How Video Games Changed the World Page #11

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But unlike cinema,

most of the stories told

within the world of GTA

are ones the player

effectively writes themselves

using the freedom

of their own actions.

Don't be no wise-ass punk.

Now give me that!

The other day I stole a car,

I'm shooting someone in the head

and my wife was shouting

shoot him again, shoot him again.

Now, we are two very peaceable

cat-loving ladies from Glasgow.

I think I can rationalise it because

I know it's not real, it's not real.

Yes, and if rib-tickling

viral videos are anything to go by,

GTA's world of fantasy indulgence

even seems to appeal

to older players,

especially those with an axe to

grind against energy companies.

You take that.

Hello, what do you do for a living?

Work for British Gas, do you?

You wanker.

I'll give you put my bills up.

Bastard bank! You take that.

You won't put them up no more.

Bang! One for you and one for you!

For some reason,

this level of anarchic freedom

seems to upset people.

Parents, listen up because here's

what you need to know tonight.

In Grand Theft Auto, your son

or your husband or your boyfriend

or whoever can hire a prostitute,

have sex with her

and then beat her to death

with a baseball bat.

GTA is the gift that

keeps on giving for tabloids.

I mean, Parliament debates it,

there are motions tabled

in the House of Commons on it,

there are endless commentators

who judge it to be something

linked to the devil.

If you're a parent and you allow

your son or daughter to watch this,

even if they are beyond 18 years old,

you're a lousy parent, in my opinion.

It is the definitive

moral panic game.

Please don't make me ruin all the great work

your plastic surgeons have been doing.

Grand Theft Auto is pretty much the

Frankie Boyle of the gaming world, really.

It's controversial,

Scottish, nihilistic,

hard to defend in the Guardian

and to what end?

Well, because it just wants to

make you laugh, of course.

Yeah, shut it, pal.

You'll leave here with an a**hole

like a yawning hippo's mouth.

It is interesting being a Brit

living in the United States.

People outside of America

tend to look at the American world

from the outside

a little more cynically.

We look at American culture

and American values with a little

bit more cynicism than

people inside America society do.

You have to be on the outside

to hold up a mirror

and that may be the reason GTA has

been fairly successful as a piece of satire.

Again, I think the satire,

the commentary in GTA,

is often very crass.

I think they miss the target

as often as they hit it but again,

the fact that they are trying

goes beyond a lot of what

a lot of triple-A big budget video

games ever try to do.

It's a giant cartoon, Grand Theft

Auto, and it's not exactly a subtle

representation of anything

but then it is not meant to be.

If you want a subtle representation

of something else,

read a lovely book by Jane Austen.

Grand Theft Auto is all about

causing mayhem and not giving

a fig about the consequences

but increasingly some games

are prompting players to consider

the repercussions of their actions.

And they do it

with surprising grace.

Shadow Of The Colossus was a really

fascinating game in a lot of ways.

It was a really meditative game.

You played a character who lived

in a fantasy world, whose mission was

to rescue a princess which is

a very basic video game set-up.

Your job in the game is to bring

down these huge creatures.

It's like seven huge boss battles

where the bosses

are not only monsters

but so big that they are

almost a landscape in themselves

and gradually as the game goes on,

your feelings as you bring down

these monsters

become more and more complicated.

Because every time you killed one

of these creatures, you realise you

just killed something magnificent,

something larger-than-life.

This beautiful majestic animal

and you just slaughtered it

for some unknown reason.

And every time you did one of those

things your character design

slowly morphed

and became darker and darker

and you realise

you are the villain of this world.

Shadow Of The Colossus

was significant

because it helped forge

a new way of looking at games,

one in which the player could no

longer be certain they were the hero.

It also influenced recent indie

titles like Papers, Please

which, despite its basic appearance,

is a complex game that causes

the player increasing discomfort.

Papers, Please is a game

where you are a customs officer

working on a fictional border

of a made-up country

and you have to check

everyone's paperwork

to see whether or not

they can come into the country.

The mechanics is, like, someone

approaches kind of the checkpoint

and hands you their papers and they

might ask you to let them in,

they have family starving inside or

they're trying to bring something to them

but your job is just to check

whether their paper is forged,

do they have all their papers

and whether to allow them

to get in or reject them.

You quickly realise

you've got to be a bit evil.

If you do not make the quota every day

for stamping enough people through,

you don't get enough money

to feed your wife and kids.

And it's the sort of game

where you play it

and you realise why people

do bad things.

It puts you into a position where you

slide and you go, "All right, well,

"just one person," and before you

know it, you are completely corrupt.

And yet you never really

noticed it happening.

Through those mechanics you feel a

feeling that is so unique to gaming.

You feel guilt.

And a movie

can't make you feel guilty,

a book can't make you feel guilty

but here's, like,

I'm making an action

and somebody can curse me

because of it and I feel guilty and

it's kind of brilliant in that way.

Games excel at making you

stand in other people's shoes.

Not just the shoes of corrupt

Eastern European officials

but creatures so phantasmagorical,

so beyond our imaginations

they don't even need shoes.

Imagine that. You can't!

Something happened in the mid-2000s

with the rise of what's called

the massively multiplayer game

and this was the point

in which the line between games and

reality started to get quite blurred.

My wife got super into it

and so did my son and what was nice

in actual fact

was it became quite a nice mother

and son thing to do together.

It was very interesting, you know,

they would go on raids together.

You know, where else can a woman,

a grown woman who's mothered

several children

and written several hit movies,

go out with her son,

skin some animals, kill a troll, OK,

win some gold

and still see a lovely bit of scenery in

a lovely new mythical city? Nowhere.

The problem with a game this

seductive is it can also be quite addictive.

Regularly,

I would play for 14 hours straight.

When I would be raiding.

I would do a couple of raids a day

and then I'd have to do upkeep

in between the raids.

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