Life is complicated. I killed people, smuggled people, sold people. Perhaps here, things will be different.
--Niko Bellic, Grand Theft Auto IV
When Rockstar Games showed the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto
IV, people marvelled over the detailed environments, thrilled to the
series' return to Liberty City and speculated about just how next-gen
Rockstar North's Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 debut would be. For us, our
sense of anticipation was built around something entirely different:
the prospect of an immigrant story. When MTV's Tracey John interviewed us for the Multiplayer blog, we spoke of ourselves as being liminal people, in the following exchange:
Multiplayer: Do you feel there are any advantages [to
being black and covering videogames]? Do you feel you stand out more
because of your race?
Croal: Well, there are relatively few of us. So I guess
in that sense I stand out. But I think also I stand out because of my
dreads. [laughs] I stand out because I work for Newsweek. … [Working
for Newsweek] opened a lot of doors. I know that’s not really what
you’re asking, but in terms of race I don’t think I found a particular
advantage or disadvantage. Professionally I think there is a
perspective I have but I wouldn’t attribute it solely to race. I would
say that I’m--and I hate to use a big word--but I’d say that I’m a
liminal person; people who exist along boundaries or lines sort of in
between spaces.
My parents are from Guyana, South America. I was born in
Canada. I lived a little bit of my life--when I was two to when I was
five--in Guyana. I studied French for 10 years. I grew up in Canada. I
moved to the United States for college. I’ve lived in California, D.C.,
and now in New York. I work at a mainstream magazine covering a niche
subject within that magazine. So there’s a way in which I have all of
these different perspectives. I’m a black, Canadian immigrant living in
the United States of Guyanese descent, right? So there are all of these
things that I’ve seen and done and by virtue of how I came into
covering this, starting out writing about arts and entertainment,
mostly movies, some music, some technology, and bringing that to
covering games and being very inspired by everyone from Pauline Kael
and John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann, Roger Ebert--to people who were
writing for the Village Voice like Greg Tate and Lisa Jones and really
strong cultural reporters who brought multiple perspectives to things.
I try to bring that to games.
Now, we don't want to oversell the cultural differences between the
English-speaking parts of Canada and the U.S.--let's face it, you
export your Hollywood movies and rock/hip-hop while importing our
comedians and news anchors, so pop culturally speaking, there are a lot
of similarities--but take our word for it that being a
double-immigrant has given us a unique-ish perspective on matters large
and small. And because of that, we responded strongly to Niko Bellic in
a way that certain others may have not.
We say this in search of
a way to write thoughtfully about a subject that Rockstar Games is not
yet allowing us to write about in any detail: the opening credits to
Grand Theft Auto IV. (We already revealed the game's very first line of
dialogue in last week's Conventional Wisdom Watch in the pages of
Newsweek: "Daddy's Back, you ***"; when asked if this was a coded
message to all those other developers who dared step to fickle gamers
during GTA's two-year absence, the succinct response was, "Oh, yeah.")
To respect Rockstar's wishes, we'll simply say the following: that Niko
arrives on these shores in a manner reminiscent of many previous
immigrants to this country; that the team uses said arrival to
masterfully hint both at the milieu in which all of its GTA games
operate and the specific past of our new protagonist; and that maybe,
just maybe, Rockstar is tipping its hat to David Fincher for some of the "Fight Club" director's previous work.
The
insider-outsider theme continues in the game itself, as evidenced by
our six or seven hours of gameplay. There's Niko's cousin Roman, who's
forgotten their native tongue. There's Niko's first American
girlfriend, who remarks that she's never dated a foreign guy before.
There's the small-time gangster Little Jacob, whose Jamaican patois is
astonishingly authentic in its impenetrability--even our
Guyanese-by-way-of-Canada ears could only decipher every second word.
And there's Niko's own wary love-hate relationship with his adopted
homeland, where everything is bought on credit and nothing is real,
right down to the fake breasts in the strip clubs he frequents.
The
wily Brits and Scots at Rockstar have always tried to bring a
satirist's eye to their Grand Theft America, and GTA IV is no
exception. We wouldn't quite put them on Paddy Chayefsky's level just yet--there's a line between parody and satire, and the low comedy
approach that Rockstar brings to the humor of its numerous sendups
keeps them firmly on the parodist's side of the aisle, which is
probably the wisest choice when trying to appeal to their audience's
collective inner groundling.
Still, the level of ambition on display in some of GTA IV's dialogue
suggests that if Rockstar ever put its mind to it, the
stiletto-twisting-in-one's-stomach aspect of the true satirist is
within its grasp, and the more pretentious members of the Level Up
staff hope that someday, Rockstar goes for it.
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