A massive thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. The first 1000 of my subscribers
to click the link in the description will get a two month free trial of premium membership
so you can explore your creativity. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve had
2013 games on the mind a lot lately; such a seemingly important year for the medium
as it was with several significant, cinematic AAA releases proving that games are just like
any other artform… or something. And, on some level, it would seem like time has borne
out 2013’s importance—in particular, GTAV’s continued success is beyond anyone’s wildest
imaginations. It’s not just one of the biggest games ever, it’s one of the biggest entertainment
products, period; its absolute cultural dominance perfectly highlighted by the fact it opened
up the PS5 reveal—in Sony’s own words, this now seven-year-old title is the Future
of Gaming. It’s important to remember though, that
GTAV achieved a great deal of this success before its monumental online mode was introduced.
Rockstar had built up a pedigree by 2013 of celebrating the excess of their open worlds,
by packing them with these truly massive stories guiding you through it; sparing no expense
bringing in top tier Hollywood talent to flesh them out, with GTAV set to be the most ambitious
of the bunch. And yet, while I still enjoy diving into that world every so often to mess
around, I’m not convinced GTAV’s narrative really makes good on that potential. Like
other GTA games it is full of searing satire and jokes but to me V in particular stands
out for just how… messy and inconsistent it is. Things constantly just happen for seemingly
no reason, culminating in a confused plot with a bunch of pretty nothingy characters
and one of the least satisfying endings I’ve ever seen in a game.
But I’m not here to tell you how shocked and apalled I am that the story of this seven-year-old
goofy crime game isn’t a masterpiece or whatever; rather that the reasons behind that
brought up some thoughts about how we criticise games more generally—how terms and problems
a lot of us have come to think of as pretty cut and dry are more nuanced than we might
think. Because it all comes down to my belief that a lot of the narrative issues and inconsistencies
on show here are caused or solidified by the game’s focus on one of its most recognisable
elements; the thing that, from a distance, seemed like it was specifically designed to
solve the criticisms people laid at the feet of other GTA stories, inadvetantly creating
a whole bunch more issues in the process. The thing I’m talking about, and I know
this is controversial but bear with me, is the character of Trevor Philips.
And to explain why that is, we have to go back to the GTA of old for a minute. Picture
the scene—the year is 2008. You’re stepping off a boat after a long journey to something
resembling New York, in pursuit of the American Dream; all while, however, your personal demons
eat away at you. You have to grapple with your urges to find those who sold you out,
weighing up vengeance and falling into your old ways, against turning your back on the
past and living a more peaceful life. And then you fire a rocket launcher at some civilians
before hijacking a car without thinking and racing along the pavement.
Such is the story of Niko Bellic in GTA4; what many people have described as, and I
can’t believe I’m going to bring this up, a textbook case of “ludonarrative dissonance”—a
term utilised far and wide since its coinage in 2007 to describe a situation in which the
story the game is telling conflicts with the mechanics you engage with. It’s Bioshock’s
gameplay promoting objectivist self-interest while its story forces you to assist Atlas.
And as it turns out, it’s Niko’s more sombre struggle to find peace clashing with
the violent, off-the-wall, player-driven rampages that make GTA the series it is. If you’ve
engaged with game criticism in a meaningful way in the last several years, you’re likely
sick to death of this term by now—believe me, I am too.
But my problem with the notion of ludonarrative dissonance has less to do with people trying
to sound smart by using the big words (it’s OK, I remember having my mind blown by this
concept when I first heard it too), and more to do with its application—its use as a
kind of “gotcha” tool whereby almost any game that has seemingly conflicting narrative
and mechanics, will undoubtedly have people saying “It’s ludonarrative dissonance!
This character is violent but you tried to make them likable! That means the game is
bad!” Because, whether deliberate or not, Rockstar
ended up giving us the answer to this quote-unquote “problem” in the form of Trevor Philips.
Described by one Adam Sessler as the greatest character in all of crime fiction, and forming
one part of the game’s trio of playable characters, Trevor is defined by his brutally
violent psychopathy, his penchant for flying off the handle at any given moment and his
utter disregard for any form of consequences. He pays less than zero heed to any societal
norms, he spits in the face of taboo—the game goes as far as to insinuate that he may
be a cannibal. In other words, and in stark contrast to the more understated Niko Bellic,
Trevor embodies exactly the way you’d imagine most typical players approach a GTA title;
making the most of their freedom relative to other games as they ditch the main plot
to go on a kill-crazy rampage at the drop of a hat. Hooray, problem solved! We no longer
have the issue of story not lining up with gameplay, because we have a character exactly
as unhinged as the player! What’s more, in the game’s obvious pastiche
of Heat, Trevor fits remarkably well into the role of Waingro—the weird serial killer
dude and the spectre hanging over both Hanna and McCauley for different reasons; so creepy
because there is no reading him, no predicting what he’ll do next. But, with all of that
in mind, there’s a reason Waingro is the antagonist of Heat. In terms of the drama
on screen, he’s the chaotic force in the background that makes things unnecessarily
difficult for everyone involved—he’s not the guy you root for.
And I’m not questioning this decision on Rockstar’s part from a likability perspective—a
character doesn’t need to be likable to be compelling—but by placing such a inherently
uncontrollable character at the centre of your narrative, that narrative itself becomes
harder to control. How do you in any way ground a story that hinges on a character whose loose
motivations can shift entirely in a matter of seconds?
The answer, according to GTAV, is that you don’t. The inconsistency fundamental to
Trevor’s character seems to bear itself out in the trajectory of the wider plot; where
you initially have a simple story of the former bank thief unsatisfied with life on the straight
and narrow suddenly finding himself living vicariously through his attentive pupil, only
for Trevor to show up and things turn into Michael pursuing a career as a film producer,
a bunch of “one last missions” for the FIB to keep things under wraps and at least
one of the few story heists the game has to offer going nowhere, thanks to Trevor not
thinking it through. What’s more, Trevor finds out Michael has been lying about their
dead friend Brad the whole time and doesn’t kill him immediately for some reason, but
also wants him dead, but then saves him but only because he wants to be the one to kill
him, but then he doesn’t do that, but he also still hates Michael I guess… it’s
wild. There are so many moments like this in Trevor’s
story where I thought to myself “why are you brutally slaughtering these people that
have done nothing, but not these people that have consistently and aggressively wronged
you and represent everything you hate about the world?” It’s not a question of morality,
but rather dramatic consistency, whether a character that unhinged makes sense as the
one we’re meant to control for, ostensibly, a third of this huge game; because like I
say, Trevor does not care one jot about consequences. This is exemplified when the actual last job
the crew pull is rendered wholly anticlimactic, seeing as the game now has all these loose
ends the writers forgot about I guess, and subsequently (depending on what ending you
choose) have you picking them all off in one fell swoop anyway. I, as the player, thought
about doing that before all this; I imagined Trevor would too… so why didn’t he? By
solving the supposed problem of dissonance in one game, by creating a character more
in line with player actions, the character of Trevor Philips ends up creating all these
other dramatic problems for the writers. And I say “supposed” because, you know
what? After all this, revisiting GTA4… its story is fine. Turns out it’s not impossible
to suspend your disbelief while playing an open world crime game; that it doesn’t really
matter all that much that Niko’s story is one of personal redemption and coming to terms
with his past while you also control him jumping off of buildings onto the unsuspecting plebs
below. Arguably the series’ trademark satire actually ends up working better with Niko
often being framed as the understated straight man in these comedic pairings—it allows
the complete and utter absurdity of this world and its denizens to happen to him, highlighting
how ridiculous and hypocritical it all is from a neutral perspective (at least in the
cutscenes); and this is an absurdity that becomes somewhat muted when the person you
control consistently outweirds all these other characters and the world in which they live.
OK, haha, Facebook is funny, but this guy’s over here eating people.
Don’t get me wrong here. I think that making your mechanics thematically consistent with
your story is perhaps the thing that defines games as their own medium; it can make for
some of the most transcendent experiences I think you can have with art. That said,
what becomes clear with cases like Grand Theft Auto is that ludonarrative dissonance is not
the end of the critical conversation as it can sometimes seem. Hell, take a series like
Yakuza—with its violent clashing of an often deeply melodramatic story and bicycle slamming
mayhem creating a world in which more tender, human moments can be as explosive and fun
as any violence you inflict. If this series has taught us anything, it’s that disonnance
can sometimes be a good thing. And again, I am not saying that Trevor Philips
was somehow deliberately envisioned by Rockstar to be a remedy to the supposed disonnance
of Niko Bellic’s journey, or that I’m even particularly bothered about this seven
years after the fact. I’m just saying that the contrast between the two games provides
an intriguing case study of a concept that has become such a hallmark of games criticism
over the years; that, if the solution to your problem is Trevor Philips, then maybe some
tonal inconsistencies here and there are nowhere near as much of a problem as we might have
once thought. Speaking of the solution to all your problems,
let me take a moment to thank the sponsor of today’s video, Skillshare! Skillshare
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of premium membership, so there’s no risk to checking it out for yourself, and you’ll
really be helping the channel in the process. Thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this
video, and I hope you all enjoyed this piece on Grand Theft Auto!
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Thank you very much for watching, stay safe and I will see you all next time.