Anyone who's been a faithful reader of Level Up knows we have some pet themes to which we keep returning. Among them: games are not a fundamentally narrative medium; we all "see" games with our hands; we videogame journalists need to develop a critical vocabulary that will enable us to better explain the unique qualities of this art form. This week, we managed to smuggle some of that thinking into the pages of NEWSWEEK by means of a page-long essay on Grand Theft Auto IV, in which we wrote:

When I write a post about videogames on my NEWSWEEK.com blog, Level Up, my target audience is the sizable one that's already knowledgeable about the medium. The real challenge, however, comes when I return to the pages of the magazine. It's not easy to explain a game like Grand Theft Auto IV to an audience that's not native to this art form. Yes, I said art: to draw an analogy or three, Grand Theft Auto is to videogames what "The Sopranos" was to television--a sprawling, operatic crime series that has elevated the genre and made its creator very rich in the process (Rockstar Games took in more than $1 billion in the United States for the last three GTA games alone). But on the TV show, you only watch Tony and his minions kill their enemies. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you also direct and star in a story that unfolds over as many as 100 hours, depending on your skill as a gamer.

The experience is hard enough to sum up that I'm tempted to put novices at ease by writing something like this: a first-person, here's-what-I-did-in-the-game introduction, followed by a colorful précis of the Grand Theft Auto IV story and characters, then a recitation of the numerous landmarks and radio stations that give this skewed facsimile of New York City--called Liberty City in the game--its authentic flavor. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't begin to give you a feel for what it's actually like to play the game. Just as the majority of movie reviewers still struggle to find a meaningful critical and technical language with which to discuss actors' performances, we who write about videogames have yet to find a vocabulary that enables us to thoroughly engage the medium. One that will allow us to examine the mechanics, visuals, sounds and narrative elements of videogames not in isolation, but in concert.

Advertisement

When we wrote those two paragraphs, we did so specifically in response to several reviews of GTA IV that we'd read in the mainstream press, where the need to distill a game's essence for non-initiates is the most acute. Take, for instance, the ecstatic review that ran in the New York Times. Only two almost-throwaway sentences--"The point of the main plot is to guide Niko through the city’s criminal underworld. Gang leaders and thugs set missions for him to complete, and his success moves the story along toward a conclusion that seems as dark as its beginning"--describe the main thrust of the game. The rest of the review, though artfully written, starts with that "here's-some-of-what-I-did" intro we mentioned in our excerpt, and then follows it up with a laundry list of adjectives, characters, locations and narrative elements.

Along the way, a litany of pop culture brand names act as signposts to give the typical non-gamer the sense that he or she is on a journey towards understanding what GTA IV is about. Some of those names can actually be found in the game: David Bowie, Ricky Gervais, Karl Lagerfeld, Iggy Pop, Fat Joe, Lil' Wayne. Others--Mad Magazine, Quentin Tarantino, Elmore Leonard, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Tina Brown--are designed to stamp GTA IV with the imprimatur of older, better-known artists and hustlers of culture; points of reference that lull the reader into believing that This Medium Is Like Other Media You Are More Familiar With. We searched in vain for a chunk of the review that would approximate the experience we had while playing the game, and found none. Read the reviews published by USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press and Variety and you'll see variants of the same thing.

This approach to reviewing videogames for mainstream audiences is nothing new. After all, who was it that wrote back in 2005: "[W]hen Spore ships sometime next year, this infant medium might receive its Torah, its "Origin of Species" and its "2001: A Space Odyssey" all rolled into one." Oh yeah, that would be the same folks who just wrote "[T]o draw an analogy or three, Grand Theft Auto is to videogames what "The Sopranos" was to television--a sprawling, operatic crime series that has elevated the genre and made its creator very rich in the process"--us. Meta f---ing culpa, as one of the denizens of Liberty City might say. Meta f---ing culpa.

The issue isn't that us mainstream writers aren't familiar with games, because we are. There are two problems, as we see it. First, either us writers, our editors, or both, don't trust the ability of their audiences to relate to in-depth discussions of the gameplay; our editors have all been boomers who are not regular gamers. Second, even if we do want to go deep on gameplay, the amount of space devoted to game reviews is generally insufficient. Mainstream critics must sum up an experience that's anywhere from six to 100 hours long-one that's fundamentally non-narrative, as we keep insisting--in the same amount of space or less that's devoted to 90-120-minute movie. The end result is a review where so much effort has been spent distilling the game into something that's understandable to non-gamers that no-one ever asks how truthful the distillation is.

We reject this approach. (Take a look at the final paragraph of our GTA IV essay as it appears in this week's issue, and tell us whether we're getting any closer to our own ideal.) We think that mainstream audiences are capable of understanding reviews that don't oversimplify the gameplay experience by burying it under a list of descriptions and analogies, and that it's our collective responsibility to find a better way to do so. But to be perfectly clear, we're not calling for the graphics-gameplay-sound-fun-factor consumer guide reviews that have historically been the hallmark of the enthusiast press, either. A good example of what we'd like to see more of is how Chris Baker approached the game in Slate (like Newsweek, Slate is owned by The Washington Post Company). In a story titled, ironically, "It's Not Just About Killing Hookers Anymore," he wrote:

The distinction between what you're allowed to do and what you're compelled to do is more meaningful to people who actually play games. All of us have tested the limits of what Will Wright calls a game's "possibility space." In a World War II game, for instance, it's informative to try to shoot your own sergeant the first time you play. It tells you instantly if the game will let you kill your comrades--some do, and some don't--and whether you need to worry about causing a friendly-fire incident. More often, players will resort to this sort of boundary-testing when they become bored or frustrated with the game's more concrete goals. I'm the type of GTA player who polishes off around half of the missions, an accomplishment that unlocks large swaths of the game world and scores you access to nicer crash pads and more powerful weapons. But then there's invariably some mission that's so involved and difficult, or requires me to crisscross the town so many times to get back to the starting point, that I give up and go for lower-impact entertainments, like turning on the cheat codes so I'm invulnerable and have a tank and a rocket launcher with unlimited ammo. Then I try to rack up a body count that would make Attila the Hun jealous

I'm guessing that fewer players will reach that breaking point with GTA IV.

Further on, he says:

The game's improved characterizations give far greater weight to the act of killing. Grand Theft Auto was never the most violent game going. In the sci-fi shooter Gears of War, you can chain saw enemy aliens until fountains of blood seem to splatter onto the inside of your monitor. But since the game's world is firmly entrenched in the clichés of 1980s blockbusters like Aliens, you feel some distance from it all. There's no such distance in GTA IV, where the physics of death feel shockingly real--bodies can't be blown apart or torn to pieces, but they react convincingly to explosions and severe impacts. Each death is a decision. At one pivotal moment, Bellic has to choose between killing two people--one a total jerk who could help advance his career, and one a good friend who can't do much for him. There's no right or wrong decision here--well, actually, there are two wrong decisions--and players will struggle to make the choice. No cheat code or online FAQ can help you here.

This is the kind of assessment that can take people who are only casually familiar with games and bring them into GTA IV's art of darkness. Baker gets at how people have played GTA in the past, then explains why they might be compelled to do so differently with GTA IV. He points out the rich-by-videogame-standards characterizations, but ties them to their emotional impact upon the gameplay. And later on, when he mentions the laundry list of radio stations in the game, he begins by pointing out that the player's exploits are reflected back through on-air broadcasts. As gamers ourselves, we could read this review and see our own experiences with GTA IV within it, rather than those experiences being minimized and flattened out.

It's great that those of us in the mainstream are being given the space and resources to cover videogames, both journalistically and critically. But just as we have to avoid distorting our beat on the journalism side, we must avoid misrepresenting the medium on the critical side--even if those misrepresentations are ultimately positive. There are some ways in which videogames are like other media, but there are many ways in which they are not, and our reviews only do the public a disservice if we focus on the former to the virtual exclusion of the latter. The essence of game cannot be found in a plot summary or in a catalog of its elements. So we need to find a way to talk about games that can engage the mainstream while educating it--truthfully--about what the experience of playing each individual game is actually like. Is this an easy task? Hell, no. But since it's not going to get any easier, why don't we all just get started right now?