[Supertanker]

I've used my lunch hour to try and capture GTA3 moments in Haiku:

My taxi aflame
I'm just passing with a fare
Damned Triad jerkoffs

It took me a while
But I found a Yardie car
Wow, check out those seats!

Gosh, they're lesbian?
Like an FBI driver
Oh so darn subtle

Hah, they can't stop me!
Even the soldiers have failed
Uhh, is that a tank?

[Matthew Gallant]

Seaborne packages
It's hard to jump to the pier
Stupid fucking boat

Don Love disappears
His old asian boyfriend weeps
Looked so good in sweats

GTA sells big
Take Two stock dips lower still
Shareholders are hosed

[Bub, Andrew]

Cute guys, very cute.
But I can't use them in the column unless you email them to me. Please do, you're all much better than my very British GDR column audience. Feel free to cover any game you like.

(This is not a knock on the British, only their Haiku skills)

[Sean Tudor]

Cute guys, very cute.
But I can't use them in the column unless you email them to me. Please do, you're all much better than my very British GDR column audience. Feel free to cover any game you like.

(This is not a knock on the British, only their Haiku skills)

Can someone explain what a Haiku is and how it works ?

All this stuff is too cerebral for me ...


Grand Theft Auto 3
Show me the target
And I will kill it

[Supertanker]

Haiku are three lines, with 5 syllables, 7, then 5 again. Many say they are supposed to invoke nature, too:

Lisping Yakuza
Would he not feel the Don Love?
Dawn breaks without him

[GregB]

An easy way to make a haiku...

Sing Moonlight in Vermont and make up your own lyrics. Poof! Instant Haiku.

-g

[Bub, Andrew]

Sean Tudor, that fool!
Read my column but missed the...
haiku instructions.

It is supposed to be about nature, but I stole the idea from Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column. In there it must be about Football. In HubBub it must be about games.

[Dirt]

"It's also an interesting (not necessarily accurate) way to judge a person's character by watching them play this game. My uncle only rampages. He never plays the missions. I pity and kind of fear him because of that.... "


Maybe he hasn't played it enough. My friend did the same thing for about the few 100 times he played it, got bored and is in the third city now. Someday, I'll get my PS2 back... Someday...

BTW, how the hell do I put quotes into the boxes when I post?

[Bub, Andrew]

BTW, how the hell do I put quotes into the boxes when I post?

Hit the quote button on the top right of the message.

As for the rest of your post... maybe. I doubt it. He played GTA and GTA2 for his computer for years without ever playing missions. He's Mr. Cheat Code too. Played Half-Life all the way through in GOD mode. What's the point? I asked him. Entertainment! He answered. Live and let live.

Still, I found the Rampage option pretty dull after a couple times. I do it now and then still, but only when I screw up a mission for the 3rd or 4th time.

[Anonymous]

"Sing Moonlight in Vermont and make up your own lyrics. Poof! Instant Haiku. "

SOunds more like instant homosexuality

or is moonlight in vermont a song widely known outside of the antique shop owners community?

[Bub, Andrew]

If anyone is interested, the new HubBub, #18 is up at GDR. More on GTA3, a short story and an answer/argument to that RPG question I posed in the previous column.

http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/depart/jun02/hubbub18.html

As a bonus there are haikus from me, Alan Au and the inimitable Sparky. I want to thank them for their help.
Enjoy!

EDIT: My TechTV review is up - and that's enough self promotion for one day. :oops:
http://www.techtv.com/extendedplay/reviews/story/0,24330,3388522,00.html

[Anonymous]

Yeah, where is Amanpour?

Alas, he is too much in the real world these days...he just finished buying a house. Remeber, Super-T?...he couldn't even make shoot club last week...things must be dire, indeed.

Oh, and on the subject of Haikus...back in undergrad, a friend asked me to write him the worst haiku ever. My offering, now that I think about it, fits into the GTAIII thread pretty well:

Get them. Get them now.
Get them before it's too late.
Get them, I tell you!

[Bub, Andrew]

This one is worse. It's the first one I did for the column... obviously I didn't quite grasp how to count syllables then.

"Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
MOH bloodless?
But the Nazi's still die horribly?
EA, Think of the children!"

[Anonymous]

As always, a thoughtful and well written column but I'll still respectfully disagree with your conclusion and I'm trying to think of the best way to address that disagreement over what I said before.

When you think of play, as in 'some play in the line' that means there's slack and room for movement. When you think of a role, as an actor, you try to determine the essence and self-contradictions about the character and how best to develop and portray that person in his context - you look for that character's 'spine'. So I guess I can describe roleplaying as looking for the 'some play in the spine'. What choices can I make that really determine a character's identity in a game? (How's that for a really tortured analogy? I've got thousands of them.)

Frankly there aren't many good examples of real roleplaying computer games yet but Daggerfall, and to a somewhat lesser extent Morrowind, still remains one of the most useful despite its shortcomings. In these games you chose what skills your character will have and how you deploy them, your development of a personal style, will have a dramatic effect on how the game plays out for you.

Much, much, more importantly you can chose associations in the game that say a great deal about who your character is. You make decisions that are tracked and evaluated by a multitude of distinct entities with complex relationships and divergent points of view. That very evaluation is almost a triangulation of who your character is. No absolute paths are nailed down and no moral choices determine your relative success - all these things, driven by your choices, do determine who your character is. That's the roleplay.

It's primitive, compared to the nuances and dynamic storytelling of a face-to-face game, but compared to the linear storytelling and fixed factional relationships (which is very much at odds with the otherwise dynamic and non-linear gameplay experience) and inconsequential choices you make in GTA3, it's night and day.

I'd rather see more arcade games with the ambition and great design of GTA3 than fewer of them, that's for sure, and as far as computer games go overall it's neck and neck with Morrowind and Falcon 4 in my personal favorites lists. On the other hand, I'd really like to see a GTA4 that does allow for meaningful roleplaying, dynamic factions, and persistant relationships that can make those choices and the drama of the arcade game all the more immersive and nonlinear.

[Murph]

Arcanum did a great job of fitting the definition of role-playing described above, too. It impressed me a lot, in a lot of ways.

[Alan Au]

Yeah, but the more I played Arcanum, the more I wanted to play the Arcanum abridged version instead. Not that I wanted the designer to walk me through the game, but I grew tired of trudging around Tarant trying to navigate by reading street signs.

Open ended worlds are great, but not at the expense of gameplay.

- Alan

[Chris Floyd]

Hey, Bub, will you please write the narration for Max Payne 2? Please?

I think one notion that needs to be dispelled in gaming is that CRPGs really bear much similarity, as a genre, to tabletop RPGs. What defines tabletop is the immersion in a role, like acting with statistics instead of a script. CRPGs, unless we want to admit that there have never been any, are defined by -- in my mind -- two things:

1) Character advancement. My guy(s) get better at what they do and gain more stuff.
2) An open, interactive world. This differentiates from adventure games, in my opinion, which themselves better capture some aspects of tabletop RPGs than CRPGs (adventure games, for an example, can better engage the personality of the main character into the story).

Different CRPGs have different degrees of these two criteria. Elder Scrolls focuses on the openness of the world. Torment doesn't. I think it's an inevitable dichotomy -- the more open, non-linear, and free the game world is, the less the story can really focus on your character. The less your character can be defined. In a way it lets you define your own character, but most of that ends up in your head and not engaged in the actual functions of the game. If that makes any sense at all.

By this analysis, then, we discover that GTA3 has applied the second criterion to the action genre. So, I'd say you're right... to an extent, Bub. There is something role-playingish about GTA3.

[Brian Rucker]

I'd definitely agree we haven't seen any ideal roleplaying games on the PC however I'd say the principles that apply to a well run session of face-to-face roleplaying can also apply to the design of a roleplaying game for the computer. To keep this simple, the basic function of the well run, contemporary, roleplaying game is immersion and suspension of disbelief. The way a good DM/Storyteller managers this is to understand his setting intuitively and the player-characters as well. He'll array what he knows about these characters and their personal goals and histories against the NPCs, factions and settings of his world and come up with likely storylines based on player driven initiatives. The days of scripted modules and ten-foot-poles, for old hands at least, are long gone. This is the age of storytelling and adlibbing.

The story is now really about a player's character notthe notes on a DM's graph paper pad.

Engines can adlib, to an extent, as well. They need to be able to respond to character designs and character behavior by offering feedback that reinforces a player's sense of the character's assumed persona. There are plenty of good discrete examples of games that already do this to one extent or another and these would be titles that should influence the design of future 'true' roleplaying games, IMHO.

I'm not quite ready to throw up my hands and say it's impossible when it appears just around the corner. :wink:

As for level advancement, yes, out of sheer habit that's become the shorthhand definition of roleplaying in the industry but it's really not a good way to judge a game. Lots of games have units that improve over time but, just like 'real time strategy' the phrase 'roleplaying' has also come to mean some very particular things in our lingo. Unfortunately for roleplayers those assumptions seem to be crippling creative thought as to what computer roleplaying games could be - outside the mold of thirty-year-old cliches.

As for story, well, I tend to think the story in contemporary roleplaying tends to be about the player's character - not the designer's character. In games like Daggerfall your adventures really do belong to you and no two characters will ever have an identical experience. It's a bit like the flight-sim 'roleplaying' experience as players get very immersed in their own warstories.

[wumpus]

I liked GTA3, but it wasn't the life-changing experience for me that it evidently was for a lot of people.

For one thing, I had no desire to run around the city aimlessly exploring ala Chet. I felt like I was starring in a gangsta version of The Truman Show-- there's this illusory 100 foot bubble of activity going on around you everywhere you go.

[Anonymous]

I felt like I was starring in a gangsta version of The Truman Show-- there's this illusory 100 foot bubble of activity going on around you everywhere you go.

This is a pretty funny and accurate analogy. I love the game, but it did creep me out when I started to notice something a little "off" about this living world. I thought the fact that cars phased in to view was some limitation with the draw distance, but eventually realized it's because everything is created around you on the fly.

Try this: get in a car, and park yourself smack in the middle of a long, straight road so you're perpendicular with the curb. Now use the "look left" or "look right". You'll notice when you look, cars will gradually approach, but as soon as you stop looking and look again a split second later, the cars have vanished or changed into something else!

It's also amusing that the GTA3 world is designed for you to constantly be moving. Notice that if you stop absolutely anywhere, everything around you falls apart. Cars crash into one another, the street gets overloaded with clone people etc. It's drawing more and more crap on the screen under the assumption that you're still moving around.

This is apparently the reason multiplayer was impossible. Nothing exists more than 100 odd feet away from you, so two players in one game wouldn't be communicating the same information.

[/quote]

[Alan Au]

What? Smoke and mirrors in a computer game?

- Alan

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

[mtkafka]

Still... GTA3 does give a great illusion of a living modern city. I'd love it if more crpgs used the fade out technique (which seems to be in Midtown Madeness, Crazy Taxi and Shenmue). Like every NPC in crpgs are generic anyway, so why not make a better illusion!?! Would be cool to see something like this in MW when walking through Vivec!

etc