Live from Austin!

In part 1, I talked about the history of video games. In part 2, I talked about how GTA 3 differed from earlier games. Now I’ve finally reached the payoff: discussion of criticisms of GTA.

Getting off on a technicality

Let me first return to the media controversy of GTA, and start off by talking about prostitutes and murder. You’ve probably heard the horror soundbite: GTA encourages players to have sex with prostitutes and then kill them.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve played all the storyline missions of all the 3D GTA games. Going by my experience, I will say that technically, I know of no point in any of the games where you are encouraged to kill a prostitute.

I say “technically”, because in GTA: San Andreas, there’s a mission where a pimp hires you to protect his girls. You’re told that two of them have been murdered, and you end up racing to rescue a third who is being attacked by two men. You then take the woman to a nearby hotel. Unfortunately, the woman later decides to leave the business, having met up with some charismatic Christian preachers. The pimp demands that you kill the ex-prostitute and her new friends. (Later you might end up killing the pimp too.)

This is an example of the kind of moral ambiguity that occurs in the GTA universe. One moment you can be saving lives, the next you can be killing people. The game presents you with many options, and leaves you to make the decisions. As I pointed out in part 2, you could also decide to protect prostitutes from the men who attack them. There are several story missions in the various games that involve that kind of scenario.

So other than a single mission in one of the games, I don’t believe that GTA games encourage or require that the player kill any current or former sex worker. The story rose to notoriety because some GTA 3 players worked out that you could avail yourself of a prostitute’s services–thereby boosting your character’s energy/health level–and then kill the woman afterwards to get the cash back.

I have no proof, but I suspect that the rules of the game were not chosen specifically to encourage prostitute-slaying; the fact that dead prostitutes drop cash is simply a matter of realism. When you kill any person in the game, you can grab whatever cash or weapons they were carrying. The rules of the universe were set, the gamers made the moral choice.

The questionable part, frankly, is the idea that seeing prostitutes would have a positive effect on your health; perhaps Rockstar should simply have made it one of the many things you can choose to do within the game that have no real benefit, like knocking down lamp posts or shouting insults at passers by in GTA: San Andreas. Perhaps in a future game we’ll see the protagonist come down with a bad STD and limp around in pain until he goes to the clinic.

A mug of hot coffee

Now the second controversial thing everyone’s heard about: the so-called “Hot Coffee” modification to GTA: San Andreas. The modification restores a scene which had been cut from the game before being completed, in which the protagonist has consensual sex with his girlfriend.

Let me emphasize that: Consensual sex. There is no moment in any of the GTA games where the protagonist gets to rape anyone. There is no sexualized violence.

The hot coffee scene occurs after CJ, the protagonist, has taken his girlfriend on a number of romantic dates to restaurants or bars, and has presented her with flowers or some other token of affection. She invites him in for coffee, and there’s some clothed and badly-animated grinding. In the game as released, you just hear some muffled moaning.

So in short: A series of games were sold in which you get to kill as many people you want, and can do so in dozens of creative ways. The authorities had no problem with that. But as soon as it was discovered that one of the games could be altered so that it depicted romantic sexual activity without nudity, there was a government investigation. That’s the USA for you.

But this episode brings me to another fact about the GTA games: They do not portray women only as prostitutes and strippers, a claim I have seen repeated many times. Nor are women always victims or sex objects.

In GTA3, the protagonist is at one point ordered around by Asuka Kasen, a woman who is a member of the Yakuza crime syndicate. In GTA: Vice City, there is a series of missions you can perform for an old Haitian matriarch called Auntie Poulet. In GTA: San Andreas, you can lead a double life and commit crimes for a vengeful criminal woman named Catalina, while dating a female police officer from a nearby town.
Kill all reporters!

As well as the fuss over “Hot Coffee”, there was some controversy in the media over allegations that the GTA games were racist. Specifically, one of the missions in GTA: Vice City included an instruction to “Kill all the Haitians”. The mission is one in which the protagonist has been hired by a gang of Cubans, who are racist towards Haitians.
Now, as I’ve already mentioned, you have the opportunity to work for the Haitians later on, and kill Cubans. However, as a result of the criticism, the game was modified to alter or remove references to both Cubans and Haitians.

The thing is, gang warfare can be racist. The GTA games depict it, without necessarily condoning it. The same can be said of many books and movies.

Do I think GTA is racist? Well, two of the games have a black protagonist, and the new GTA IV features a protagonist from Serbia. Both GTA: San Andreas and GTA: Vice City Stories feature interracial dating, which is treated in a completely matter-of-fact way. There are heroes–and villains–of all races. So I think it’s a stretch to claim that the games are racist; rather, they at times depict racism.

Are you high or something?

I haven’t played GTA IV yet, but there’s one more recent controversy I feel the need to mention briefly: Mothers Against Drunk Driving complained that the game allows the player to get the protagonist drunk and then have him attempt to drive home.

There are several ignored facts that make this a poor criticism of the game. The mission in which drunk-driving is set up is specifically intended to introduce the player to taxis, and how to use them. The game specifically tells you that you’re drunk and ought to take a taxi home. If you fail to do so, you are likely to hit stuff, kill people, and end up arrested. It seems to me that if anything, the game attempts to educate the player not to drunk-drive.

Informed criticism, rather than the usual kind

Having dealt with a few of the common misconceptions surrounding the GTA games and talked about a few uninformed criticisms, I’d like to move on to consider some of the ways in which the games do, in fact, fall short.

One criticism that can justly be leveled at GTA is that all the protagonists are men. Of course, GTA games are hardly alone in this; the number of video games with strong female leads is pretty small. (For my money, one of the best is Beyond Good And Evil , which is good in so many ways I could write a separate essay about it. The Metroid Prime series is excellent too.)

I gather that in GTA IV, you can play as a woman in the online multiplayer. Obviously it would be good if the main game allowed you to play through the story as a woman, but let’s stop and consider what would be required for that to happen.

Video games these days are big business. Tens of millions of dollars are spent developing them. The GTA games have hours of motion-captured 3D cut scenes in them, and voice acting from famous names as diverse as Samuel L. Jackson and Phil Collins. It’s reported that GTA IV has over 60,000 lines of dialog for 660 speaking parts–just for the pedestrians who populate the city! And because the games are set in a world somewhat like ours, you can’t just swap a male and female character and expect all the dialog and plot to still make sense and sound right. Hence, there would need to be parallel cut scenes and dialog tracks for the male and female variations of the game. I’d love to see it, but I don’t think it’s realistic, any more than it’s realistic to demand a version of Tomb Raider where Lara Croft is replaced by a guy with asthma who programs computers for a living. Maybe that would help me identify with the character more, but I don’t need protagonists to be just like me; as mentioned earlier, I’ve had great times playing games in which the protagonist is a woman.
Another justifiable criticism of GTA is that it’s a totally heterosexual world. Here, I suspect that the reason is the genre. The games are set in the world of violent crime. While there may be gay gangsters–and several of the games hint at same-sex attraction on the part of some of the thugs in the GTA world–it would be a stretch to make the protagonist overtly gay.

Does that mean the protagonist is always the aggressor in relationships, then? As a matter of fact, no. GTA: Vice City Stories features a transsexual German movie director who is constantly trying to get in the lead character’s pants. There’s also a mission which ends up in a gay bar; the first time I played that one I got my ass handed to me, so to speak.

Meanwhile, one of Rockstar’s other games, Bully, allows same-sex kissing. Like the GTA series, Bully is a “sandbox” game, this time set in a boarding school; so perhaps we’ll see same-sex romance in a future GTA as well, when it makes sense for the scenario.

A third criticism of GTA is that for all the openness of the world, your interaction with it is still pretty limited. You can eat food, exercise, shoot stuff, drive vehicles, and that’s about it. Again, it comes down to limiting the complexity explosion, but still, I’d love to see an adventure game that had a world as open as GTA’s.

Conclusions

The GTA series of games isn’t perfect. However, it isn’t the misogynistic interactive ultraviolence that people often claim. While some may play the games for the violence, a lot of us play them because they are a massive sandbox city that you can explore and mess with as you please.

As a reviewer at WIRED comments, the games are ultimately deft satires of the American city. They are so carefully observed and detailed that if you visit the real city after the GTA version, you’ll recognize familiar elements everywhere. As such, it’s almost as much fun to explore a GTA city as it is to explore a real city, and a lot less tiring and expensive, not to mention safer.

Further reading

The GTA games, reviewed by someone who had never played any of them before.

MSNBC on why GTA is fun to play.

bOING bOING on how GTA IV is perhaps the best way to understand the real New York.

A Flickr set of images comparing Liberty City with the real NYC.

The Onion has a surprisingly insightful article that pokes fun at the lack of realism in GTA.

Washington Post :

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn’t pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

[...]

Karen Seifert, a volunteer from New York, was outside of the largest polling location in Lackawanna County, Pa., on primary day when she was pressed by a Clinton volunteer to explain her backing of Obama. "I trust him," Seifert replied. According to Seifert, the woman pointed to Obama’s face on Seifert’s T-shirt and said: "He’s a half-breed and he’s a Muslim. How can you trust that?"

Stay classy, America!

New York Times:

“You can hear voices, you can operate under intermittent delusions, you can see rabbits in the road that aren’t there and still be legally sane [by New York standards].”

Last year:

Investigators handed 26 items, including clothes, phones and cameras, to transit workers, “explaining that they had found the lost articles on a train or bus.”

But, the report states, “Three months or more after these items were placed in the system, we recovered only three from the Lost Property Unit at 34th Street. The whereabouts of the other 23 articles is unknown.”

Last year:

The report said that the transit agency’s lost property unit received more than 8,000 items each year and that only about 18 percent wound up back in the hands of their owners. Most unclaimed items were eventually auctioned off, the report said.

This year:

While riding in the New York subway, Carlos Alayo found a wallet sitting on an empty bench. In a hurry to get to a meeting, Alayo picked up the wallet and said he was going to check it for ID later. Before he knew it he was being frisked by police.

It turns out the wallet was planted by New York City police as part of “Operation Lucky Bag,” a decoy operation involving planted wallets and undercover officers watching how bystanders react.

I can imagine the conversation:

“This is a public relations disaster. Now that people know that practically nothing they hand to officials ever gets returned to its rightful owner, they’ll stop handing stuff in and we’ll lose the auction profits.”

“I’ve got it: we’ll start a sting operation to make people scared to return anything to its rightful owner!”

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the best-selling Christian porn Left Behind got turned into a video game.

Soon, Left Behind: Eternal Forces will let you play the part of a heavily armed born again Christian. Your mission, to wage armed battle in the streets of New York, wipe out the unbelievers and other forces of the antichrist, and save America.

The Palisades conference center is probably a nice place most of the year. The same is true of the nearby Hilton. Unfortunately, it was February, and cold. Even in the building, it was somewhat cold–when we walked past a fireplace in the conference center on our way back from lunch, the Austin folks all immediately walked over to it and stood there trying to warm up. The rest of the team, from places like New York and Indiana, looked at us with mild amusement.

That said, the first thing I noticed on returning to Austin wasn’t the heat–it was the moisture. Northeastern winters are a constant battle against dry, cracking skin, sore eyes, dry throat, and so on. It now seems amazing to me that I lived in New England for so many years, putting up with sub-zero temperatures and dry air for months at a time. What was I thinking?

Food was pretty good. Because Palisades is a conference center rather than an office, it serves customer food rather than IBM canteen food. The coffee, however, was another matter. The pod-based coffee machine near the meeting room produced something that actually tasted worse than the coffee from the miniature coffee maker in my hotel room. You know things are bad when you go to Dunkin’ Donuts and think “Wow, this is great coffee!” And given that we were starting each day’s work at 8am, coffee was a critical requirement for me.

Evenings were better. One night we went to the TriBeCa Grill, co-owned by Robert DeNiro. It was good food. I’m not sure it was good enough to make up for trudging a mile through freezing winds, but I’m not really a food snob.

Visiting the World Trade Center site was odd. I hadn’t been there in 15 years, so the absence of the towers didn’t seem odd. Ground zero looked like any other urban construction zone.

The business part of the trip went well, and was far too (a) confidential (b) boring to non-IBMers to recount in more detail.

Astonishingly, nothing went wrong with the plane flights, which both left on time and arrived slightly early. Then again, this time I had carefully avoided American Airlines. Security asked to check my bag on the way back, I immediately and correctly guessed that they wanted to see my razor. I took it apart and demonstrated the lack of blade, the blades all being packed in my checked luggage.

Got back at around 23:00, completely exhausted. Managed to stay awake enough to drive home, crashed into bed. Still tired today.

I’ve been away in New York this week, at the IBM Palisades Executive Conference Center. Four days of team meetings with my immediate project team. Four of us are located in Austin, but senior management were in New York, so everyone traveled to New York via New Jersey.

Traveling from Newark airport to Palisades isn’t exactly difficult, but it’s surprisingly easy to end up in Manhattan accidentally. There are two main traps I’ll need to remember if I go there again.

The first trap is that the New Jersey Turnpike splits into two on the way north, and the two halves have entirely different sets of exits and available destinations. Computer-generated routes don’t mention this. The “local” route was the one we wanted; the “express” route has a different set of exits, turns and signposts which bore no resemblance to the ones in the directions.

The second trap is that at some point, you want to transition from the New Jersey Turnpike to the Palisades Interstate Parkway. Doing so apparently involves driving towards the George Washington Bridge, being funneled towards the toll plaza, then cutting across five lanes of traffic to a small left exit labeled Fort Lee. If you fail to make it, or don’t see the left exit, you’re screwed—there’s no way to turn around without going across the bridge to Manhattan, turning left twice, and coming all the way back. To add to the irritation, they’ll charge you $6 for the pleasure of going across the bridge to Manhattan, even though you have zero desire to do so. This trap wasn’t mentioned in any of the directions either, and explains how our route from Newark to Palisades came to include the Bronx.

We opted to take 9N and go back across the river at the next bridge, rather than try again to negotiate the maze of roads near the Washington bridge in the dark. Fortunately I’d had the foresight to bring the GPS, so we were making progress, and not in any real danger of getting totally lost. Our route was sub-optimal and slow, but we’d get there.

Once we could see the Tappan Zee bridge, there was the minor problem of getting onto it. You’d think it would be well signposted from most nearby road junctions, but you’d think wrong. We stopped at one of the few open gas stations to ask for more specific directions than “drive up and down the coast until you see a way on”. The guy behind the counter said “I’m afraid I’m not from around here, I have no idea.”

There was a pause. I turned around and looked at the other gas station employee, standing by the door. “I’m not from around here either,” he said apologetically. “This is a brand new station, they brought us in from somewhere else.”

So on the whole, a farce which has done nothing to improve my general feelings about New York.

A&E is showing a reality TV series about one of the Austin roller derby teams, the Texas Rollergirls. Reviews from the New York based media seem to have missed something.

AP writes:

This new generation of roller derby queens skates that thin line between blue collar and white trash, balancing nights of tequila shots with days of their real-life careers as nurses, teachers and rubber-lingerie designers.

[...]

Despite their penchant for fishnet uniforms and rump-shaking celebrations, they bristle (in episode two) at the suggestion that roller girls are easy. Still, they smoke and drink and curse like sailors and extend their middle fingers liberally. When Miss Conduct is missing in action at a practice, a teammate offers this explanation: “Miss Conduct is drunk.”

The New York Times isn’t quite so diplomatic:

For a while, it seemed as if Roller Derby was a lost art, like illuminated manuscripts or clog dancing. Actually, it’s more like polio: many people assume it was eradicated in the 1970’s, but it’s still around and, in some areas, quite virulent.

[...]

Reality contests take ordinary, identifiable women and pose them in an absurd, artificial fantasy fishbowl. “Rollergirls” is a documentary that takes women who pursue an absurd, artificial fantasy sport and tries to pose them as ordinary, identifiable women.

[...]

These players are all based in Austin, Tex., which is supposed to be Texas’s classy town. One can only imagine Rollergirls’ Night Out in Fort Worth.

Ouch.

I’ve beem thinking about how one can actually spot shady businesses. It’s not as easy as it initially seems—there are plenty of dodgy retailers that manage to look totally legitimate, and there are plenty of good companies that you might assume to be crooks because (for instance) they don’t list any kind of address online.

For example, if you’ve ever shopped online for camera equipment, or browsed the ads in magazines, you’ve probably seen lots of stores in New York selling photo equipment at way below MSRP.

Don Wiss decided to start a project to photograph the actual storefronts of all the discount camera businesses in NY and NJ. He has put the photo gallery on his web site.

For instance, I’ve seen legit-looking ads from Cambridge Camera in magazines, so it’s interesting (ahem) to see their actual business premises.

In the UK we call these places “box shifters”. They all used to collect along Tottenham Court Road in London, though that may have changed.

The problem is that not every obscure online store in Brooklyn offering amazingly low prices is run by crooks. I bought our new TV from Best Buy Plasma in Brooklyn. It arrived promptly, in perfect condition, and has made me very happy; so Best Buy Plasma are clearly not to be confused with PC And Plasma.

Similarly, HKFlix are legit and knowledgeable (in my experience), even though it seems to be almost impossible to find out where they’re actually located. (No address on the site, domain hosting points to Hawaii, stuff ships from California.)

Generally speaking, I’ve been able to shop online and save a ton of money and not get ripped off. But I don’t think I could write down a set of objective criteria for working out if a vendor is honest; it’s usually an intuitive decision for me. I do a bunch of research, but ultimately there’s some kind of non-logical synthesis of the available information.

In April 2004, a Communist Party official told Chinese journalist Shi Tao how to report the upcoming 15th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre.

Shi Tao took notes at the meeting, wrote up what he had been told to write, and e-mailed a copy to a pro-democracy web site in New York.

Unfortunately, Shi Tao used Yahoo web mail to send his e-mail. When the Chinese government approached Yahoo and asked them to reveal the personal information of the person who had signed up for the account, they gladly did so.

Asked about this at a conference in China, Yahoo’s Taiwanese co-founder Jerry Yang said:

“To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law.”

Since then, people have pointed out that the journalist hadn’t been convicted of any crime. A Chinese lawyer—as in, a lawyer who actually practices law in China—has said that Yahoo was under no legal obligation to reveal the journalist’s name. It certainly seems that no legal action was taken against Yahoo to force them to rat out the guy.

It’s a pity there’s no Adolf Eichmann Award for Excellence in Only Following Orders, Jerry Yang would have a good chance of winning.