1341: Life in Los Santos

I’m very impressed with Grand Theft Auto V. Much, much more than I was expecting to be — most notably for the fact that it’s actually the story keeping me interested.

Grand Theft Auto has undergone a gradual evolutionary process since its first installment. The first Grand Theft Auto was a fast-action arcade game — you had a score, lives, crazy bonuses and the fact you were driving around being an asshole was largely incidental. Grand Theft Auto II introduced a few additional mechanics, but was still largely a “game” rather than an immersive world and story.

Grand Theft Auto III is where things started to change. Transplanting the action from the top-down maps of earlier installments into a fully three-dimensional city, it was many folks’ first encounter with a “sandbox” game, in which you could do as you pleased. That “freedom” was something of an illusion, though; Grand Theft Auto III still had a very “game-like” progression whereby you couldn’t make it to the next “level” — the next of Liberty City’s three islands — until you had progressed far enough in the structured content. It worked well, though; by the time you finished a region, you knew it really well. That said, if you were booting up the game for the first time on, say, someone else’s console and you just wanted to get the great sports cars and cause havoc, there were arbitrary limitations in place.

Vice City took the basic structure of Grand Theft Auto III and removed those restrictions for the most part. The Miami-inspired setting was split between two islands that you could drive back and forth between at will, and there were plenty of things for you to do besides the story missions — though the story itself was interesting in a Scarface sort of way. This was taken to an extreme in San Andreas, which offered three cities and a whole host of countryside in between, with plenty of side things to do along the way, although the early part of the game did reinstate the arbitrary game-like restrictions on where you were “allowed” to go.

Grand Theft Auto IV was another turning point for the series. Although III onwards had had an actual narrative with a beginning, middle and end, IV placed the emphasis on the story rather than freeform chaos. You still had a lot of choice and freedom in how you went about beating the game, but real efforts had clearly been made to make the protagonist an interesting character. For some, however, this went against the grain of what they felt Grand Theft Auto “should” be about — particularly when you started getting regularly harassed on the phone by virtual in-game girlfriends and friends to go and hang out. I personally quite liked it — though not enough, I might add, to ever actually finish it.

And now we have Grand Theft Auto V, a game which is attracting as much cynicism as it is popularity and commercial success. And I’m a bit sad about the cynicism part, because Grand Theft Auto V is doing some clever things, is written well and is a remarkably effective piece of fiction — both from the perspective of its scripted narrative and in the building of its world that presents a skewed, twisted but eerily accurate view of our own society in 2013. At the same time, the open world chaos is still very much present and correct — it just doesn’t feel as “gamey” as it once did. And that’s good — it shows the series has evolved over time rather than stagnating, because it has.

Grand Theft Auto V has the most seamless transitions between freeform wandering around and scripted narrative that I’ve ever seen. There’s no loading breaks, no fade-outs with mission titles, no “letterboxing” — just one moment you’ll be walking around, the next you come across a couple of people talking, you walk up to them and you’re seamlessly into a cutscene.

Then there’s “the torture scene,” a scene that has caused a considerable amount of hand-wringing from people across the industry. (Spoilers ahead, obviously.)

In “the torture mission,” two of the game’s three protagonists become embroiled in a plot involving the in-game equivalent of the FBI. Having “rescued” a hostage from the CIA-equivalent, said hostage is then kidnapped by the FIB (sic) and dragged to an abandoned warehouse for interrogation. Michael, one of the protagonists, is sent out to find a person — supposedly a threat to national security — based on the information the hostage gives. Trevor, another of the protagonists, stays behind to administer torture and get the hostage to talk.

For the mission, your control flips back and forth between Trevor and Michael several times. As Michael, you have to use the information Trevor finds to locate and assassinate the right person; as Trevor, you have the option of using several different implements to administer torture to the hostage, and you have to actively participate in said torture by following on-screen prompts.

The scene is graphic, horrible, disturbing and unpleasant. Taken out of context, you’d be forgiven for thinking Rockstar had finally gone too far with this scene. Take it in context, meanwhile, and it’s entirely appropriate for this scene to be there. It makes sense, and it has something to say. The hostage starts talking almost immediately after the prospect of torture is on the table, and yet as the player we’re still forced to administer torture four times in total, reflecting the fact that both Trevor and Michael are very much under the control of the FIB at this point. Trevor, being a psychopath, takes a certain degree of pleasure from administering the torture but is still aware that not performing it would be worse for both him and the hostage. And when it’s all over and the FIB agents leave Trevor alone with the hostage to “deal with” him, Trevor instead cuts the hostage’s bonds, loads him into his car and drives him to the airport, telling him that his old life is over now and he needs to get as far away from Los Santos as possible.

“Torture is for the torturer,” Trevor says to the hostage on the drive. “And for the person giving orders to the torturer. Sometimes it’s for the torturee, but only if they’re paying well enough. It’s a terrible means of getting information.”

I had no idea of the latter part of the scene’s context from the articles that emerged shortly after the game’s release, and it’s important. It gives it meaning and a message — whether or not you think it’s succeeding in delivering that message is a matter of opinion, of course, but I think it was remarkably effective. One thing I am certain of, though; it’s certainly not in there just to court controversy. Like so many other things in Grand Theft Auto V, it’s a brutal and biting attack on some of the things about modern culture that we might not want to acknowledge or admit.

Should we have been able to skip it? Should it have come with warnings? Those are questions I can’t answer, I’m afraid, but for me, some of the impact of that particular part of the story would have been lost if that scene was not present.

And I’ll be honest, I never expected to be sitting here talking about the impact a Grand Theft Auto’s story had on me, which is just one of many signs of how far the series has come.