GTA IV

“It's a second life, it's a different life from what you lead. You get the stress of life, so you just take it out on the game. I'm not hurting no-one.”

A game which has had a massive effect on our society, multi-tiered, postmodern self-awareness of today's art-loving gamer, yes it is Grand Theft Auto.

This game is seen to be a cultural and marketing event, cultural, because of the number of people around the world who care about it and marketing because it’s creators Rockstar who have always been brilliant at marketing.

Parody is used a huge amount in this video game. GTAIV is set in ‘Liberty City’ also as we know it ‘New York’, the statue of liberty is a very popular sculpture, for Rockstar Games they have turned it into a pastiche or a parody of what we think is a masterpiece. In the game the statue of liberty is holding a coffee mug instead of the famous flame. Could they be showing us the explosion of Starbucks Coffee taking over the world or is it just something for the gamers to find funny?

This game definitely goes under Strinati’s five, ‘An emphasis on style at the expense of substance and content’. As you know you drive around manically in any type of car you want, the amount of radio stations that there are in the cars is unbelievable, it just shows how much work goes into this game. They use music from reality into their game that shows a massive intertextual influence but also Baudrillard sense of ‘Hyperreality’, what is real and what is not. Grand Theft Auto can be seen as a second life. The setting is enormous, to every single detail there is always something that your character can do.

Confusions over space and time are a huge importance in GTA, the cheats that people use in this game to complete the game quicker, people find it annoying that you have to drive from one part of the island to another, so they use cheats to have a helicopter suddenly appear in front of you instead. It just shows how we have changed into a postmodern society, how we have become impatient in our surroundings and finding anything possible to shorten our time to get to one place to another.

Bricolage is used in this game, there is a narrative but it is jumbled. You do not follow a certain story, there are different missions with different people and it is you choice whether you want to do the missions now or decide to go and run over all the pedestrians on the ‘sidewalk’. There is no time limit in completing the game, you have the choice in what you want to do. This can be seen as postmodern as people have their own choice, this game has no boundary’s!

Grand Theft Auto is ‘art’! It breaks down the distinction between high and popular art, with it’s detail packed pop culture pastiche and ghettoized by it’s allegiance to, the geeky area of sci-fi and fantasy. With its globalization of success it is merging into reality with extreme shows which have gone one step further with Moscow’s TV show ‘Interception’ – that has members of the public trying to steal a car without being arrested. If they are not caught they keep the car.

Another postmodern aspect is narrowcasting, it is targeted for mainly males, the game is an alpha male simulator for media-addled introverts and so profoundly of it’s time. It is filled with ‘pornoviolence’ which attracts the males attention and for some it has been thought that it is one of GTA’s main appeals.

Futhermore Grand Theft Auto has the sense of escapism. People get to control these characters and make them do whatever they want, they can escape from reality and relieve their stress, enter a new world ‘Get some car’s, get some gels, get all the fings every man would want in life’.

It’s entertainment and as long as any media text is entertaining they know straight away that it is going to be a big hit. So the question is will there ever be a line? Or will creators keep making media texts to keep us entertained?

Personally I think they will and the influences of GTA will have a massive effect in our society.