And here I thought the gameplay was a minor consideration because the overwhelming majority of those 6 to 100 hours consisted of Run from Point A to Point B. Shoot everything that moves. Run to Point C. Rinse, repeat.

The characterisations and the (rare) moral choices with implications in GTA4 are a very new thing in mainstream gaming. I'm not sure the opportunity to discuss popular games in terms of emotional depth really existed before the current generation.

One issue that's been popping up of late is that, as you point out, there needs to be a different way to evaluate games. But the games industry itself has aligned itself with the Hollywood measurements of success. A lot of the post-launch news about "GTA" (and "Halo 3" late last year) was the record-breaking sales figures and comparisons to Hollywood movies. It seems like those sales figures are being used as way to legitimize the industry to the mainstream, or at least to keep reiterating the point of what a large business games have become.

I see that ramping up with every big game release moving forward -- will the next "Gears of War" be as big as "Halo 3?" Will the new generation of "GTA" games do as well as "GTA IV?" It feels like we're getting into this financial foot race with games that makes it even harder to separate the industry (and by extension, writing about the industry) from movies, TV, books and other media.

This is perhaps a different issue than game reviews themselves, but if we're talking about how gaming is communicated to the mainstream, these multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars sales seem to be the shorthand for making non-gamers understand the breadth of the audience for A-list games.

I haven't read this post to the end, but I had to grab my copy of NEWSWEEK and search for your article when you mentioned it.  And when I found it, and even before start reading the article, I had to return here and say something:

Why is your article under "Technology" section?! Even in the first paragraph (okay, I did read a little), you use the word "art." The only reason I can think of is your editor refused to acknowledge game as a art form, and that you couldn't convince him of that.

...To think that such an enlightened game-journalist (I say this since your view of game and its nature closely align with mine) is working with such a traditionalist who reject game as art... that's sad. :(

So, please do something! Let me read your article under "Culture" section!

Hey N'Gai!

Thanks for your kind words about my piece, and thanks for succinctly outlining the challenges of writing about games for a broad audience that includes both gamers and non-gamers. Everything you said jibes with my experience as a freelancer and as an editor at Wired, and I agree 100% on what we should aspire to convey in our coverage.

@stephentotilo: I think you're right that in order to write an authoritative piece of game criticism, you need to complete the narrative, or at least get a lot further into it than I did in GTA4. I gave myself an out in that Slate piece  by suggesting that many players don't actually finish the game, so therefore my incomplete impressions were valid. But that was pure exigency--I got a lot less advanced access to the game than I thought I would when I pitched the piece.

I'd hate to think that my piece was the only source of GTA4 information for some people. There's a real need for us to strive to give readers a definitive take. Let's face it, a music CD doesn't cost $60. You don't spend 40 hours watching a movie. And you don't have to download a patch to access the last chapter of a book. A game is a work of art and a piece of software, and it demands to be addressed in depth on both of those levels in our criticism.

But given the nature of games, and given issues of timeliness and access, I think that there has to be room for other sorts of coverage that don't aspire to be an exhaustive critique.

I idolize Clive Thompson, who does a regular column on games for Wired News. It's not always clear that Clive's played a game to completion--in fact, he'll sometimes state flat out that he hasn't. But he zeroes in on some facet of the game that interests him, and usually manages to come up with some terrific insights that are both illuminating to non-gamers and defamiliarizing to gamers. (I wish I could take some credit for editing Clive's columns, or even just inserting the hyperlinks or something...but I have nothing to do with them. Sigh.)

Steven Poole's Trigger Happy columns, which used to run in the British magazine Edge, were terrific. Poole was a book critic for the Guardian, and was by no means a hardcore gamer. But his pieces made such a strong impression that nowadays, getting a bylined column in that famously non-bylined mag is one of the greatest honors in games journalism. (It's entirely fitting that the honor now goes to the  Level Up team.)

I'm not suggesting that my piece is as good as anything Clive or Steven have done. I guess that all I'm saying is that when I sit down to write about my experience playing a game, I usually feel this compulsion to be the first and last word on it, to address every fault and every success, to correct every misapprehension that a non-gamer might have, to squeeze in everything that the hardcore might flame me for leaving out, etc. But with this particular story, I couldn't even attempt to be definitive. And it was kinda liberating.

    As always, love your work, N'gai!  Chuck Klosterman had an interesting essay a while back questioning why there was no Lester Bangs of videogames  http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0706KLOSTER_66  from that piece, "What makes video-game criticism complex is that the action is almost never static. Unlike a film director or a recording artist, the game designer forfeits all autonomy over his creation--he can't dictate the emotions or motives of the characters. Every player invents the future."  

    Thus, we have the pleasure of videogames, in that every single experience a player has with them is unlikely to be repeated with a different gamer, or even under different circumstances (more on that in a moment), and the trap in that this is what makes games so difficult to discuss in any meaningful intellectual context.  Hang a painting on a wall and send a NYT critic (hopefully a good one) and you will end up with a meaningful essay about the nature of the work and its context within the greater art world.  If i then go see that painting, I will have an experience that is relatively similar to the critic.  While I may bring a different background to the painting, it essentially remains static, its message (whatever I may interpret it to be) fixed for all time.  Pop a game in a console and I bring my actions into play in defining what the game even is.  As an example, in real life I'm a prosecutor, and would never walk up to a random stranger and beat them around the head and neck with a Louisville Slugger.  When I play GTA, I'm interested in seeing what effect that criminal act then has upon the world, and how that affects my game (am I the only person who regrets that Rockstar was unable to cram in a "Law and Order" type minigame relating to arrests and trials? ha!).  I'm still only a very small way into the game (stupid real life, not enough time to play games, grumble, grumble, why inna heck did my sister pick the weekend after the GTA release to get married?), but I'm looking forward to the moral choices apparently played out further into the game, and I expect I'll make my journey into Niko Bellic's heart a journey into darkness, as that's something I'll never get to play out in real life (nor would I want to).

    The problem then, is how do you translate all this CHOICE, all this anarchy and free will into an essay into the nature of the meaning behind any given game?  I truly wished I had the answer to that (hey, Lester Bangs was motherchuckin' cool), and while I don't I'm glad a few thoughtful people (present company included, dear readers) are making the attempt to sort it out.  I'll tell you one thing, though, its a pretty damn good time to be a gamer!  The hardware lets the artists do just about anything, and we're starting to see some genuine artists emerge into the gaming community, people who have big ideas and the chutzpah to express them, as well as intellectuals to sit around and talk about what it all means.  That, and when we get tired of straining our brains, we can kick back and jack some poor Liberty City folks' rides. :)

Errol

Damn fine essay in Newsweek. You're one of the few journalists capable of helping nongamers see the relevance of the medium.

Splendid piece, N'Gai.

Something for you to grapple with: by rejecting the view of games as a narrative medium and by encouraging the kind of excellent criticism seen in Chris Baker's piece, you have raised the question of whether it is relevant for a critic to complete a game.

What is the meaningful end of a game? When is the moment when a critic can step away and say "I think I've got it; time to write up my thoughts."?

You know my answer. I'm a big believer in games being completed, of the last main mission being played, the lest level conquered, before someone can hope to express an authoritative take on it.

But your standards suggest a compelling second approach: by focusing on experience, who cares about the end? By rejecting the importance of narrative, you're entertaining a different view of game structure and a different prioritization of what needs to be played and discussed in a critique or a review.

Hi N’Gai,

Long time reader, and a big fan. I think that if there is indeed a problem incorporating gameplay and other unique gaming elements into criticism of what is an increasingly mainstream medium, it is due in part to a similar struggle on the part of games themselves. You often write about the need (both from critics and game developers) to try and move beyond the idea of gaming as a narrative medium, or to try and resist the urge to shoehorn games into unfair comparisons to film or other narratives, but at the end of the day GTA IV is at least partially a narrative experience, and to the extent that gameplay is a part of this narrative experience, I am unsure if it works effectively.

Perhaps I could offer an example from my first 8 hours or so of playing GTA IV. Like many reviewers, I was pleased to learn that at several points in the game I was given the option to spare the life of my mission target, rather than end it. My/Niko’s to make these life-sparing decisions, and to hear his regret following some of the more brutal assassinations did give death a weight that had been missing in the previous games. While I continued to enjoy playing GTA, I couldn’t really say that I enjoyed killing.

So imagine my dismay when I started to do some of the procedural drug run missions, and found myself mowing down squads of gang members almost indiscriminately. Efforts to merely shoot the targets in the leg (as I had done in an earlier storyline mission) proved ineffective, as the game was unwilling to consider the mission complete until I had killed every target. Even other essential storyline missions often involved killing large groups of people, seemingly robbing death of the weight it had been granted during the first 2 or 3 (gun-less) hours of the game.

I realize that if you take out the gunplay, you take out a lot of the gameplay and end up with a rather dull experience (Shenmue anyone?) but in terms of the narrative contained within the game, the killing (my stat page now claims a body count of 57!) weakens my emotional connection to the characters. Niko just doesn’t seem like a guy capable of that kind of carnage. You said that we need to develop a critical language “that will allow us to examine the mechanics, visuals, sounds and narrative elements of videogames not in isolation, but in concert,” but the only way I can get past the compassionate Niko I see in the cinematics and the bloodthirsty Niko who’s killed 57 people is to keep the former narrative element separate from the latter gameplay mechanic. If I were a reviewer, it would be rather easy to ignore the later gameplay element entirely in order to more easily praise those aspects of the game mentioned in the NYTimes review and elsewhere.

If I should resist the urge to separate gameplay from story, then how do I resolve this? Is GTA at fault for failing to provide gameplay that’s flexible enough to accommodate my experience of the story, or am I at fault for treating GTA as something other than “just a game?” Sorry for the long post, and keep up the good work. You are the most essential writer in gaming today.

I think the best thing that a gaming site (not applicable to magazines and new papers) is to put out a video review. 1up in my opinion does it the best. They have the written review up on their site and at least now, the more popular games get video reviews in the Review Crew segments posted on 1up sister site GameVideos.com. There are usually 2 or more reviewers talking about the game while the conversation is facilitated by the fabulous Garnett Lee. The video offers game play video as well as solid discussions about these games. The video game audience is certainly a tech savvy crowd and I think more video reviews and more round table would be better. You also get a great idea about games on podcasts like 1up yours. Oh and N'Gai, you've got the BEST analogies I've ever heard. Next time you're in CA, hit up the 1up Yours podcast again.

This is clearly an issue that one faces whenever they try and fit a "new" medium into an old one. It reminds me of when I started writing about hip-hop, and decided to make it my business to always talk about what it felt like to dance to a record. I did this because I thought it was important and relevant, but also as a way of distinguishing myself from a cadre of older, white journalists who seemed to have little interest in this aspect of the music form.

I'd also noted the SLATE piece, and thought about it when I read N'gai's review in NEWSWEEK. Like Evan says, as well, their are a host of limitations on the standard review format that don't afford the thoughtful game critic leeway. or much.

It might be helpful, for those concerned with these issues, to do some research into the first few years of of television critique, or even film critique, to see what kinds of issues the first writers dealt with, when talking about the medium. I'm old enough to recall when the internet was referred to as "the information superhighway," much as cars were once called "horseless carriages."

Said Gavin McNett in his 1999 review of Jeniffer Cobb's *The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace*, "The idea of the Internet as 'cyberspace' was a shaky one from the beginning, cobbled together as it was from bits of virtual reality research, emergent Net technology and science-fiction novels." Often, developing new language requires fashioning these neologisms--gluing together words, in modular fashion, sanding off the rough edges--so that one can get the benefit of the component words' associative value.

Produce Justice,

HA

If I were going to pick the single issue that most reviewers and journalists have missed with GTA is the hedgehog/fox element, because GTA is a hedgehog if there ever was one. The series aims to synthesize a bunch of mechanics into a larger vision, so it's hard to say much about any of the individual elements without missing the point.

I totally agree. I subscribe to Nintendo Power (nintendo nerd, sorry, never liked GTA) but I pretty much stop reading the reviews, for 2 reasons.  1, mainly, I don't play games that much anymore, I devote my time to webdesign, and 2, the reviews lacked gameplay.  All I hear is how the graphics and sound are, how they think the voice acting is, and controls and such.  There is more little details than the actual gameplay, so I think I'd get a better review just renting it or borrowing from a friend than reading alot of the reviews floating around.  Good review though, if only others could do so well.

-Huruyami

Thank you for the link to that article N'Gai! I've been reading a wide range of reviews on GTA IV now I've finished writing mine (and currently editing), yet I hadn't seen many that reflected the emotional experience of playing like the Slate one you've linked to.

I was so surprised at one particular moment of the game to find myself holding the right trigger down half way, with a gun pointed at a snivelling, sobbing head and held that position for five-mnutes. That trigger was being pulled taught, loosened, depressed and let go. It was a wrenching experience to simply walk away and to hear Roman sitting next to me congratulating me, providing me with support really did help me feel like I'd made the right choice. Or at least, that I had rejected the instinct to kill, to appease the suffering Niko had went through, to provide him with a clean start.

And I found that, unlike other GTA IV games, the first thing I did was put down the controller, pick up my mobile phone and call a friend who I know had already completed the game to discuss the decision he made and how difficult it was.

To amazing credit, GTA IV is the only game to date that has actually made me choke back emotionally. In BioShock, I had no attachment to the Little Sisters and the first thing I did was harvest her, and I didn't feel guilty. I believe the reason I was able to do this so readily was because I hadn't spent any time with the sisters and the character I was playing didn't have a past. I knew of the history of the environment, I was learning about other characters, but as far as I was concerned, the character I played was a blank slate. There was no moral decision because my character didn't have morals.

GTA IV, as described above, is different. Creating such strong links to the characters, forcing you to choose who to kill and who to save, really threw me. This is the first game where I've faced a moral dilemma, except it's not the player's dilemma, it's Niko's. Where GTA IV succeeds in forcing you to question is that the player is NOT playing this game as a faceless, bodiless character whom you can mold, you are guiding an already established character through their story. It's true, I played the game as I felt Niko would - and that I had to stare at someone crying while half depressing the trigger on what may as well have been a real gun before physically wrenching myself away to walk back to the car, that was such a special moment that I hope more games in the future manage to achieve.

So, I turned in a review of GTA IV today for a general-audience magazine and I ran smack into some of these same problems. I won't say I solved all of them, but reading this post made me think about why some of these problems persist. Keep in mind that these aren't points of rebuttal, just further points of insight hopefully.

1. Word Count and Deadlines– I was given a field of 300 words to write about a game with approx. 100+ hours of gameplay with a week of playtime. The math just doesn't work out.

2. Editors and Media Outlets – They don't always want to read new, inventive critical language. Rather, they often want things that the average non-gaming reader can understand. Part of the struggle here may be to convince these editors (and I've dealt with lots) that more of their readers play games they may know.

I'm re-reading the post and realized that I'm repeating some of your points. I warned my editor that my GTA article would likely be more of a think-piece and less of a buy-it-or-not review and he was cool with that. He even gave me 200 more words. (Whether HIS editor lets that pass is another thing enitirely...)

Another factor I'm finding problematic in grappling with this whole critical language thing is that because games are experiential in nature, it feels like you have to use first-person voice a lot. Using "I" in a piece of journalistic writing pretty much goes against all my training and instincts and reading it in a piece tends to turn me off.

Anyway, thanks for turning Level Up's lens to this once again.

I like the term you coined -- "gametelling" -- as a means of acknowledging the differences between game narrative and traditional narrative. I was thinking about this in a conversation I had recently where I tried to explain the appeal of GTA beyond the surface level violence and base desires, and what's interesting is that I had far more trouble explaining the concepts of sandbox gaming and emergent gameplay than I did with defending the thematic content. I'm not sure I have enough of a handle on these things myself to be able to convey them well to a non-gaming audience -- as a longtime gamer, it's intuitive, and I certainly haven't thought enough about how and why games are different from other media except to recognize that they *are* different, much less how to explain as such to other people.

Fittingly enough, I was listening to the most recent Retronauts podcast (Ep. 41) where they get into the GTA series, and where Jeremy Parish elaborated on what he thought were the three levels of narrative (of games in general, I suppose, but particularly illustrated with this series):

1) the main narrative (as told by cutscenes and dialogue, and what we might base the "movie" comparisons on)

2) what the game player does in the world (emergent gameplay)

3) the game world itself (environment design, radio stations, NPC interactions, and other things that would probably employ the ultimate "show, don't tell" device)

I thought this was a pretty good starting point for me to wrap my head around, but where I still stumble (and what you were basically getting at, I think) is how to talk about this in the way that gamers experience it, where all three things are happening at once.

I'm tickled that you got to use "precis" in the article. Quite a 25 cent word, or has that inflated to a $1 word nowadays?