For my dollary-doo, the best instruction manual for how art works is Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth’s collaborative documentary experiment The Five Obstructions. (Runner-up: Henry James’ novella The Figure In The Carpet, though that’s really more an instruction manual for how art, manages to spryly evade our attempts to understand how it works.)
In the 2003 film, Trier contracts Leth to remake his own 1967 short film, The Perfect Human, following a series of rules: no shot longer than 12 frames, set the film in the worst location imaginable, etc. As punishment for not properly completing the second obstruction, Trier demands that Leth remake The Perfect Human with no structural impediments to his creative process. The third obstruction is no obstruction at all.
The result is disastrous. Almost. Its disastrousness ends up illustrating one of the central themes of the film. So it’s not a total wash. What ends up coming across, maybe incidentally, is that art demands restriction, even the illusion of restriction, in order to succeed. It’s a lesson Rockstar North, developers of the new video game du jour Grand Theft Auto V, would do well to note. So take a knee, boyos! Without lines to colour outside of, creativity’s a crapshoot, ambling around inside a infinite frontier, possessive of no particular definition.
GTAV has ostensible borders, defined by the sprawling boundaries of Los Santos (its mock-up of Los Angeles). But as a so-called “sandbox game,” part of the its appeal is it’s lack of parameters. Sure, there’s a story – the same ol’ Grand Theft Auto story: some guy (or in this case, three guys) returning to a life of vehicular manslaughter after some attempt at the straight-and-narrow – but the series’ big draw has always been its wide open permissibility. Instead of rolling from one mission to the next, the player can cruise around Los Santos wreaking all manner of havoc: socking strangers in the head, shooting cops, flipping sports cars off overpasses, getting lap dances, using the fake in-game Internet, boosting golf carts, pretty much whatever.
If you’re anything like me, the interplay between the missions and the free roaming creates a guilt-driven gameplay experience that seeps into real life. Basically: complete a mission, flip some cars and shoot at strangers for 20 minutes, use a cheat to spawn a helicopter and attempt to dive into backyard swimming pools from as high up as possible, feel bad for not completing a mission, complete a mission, etc., etc., etc., until hours have bled away and you feel like such a waste that you pathetically attempt to put down forty pages of what you perceive to be a “serious novel” but end up falling asleep after rereading the same sentence 16 times. Beyond being (literally) exhausting, GTAV’s seemingly infinite sandbox becomes boring.
Naturally, part of this has to do with all the hype, with the bus shelter ads and careful trickle of promotional material trumping up the arrival of the game. As one of the banner titles not just of the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360, but of video gaming itself, coming at the tail-end of this cycle of hardware, arriving just a few weeks before the newfangled PS4 and Xbox One arrive in stores, GTAV is positioned as a generation-defining title. It’s a test of what game developers, when amassed in crazy numbers (the credits apparently run over half an hour, though I doubt I’ll ever bother to get there to find out), can do with a given hardware set. Like Tim Allen souping of a miter saw with an outboard engine on Home Improvement, Rockstar’s mandate is “more.” More characters. More missions. More mini-games. More space to explore. More stuff to do. More time to waste.
All this space and stuff is meant to be impressive, but it ends up more alienating than inviting: vast and formless, mostly baffling. There’s too much to do and too much to explore in GTAV that ends up breeding little but atrophy. The game can’t even be contained by the digital space of Los Santos, with needling pop-up messages encouraging you to download tie-in apps to “your personal smartphone” (meaning, the gamer’s real phone, not the characters’ fake phones) to access special features, like an app that will allow you to train an in-game dog. It’s too much. Tucking into the game immediately has the discouraging quality of, to quote Pee-Wee Herman, “unraveling a cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting.”
The other problem is primarily attitudinal. Like most other Grand Theft Auto titles, V is cynical to the point of obnoxiousness. Meant as an elaborate sendup of American culture, its parody never runs deeper than early-season South Park. A gun store called Ammu-nation? Radio ads about cuckold therapy featuring a lisping, effeminate, presumed closeted husband? Jokes about psychotherapy over a decade since Frasier’s been off the air? It’s like an index of lousy 90s stand-up jokes. More than a simulator of rampant criminality, GTAV feels like a simulator of what it’s like to be a person who cares about a Grand Theft Auto game, asking you to laugh at mean-spirited jokes and horn-doggedly ogle a bunch of computer generated pixels clumped together to resemble female breasts. It’s Ed Hardy Shirt: The Game.
Worse: the relationship between the game’s “message” and the gameplay itself is totally incoherent, a common and extremely annoying problem in video games writ large. Just as it’s hard not to roll your eyes at Call Of Duty splicing anti-war quotes into a game that serves predominantly as a robust emulator of warfare as adrenaline-jacked excitement, it’s a little rich for a title that allows you to run over a fireman and then fishtail over his corpse while listening to Nashville Rebel Waylon Jennings to begin critiquing America’s culture of violence.
There’s even a mission where you torture someone in order to shake loose information about an Azerbaijani fugitive, which then forces you to listen as the character waxes on about how torture is an effective method of interrogation and works only the bolster America’s jingoist ego, as big and fat a slice of cake-and-eat-it-too criticism as you’re likely to find in contemporary pop culture. This desire to have it both ways theme-wise squares with the spongy non-limits of GTAV’s actual gameplay: instead of saying something, Rockstar would rather say everything.
Grand Theft Auto V may well be a technical achievement. Certainly, it looks good, chock-o-block with detail, richly textured, and all that. I just can’t bring myself to care, any more than I’d be bothered to purchase and read a book just because it had the most pages ever. It might be a matter of how truly game-changing Grand Theft Auto III was, the kind of thing that’s so impressive that it reduces even rather substantive changes in gameplay or graphic enhancements to feeling like modest tweaks.
Or maybe it’s just a matter of personal preference. Because as tired-but-reliable gaming experiences go, I’d rather grind through ever-descending cathedral dungeons in the (relatively) new PS3 port of Diablo III, pressing the same three buttons over and over to destroy skeleton archers and big fat Oogie-Boogie things whose exploding guts spawn baby demon imps, collecting +10 Reptilian Trousers Of Hardiness for a double-scythe wielding barbarian that I’ve named “SHREK!!!” for nobody’s amusement but my own.
