While the GTA IV load screen appeared on my television screen, my friend chopped up a dozen lines, reminded me of basic snorting protocol and handed me the straw. I hesitated before taking the tiny hollow sceptre, but not for too long. Know this: I was not someone whose life had been marked by the meticulous collection of bad habits. I chewed tobacco, regularly drank about 10 Diet Cokes a day, and liked marijuana. Beyond that, my greatest vice was probably reading poetry for pleasure. The coke sailed up my nasal passage, leaving behind the delicious smell of a hot leather car seat on the way back from the beach. My previous coke experience had made feeling good an emergency, but this was something else, softer and almost relaxing. This coke, my friend told me, had not been "stepped on" with any amphetamine, and I pretended to know what that meant. I felt as intensely focused as a diamond-cutting laser; Grand Theft Auto IV was ready to go. My friend and I played it for the next 30 hours straight.
Many children who want to believe their tastes are adult will bravely try coffee, find it to be undeniably awful, but recognise something that could one day, conceivably, be enjoyed. Once our tastes as adults are fully developed, it is easy to forget the effort that went into them. Adult taste can be demanding work – so hard, in fact, that some of us, when we become adults, selectively take up a few childish things, as though in defeated acknowledgment that adult taste, with its many bewilderments, is frequently more trouble than it is worth. Few games have more to tell us about this adult retreat into childishness than the Grand Theft Auto series.
In GTA IV you are Niko Bellic, a young immigrant with an ambiguous past. We know he is probably a Serb. We know he fought in the Balkans war. We know he was party to a war-crime atrocity and victim of a double-cross that led to the slaughter of all but three members of his paramilitary unit. We know he has taken life outside of war and it is strongly suggested that he once dabbled in human trafficking. "I did some dumb things and got involved with some idiots," Niko says, early in the game, to his friend Hassan. "We all do dumb things," Hassan replies. "That's what makes us human." The camera closes on Niko as he thinks about this, and for a moment his face becomes as quietly expressive as that of a living actor. "Could be," he says.
Niko has come to Liberty City (the GTA world's run at New York City) at the invitation of his prevaricating cousin, Roman. He wants to start over, leave behind the death and madness of his troubled past, and bathe in the comfort and safety of America. Niko's plan does not go well. Soon enough he is working as a thief and killer. Just as Lolita, as Nabokov piquantly notes in his afterword, was variously read as "old Europe debauching young America" or "young America debauching old Europe", GTA IV leaves itself interpretatively open as to whether Niko is corrupted by America or whether he and his ilk (many of the most vicious characters whose paths Niko crosses are immigrants) are themselves bacterial agents of corruption. The earlier GTA games were less thematically ambitious. Tommy from Vice City is a cackling psychopath, and CJ from San Andreas merely rides the acquisitionist philosophy of hip-hop culture to terminal amorality. They are not characters you root for or even want, in moral terms, to succeed. You want them to succeed only in gameplay terms. The better they do, the more of the gameworld you see.
The stories in Vice City and San Andreas are pastiches of tired filmic genres: crime capers, ghetto dramas, police procedurals. The driving force of both games is the gamer's curiosity: What happens next? What is over here? What if I do this? They are, in this way, childlike and often very silly games, especially San Andreas, which lets you cover your body with ridiculous tattoos and even fly a jetpack. While the gameworlds and subject matter are adult – and under no circumstances should children be allowed near either game – the joy of the gameplay is allowing the vestiges of a repressed, tantrum-throwing, childlike self to run amok. Most games are about attacking a childlike world with an adult mind. The GTA games are the opposite, and one of the most maliciously entertaining mini-games in Vice City and San Andreas is a mayhem mode in which the only goal is to fuck up as much of the gameworld as possible in an allotted period of time.
Niko's real pathos derives not from the gimcrack story but how he looks and moves. Vice City and San Andreas were graphically astounding by the standards of their time, but their character models were woeful – even by the standards of their time. Niko, though, is just about perfect. Dressed in striped black track pants and a dirty windbreaker, Niko looked like the kind of guy one might see staring longingly at the entrance of a strip club in Zagreb, too poor to get in and too self-conscious to try to. When, early in the game, a foul-mouthed minor Russian mafioso named Vlad dismisses Niko as a "yokel", he is not wrong. Niko is a yokel, pathetically so. One of the first things you have to do as Niko is buy new clothes in a Broker (read: Brooklyn) neighbourhood called Hove Beach (read: Sheepshead Bay). The clothing store in question is Russian-owned, its wares fascinatingly ugly. And yet you know, somehow, that Niko, with his slightly less awful new clothes, feels as though he is moving up in the world. The fact that he is, only makes him more heartrending. The times I identified most with Niko were not during the game's frequent cut scenes, which drop bombs of "meaning" and "narrative importance" with nuclear delicacy, but rather when I watched him move through the world of Liberty City and projected on to him my own guesses as to what he was thinking and feeling.
What many without direct experience of the games do know is that they allow you to kill police officers. This is true. GTA games also allow you to kill everyone else. It is sometimes assumed that you somehow get points for killing police officers. Of course you do not get "points" for anything in GTA IV. You get money for completing missions, a number of which are, yes, monstrously violent. While the passersby and pedestrians you slay out of mission will occasionally drop money, it would be hard to argue that the game rewards you for indiscriminate slaughter. People never drop that much money, for one, and the best way to attract the attention of the police and begin a hair-raising transborough chase is to hurt an innocent person. As for the infamous cultural trope that in GTA you can hire a prostitute, pay her, kill her and take her money, this is also true. But you do not have to do this. The game certainly does not ask you to do this. Indeed, after being serviced by a prostitute, Niko will often say something like: "Strange. All that effort to feel this empty." Outside of the inarguably violent missions, it is not what GTA IV asks you to do that is so morally alarming. It is what it allows you to do.
There is no question, though, that GTA IV's violence can be extremely disturbing because it feels unprecedentedly distinct from how, say, films deal with violence. Think of the scene in GoodFellas in which Henry, Tommy, and Jimmy kick to death Billy Batts in Henry's restaurant. Afterwards they decide to put Batts's body in the trunk of Henry's car and bury it in the forest. Of course Batts is not yet dead and spends much of the ride to his place of interment weakly banging the trunk's interior. When Batts is discovered to be alive he is repeatedly, nightmarishly stabbed. The viewer of GoodFellas is implicated in the fate of Billy Batts in any number of ways. Most of us presumably feel closest to Henry, who has the least to do with the crime, but is absolutely an accomplice to it. Henry's point of view is our implied point of view. Thus we/Henry, unlike Tommy and Jimmy, retain our capacity for horror.
In GTA IV, Niko is charged with disposing of the bodies of two men whose deaths Niko is partially responsible for. You/Niko drive across Liberty City with these bodies in the trunk to a corrupt physician who plans to sell the organs on the black market. Here the horror of the situation is refracted in an entirely different manner, which allows the understanding that GTA IV is an engine of a far more intimate process of implication. While on his foul errand, Niko must cope with lifelike traffic, police harassment, red lights, pedestrians, and a poorly handling loan car. Literally thousands of in-game variables complicate what you are trying to do. The GoodFellas scene is an observed experience bound up in one's own moral perception. The GTA IV mission is a procedural event in which one's moral perception of the (admittedly much sillier) situation is scrambled by myriad other distractions. It turns narrative into an active experience, which film is simply unable to do in the same way. And it is moments like this that remind me why I love video games and what they give me that nothing else can.
"Cocaine," Robert Sabbag tells us in the smuggling classic Snowblind, "has no edge. It is strictly a motor drug. It does not alter your perception; it will not even wire you up like the amphetamines. No pictures, no time/space warping, no danger, no fun, no edge. Any individual serious about his chemicals – a heavy hitter – would sooner take 30 No-Doz [caffeine tablets]. Coke is to acid what jazz is to rock. You have to appreciate it. It does not come to you."
Cocaine has its reputation as aggression unleaded largely because many who are attracted to it are themselves aggressive personalities, the reasons for which are as cultural as they are financial. What cocaine does is italicise personality traits, not script new ones. In my case, cocaine did not heighten my aggression in the least. What it did, at least at first, was exaggerate my natural curiosity and need for emotional affection. While on cocaine I became as harmlessly ravenous as Cookie Monster.
This stage, lamentably and predictably, did not last long. A large portion of my last two months in Las Vegas was spent doing cocaine and playing video games – usually Grand Theft Auto IV. When I left Vegas, I thought I was leaving behind not only video games but cocaine. During the last walk I took through the city, in May 2008, I imagined the day's heat as the whoosh of a bullet that, through some oversight of fate, I had managed to dodge. (I was on cocaine at the time.) Even though one of the first things I did when I arrived in Tallinn was buy yet another Xbox 360, I had every intention to obey one of my few prime directives: rigorous adherence to all foreign drug laws. I had been in Tallinn for five months when, in a club, I found myself chatting with someone who was obviously lit. When I gently indicated my awareness of this person's altered state, the result was a magnanimous offer to share. Within no time at all I was back in my apartment, high on cocaine and firing up my Xbox 360. By the week's end, I had a new friend, a new telephone number and a reignited habit. I played through Grand Theft Auto IV again and again after that. The game was faster and more beautiful while I was on cocaine, and breaking laws seemed even more seductive. Niko and I were outlaws, alone as all outlaws are alone, but deludedly content with our freedom and our power.
Soon I was sleeping in my clothes. Soon my hair was stiff and fragrantly unclean. Soon I was doing lines before my Estonian class, staying up for days, curating prodigious nose bleeds and spontaneously vomiting from exhaustion. Soon my pillowcases bore rusty coins of nasal drippage. Soon the only thing I could smell was something like the inside of an empty bottle of prescription medicine. Soon my biweekly phone call to my cocaine dealer was a weekly phone call. Soon I was walking into the night, handing hundreds of dollars in cash to a Russian man whose name I did not even know, waiting in alleys for him to come back – which he always did, though I never fully expected him to – and retreating home, to my Xbox, to GTA IV, to the electrifying solitude of my mind at play in an anarchic digital world. Soon I began to wonder why the only thing I seemed to like to do while on cocaine was play video games. And soon I realised what video games have in common with cocaine: video games, you see, have no edge. You have to appreciate them. They do not come to you.
There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years, times when I think of it as an unsurpassable example of what games can do, and times when I think of it as misguided and a failure. No matter what I think about GTA IV, or however I am currently regarding it, my throat gets a little drier, my head a little heavier, and I know I am also thinking about cocaine.
Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude and make me feel good and bad in equal measure. The crucial difference is that I believe in what video games want to give me, while the bequest of cocaine is one I loathe. I do know that video games have enriched my life. Of that I have no doubt. They have also done damage to my life. Of that I have no doubt. I let this happen, of course; I even helped the process along. As for cocaine, it has been a long time since I last did it, but not as long as I would like.
What have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that pointed not toward but at something. Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.
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