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The Games We Played: Grand Theft Auto V as a beautiful failure

By Omar (@siegarettes)

All screenshots taken using the in-game camera on the PS3 version.

There’s something hollow about Grand Theft Auto V. Upon reaching the story’s conclusion, I found myself left with a sense of dissatisfaction. Even before that I found myself dropping it out of my rotation due to its inane story plotting and thinly justified set pieces. It continually frustrated with prescriptive mission design that led you through interesting moments in uninteresting ways.

The core mechanics have been polished to their finest: the driving dropped the heavy handling of GTA IV for an appropriately Hollywood presentation. The cover system was tightened, with elements from the excellent Max Payne 3 added into the shooting. All of that only served to highlight how staid the moment to moment play of Grand Theft Auto has been. Rockstar provided a world whose structure and mechanics fell apart by themselves. It’s also undoubtedly provided one of the best realized digital worlds ever made.

I’m not saying that because it’s the world I’ve spent the most time with, or the one I’ve gotten the most enjoyment from (that’s probably the last two Saints Row titles), but because there’s an undeniable level of craft at work. Grand Theft Auto V is detailed and expansive in a way that only a AAA title can produce. For many it is peak videogames. Taking a stroll around the city will introduce you to a variety of unique citizens, each with incidental dialogue or engaged in their own conversations. GTA V is a beautiful illusion of a living world. There may be games that outpace it in terms of sheer landmass, but there aren’t any that can touch it in scope.

But it’s also telling that the things that I enjoy most about take place outside the story itself, away from the character interactions and tedious missions. Driving a motorcycle up a mountain while blaring pop music to do yoga on top of it. Biking at night through a rain soaked city. Climbing construction sites to take snapshots of the skyline. Saying “hi” to beach goers as Franklin and subsequently having them call the police to arrest me. Those were the things that made it feel worth revisiting this year.

With that said, there’s something not only juvenile, but mean about Los Santos. There’s a variety of activities that provides the world with an almost playground feel, but often there’s no meaningful way to interact with the world than murder. It makes sense. Rockstar’s vision has always been one of antagonistic homage. It takes its shots at American culture while inviting you to engage and even profit from it. In that way, it’s probably one of the most American games ever made. 

That’s also why its satire feels so toothless. It takes the easy shots. It’s dick jokes on every available in-game medium of communication. It’s “Men are bastards! Women are hysterical!” It’s pot shots at the players and commercialization of violent videogames. It’s “Cops are pigs, amirite?”. It’s the same jokes you get on broadcast television shows, spun with a little more mean. 

GTA V doesn’t challenge you. It doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable and when it does it’s because of the wrong reasons. It’s in the way Molly gets shredded by an airplane turbine, or the way it has you engage in torture and racial profiling. It replicates horrid acts without any meaningful commentary, and the commentary it does provide almost asks you to enjoy it.

Grand Theft Auto V is the videogame counterpart to Wolf on Wall Street: a supremely crafted hyper-masculine celebration of the human animal that does more to argue for the glory of our base desires than to provide something critical of it. While the creators of DOOM may have made it their namesake, it’s apparent that Rockstar has done more to play to our collective id than any other. 

This year’s re-release drove all of that home. Getting a first person view of it helped thin the separation between the player, the character, and the world. The beauty of its world and the hatefulness of its attitudes all come into sharper focus.

One writer wrote “GTA is ‘dangerous’ again”, but I disagree. It isn’t the violence, the hatred, the lurid sex, or the shortened mental distance from all of it. None of that is challenging, none of that is risky. It is all “what-the-people-want”. We didn’t need to go first person to bridge that gap, because we’ve been making it already. Grand Theft Auto is there to tell us what we already “know”. We don’t ask more of it because it satiates our id in a way that pacifies our egos into thinking they’ve been fulfilled. 

Maybe that’s what’s really dangerous.