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. 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. More often, players will resort to this sort of boundary-testing when they become bored or frustrated with the game’s more concrete goals. 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.
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. 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. (I imagine that’s no comfort to Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton.) You never have to do that to advance in the game the world is simply so open-ended that you can do it. Grand Theft Auto is known as the game in which you can pick up a prostitute, have sex with her, then kill her and get your money back. As such, GTA’s image has come to be defined by the most extreme stuff that players are allowed to do, not the comparatively tame stuff that they’re compelled to do. But while the plotlines have been relatively predictable (if unrepentantly violent and profane), the games’ worlds are so large, and the range of activities you can engage in so limitless, that Grand Theft Auto is known less for its game play than for free-form mayhem.
After about 10 or so hours of play, though, I would always start to lose interest in the core story. Sure, there was always some snappy dialogue and a few interesting twists, but the GTA story arc never amounted to much more than a pastiche of classic crime and gangster thrillers-the fun was spotting plot points lifted from the likes of Goodfellas and Miami Vice. I didn’t do much reflecting during the earlier GTA games.
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