Ethics in Video Games

Rockstar’s Empty Encore

I have a confession: I am not a gamer. I have not bought a new video game in about ten years. I began with an N64, graduated to a PlayStation 2 and latterly owned a PlayStation 3, but my real enthusiasm was always for real-time strategy. Gaming is now something I occasionally dip back into during winter (visiting relatives back in blightly), usually when I am trying to avoid going down the pub four nights a week during days running up to Christmas.

The games industry occupies a curious position. It is commercially larger and more widely consumed than ever yet somehow feels less culturally relevant. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, video games were inseparable from youth culture, by which I mean not merely children, but people in their late teens and early twenties.

Sega installed Dreamcast consoles in nightclubs. PlayStation ran cryptic and occasionally rather cheeky advertising campaigns built around the square, triangle, circle and cross of its controller. Those four symbols even appeared stamped onto ecstasy tablets. Gaming belonged to the same turn-of-the-millennium futurism as Nokia phones, MiniDiscs and The Matrix-inspired fashion.

Gaming was for grown-ups and why not? Gaming itself had grown up. In little more than a decade, the medium had progressed from 8-bit side-scrolling children’s games to fully three-dimensional worlds and convincing(ish) first-person shooters. It is easy to forget how brutal the competition once was. In the middle of the 1990s, a customer could choose consoles made by Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Atari (just), SNK (for the very rich), Panasonic, Philips and Commodore. Most failed and now exist only as curiosities, but it goes to show how mental the market was that everyone felt like having a go.

The themes became more adult as well. Feminists and the Christian Right alike were appalled that Grand Theft Auto III allowed the player to pick up prostitutes. The controversy now seems almost quaint, particularly when set against GTA III’s dated Emotion Engine graphics, but it reflected something real. Games had become large, provocative cultural objects, consumed by adults and capable of being drawn into the same moral panics as “video nasties” and “parental advisory” records.

Crucially, improved hardware was being used to build worlds. Half-Life 2 remains one of the great feats of environmental world-building: a political order, an occupied society and a ruined civilisation communicated through architecture, overheard dialogue and the landscape itself. Developers appeared interested not simply in providing more action, but in discovering what this rapidly advancing medium could do narratively.

That atmosphere of discovery has largely disappeared, if we are being honest. Games have become more arcade-like: louder, faster and designed around instant gratification, rewards and retention. Real-time strategy has virtually disappeared entirely, as have many of the intelligent, systems-heavy simulation games that once expected the player to think, get lost and occasionally fail. Much like modern blockbuster, the largest games now seem terrified of allowing the player to become bored for thirty seconds.

The latest provocation is Grand Theft Auto VI. Rockstar has confirmed that its so-called physical version will contain a download code rather than a disc, officially to allow customers to preload the game. Whatever the stated “convenience”, the commercial effect is obvious. A code cannot be lent to a friend, traded in or resold after the game has been completed. It is the games industry’s final fuck you to the gamer, choosing an enormously anticipated game to force the issue of total walled-garden integration.

The bearded, BO’d, Games Workshop and CEX tendency will probably trace the decline of the medium back to “ethics in video-game journalism”. There is certainly something drearily conformist and woke about the mainstream gaming press, and ideological fashion has plainly affected the industry. But what trade press is not conformist? The motoring press operates under much the same incentives. If a magazine systematically rubbishes every manufacturer’s cars, it will eventually stop receiving new cars to test. Games publishers possess the same power over access to alpha tests and early releases.

It also does not explain why the games themselves changed.

The familiar anti-woke account also has a chronological issue. Grand Theft Auto V was released in September 2013. Gamergate erupted the following year, around the tedious saga of Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest. Yet the defining faults of the modern AAA game were already present in GTA V: market-segmented characters, increasingly arcade-like mechanics, indiscriminate cynicism and an online mode capable of keeping the player indefinitely engaged and spending.

Jeremy Clarkson once suggested that the problems of British Leyland could be understood through a single car: the Triumph Stag. It was handsome, ambitious and immensely desirable. It was also riddled with faults that revealed something about the institution that had produced it. Grand Theft Auto V is Rockstar’s (and by extension the Video Game industry’s) Triumph Stag.

Like the Stag, it was technically extraordinary. Like the Stag, it was lavishly praised and, in many respects, the most impressive product its manufacturer had ever produced. But Like the Stag it was also a product of compromises. It’s very strengths concealed the institutional weaknesses that would later become impossible to ignore.

Going back now to the series from GTA III through to GTA IV is revealing. The older games feel like products of enthusiasm rather than focus groups. From Vice City onwards, the protagonists came properly into their own. Tommy Vercetti and CJ were not simply interchangeable vehicles for missions: they gave their cities a point of view.

Even apparently silly mechanics contributed to this. In San Andreas CJ could become fat or thin. He could exercise, change his clothes, alter his haircut and gradually acquire property and status. None of these systems was especially sophisticated by modern standards, but together they created something many technically superior games lack: the feeling that the player was inhabiting a life rather than merely moving an avatar between mission markers.

This immersion extended to the radio stations in car. Vice City’s public-radio programme Pressing Issues, hosted by Maurice Chavez, is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. It is politically balanced without lapsing into bland “both sides” comedy, insightful without becoming preachy, and patient enough to let its characters expose themselves.

In many ways it resembled early South Park: irreverent towards everyone, but observant enough to understand the beliefs and hypocrisies it is mocking. Congressman Alex Shrub is not merely “a stupid politician”. He is a specific type of dynastic, family-values fraud. Chavez imagines himself the enlightened and impartial moderator, but gradually reveals himself to be as vain, cowardly and self-important as his guests.

The radio was not simply something to fill the silence between missions. It made Vice City feel as though it possessed politicians, clerics, cranks, campaigners and a media class carrying on beyond the edge of the map. The jokes were allowed to develop over several minutes rather than being shouted at the player from a billboard.

GTA V was the point at which Rockstar’s old irreverence, rooted in its origins as the Dundee studio DMA Design, began to harden into corporate cynicism. The first canary in the coal mine was the decision to replace a single protagonist with three.

Rockstar had reached a fork in the road. Vice City had given it Tommy Vercetti, an Italian-American gangster moving through a world of mobsters, cocaine and Scarface. San Andreas had given it CJ, the young man returning to a fractured black neighbourhood in a story heavily indebted to films such as Boyz n the Hood. Both characters had proved enormously popular, but they represented very different versions of Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar could not plausibly merge them into one character.

GTA IV had itself also been criticised for moving too far in the opposite direction. Niko Bellic was the series’ most fully realised protagonist: an immigrant and former soldier whose experiences of war, betrayal and displacement shaped his view of Liberty City. But this made the game more personal and narratively restrictive than its predecessors. Some players missed the freedom, colour and absurdity of San Andreas. The city belonged unmistakably to Niko’s story, but that also meant there was less room for the player to invent a character of his own.

Rather than choose, Rockstar did not: it created three characters instead.

Michael supplied the ‘I am too old for this shit’ robber in the midst of an existential crisis, trapped in an unhappy marriage and attending therapy. By 2013, the premise of the middle-aged gangster on the psychiatrist’s couch was already exhausted. The Sopranos had ended six years earlier, and Robert De Niro had played the idea for laughs in Analyze This over a decade previously. In any case, Michael possessed neither Tony’s moral complexity nor Analyze This’ writing.

Franklin supplied the San Andreas CJ stand-in: a young black kid from the ghetto who wants to escape South Los Santos gang life. Michael is supposed to become his mentor, but their relationship never develops much beyond a plot armoured quid pro quo between two men. Franklin begins vaguely dissatisfied and ends rich. He escapes South Los Santos without the game ever making us feel what he has lost, betrayed or overcome by doing so. Rockstar retained visual shorthand of CJ while removing the family, community and emotional progression that had made him memorable.

Trevor was the third (and worst) solution: the player’s id made flesh. He existed to explain the behaviour that had always sat awkwardly between Rockstar’s increasingly cinematic narrative arcs. Why would a protagonist suddenly murder dozens of policemen, steal a fighter jet or drive through the desert in his underwear? Because Trevor was canonically insane. In Trevor, the Flanderisation of GTA was probably at its least subtle: the jump-the-shark moment when the game started acting more like an arcade-style experience than something attempting to tell anything like a story.

The satire also became crueller, more telegraphed, more cynical and more leaden. In the earlier games, much of the comedy was tucked away at the edges of the world, like Easter eggs (probably because they were). In GTA IV, the player could sit at an internet café and browse Krapea, a Swedish furniture company loosely based on IKEA, whose website was full of jokes about Scandinavian melancholy and perpetual darkness. The radio programmes rewarded being listened to in their entirety. Their jokes developed gradually, through characters, arguments and absurd little details that the player had to discover.

By GTA V, the satire had become dumb, loud and indiscriminate: social media makes people stupid. Los Angeles is vacuous. The rich are greedy, the poor are resentful, politicians are frauds and consumers are morons. These are not exactly dangerous insights. The game is gauche, vulgar and frequently mean spirited, yet strangely safe-horny. It performs transgression while offering little more controversial than the observation that modernity is shallow (What a Theory!). It recalls the exhausted comedy of Ted or late-stage Family Guy, but without even the warmth of the former’s central friendship or Seth MacFarlane’s evident affection for music-hall and old Hollywood.

Earlier GTA games satirised political types and social attitudes, and they did so subtly. GTA V seemed to regard contempt as an end. It did not merely mock the society it depicted; it gave the impression that its writers disliked the characters, the city and, eventually, and perhaps not surprisingly, the player.

The most evident example of this was Michael’s son, Jimmy. He is funny in short bursts: a lazy, permanently online pothead who lives off his father while resenting him, speaks in internet sociolect and spends most of his life playing video games. But the joke has an unpleasant aftertaste. There is something faintly sub-Haneke about it, although Rockstar’s device is more meta than a straightforward breaking of the fourth wall. In the Horror Funny Games, Michael Haneke directly implicates the viewer in the violence he has chosen to consume, reminding him that he is free to leave the cinema but continues watching because he wants to see what happens next. Jimmy performs a much cruder version of the same accusation. He is a grotesque reflection of the player: overweight, permanently online, weed addled, shouting at strangers and expecting electronic entertainment to provide endless stimulation.

Rockstar appears to be telling its audience to put down the controller and “touch grass”, advice with which many mothers would agree. But unlike Haneke, it does not truly want the audience to withdraw. It wants the player to remain seated for hundreds of hours and, through GTA Online, to continue spending. Haneke uses self-reference to challenge the audience’s appetite; Rockstar uses it to sneer at the consumer while cultivating and monetising precisely the behaviour it mocks.

And GTA Online *was* the natural endpoint of all. It was not Rockstar’s first experiment with multiplayer. GTA IV had already offered races, deathmatches, etc missions and the ability to roam Liberty City with other players. What changed was the importance of the online game relative to everything around it. GTA Online quickly became the largest contributor to Take-Two’s digitally delivered revenue. By the following financial year, GTA V and GTA Online were among the company’s largest overall revenue sources, while income from recurrent consumer spending continued to rise.

The commercial lesson was irresistible. Why bother spending years constructing a finite story, complete with characters, dialogue and an ending, when the same map could support an indefinite procession of races, robberies, weapons, aircraft, costumes and increasingly absurd cars essentially a giant criminal theme park? Why bother completing a narrative arc when a reskinned vehicle can be sold indefinitely?

And that is how we ended up here: a physical edition with an empty box – the final act of meta irony – Rockstar’s last joke. This matters because video games are not merely products, At their best, they are an art form: a means of entering another world with the same imaginative freedom offered by a novel, a comic book or a child arranging toys across the floor. Thousands of developers still slave away to create something strange, beautiful and genuinely absorbing. They build cities, histories, characters and systems in which the player can lose himself and, for a time, make something of his own.

The tragedy is not that games have ceased to be art. It is that the people running the industry know perfectly well that they are art, and are determined to squeeze every last drop of creativity, affection and imagination from them before selling the empty box back to us.