What's in a game? (Or, how Grand Theft Auto IV reminded me yet again that everything's changing quick-like)
When it comes to hardcore gaming – online role playing games, World of Warcraft, intense first-person shooters, adventuring off into Nintendo Wii land with magic wands made “real” – I’m what they call a n00b. A newbie. I appreciate all of these activities intellectually, understand that they’re huge huge business nowadays, and love hearing people talk about their passion for them, but I simply strayed off the gamer’s path at some point during late childhood.
And I always figured that I’m so busy in other areas these days – reading, writing, interwebbing for work and play, getting outdoors and doing real life activities every now and again – that I could get away with not having all of these things (perhaps distractions, I thought, I’ll admit) in my life.
Which is certainly true. However, there was something about Grand Theft Auto IV that absolutely compelled me to go out over the weekend to both buy and Xbox 360 and GTA IV both.
And I’m absolutely delighted that I did. Within minutes of setting things up, I felt as close as is possible to driving around my old neighborhood in Queens without actually being there (and without the real world responsibility to do things like stop at stop lights and to take care to not run people over!). The game felt that “real.” The nearly endless boundaries of this gaming world, the interaction and personalities of the characters, the interlacing storylines, the mad grand size of it all is dizzying, quite frankly.
So this is all to say my perspective on the gaming world – as a web cultist and gaming n00b – is somewhat unique. Millions of people around the world are already hip to the gaming thing, of course. And GTA IV may simply be one of the better or even best products produced yet.
It reminded me how quickly things have changed and are changing. How entertainment and information gathering and collaboration are shifting from movie theaters and video arcades to the home. How treating music in anything other than digital form makes less and less sense. How buying and consuming and communicating from anywhere other than the home, the office, the palm (mobile), and online is making less and less sense in many ways.
We’re living in fascinating times.
And now, I have to get back to a fantastical car chase through the wildly and heart poundingly fictionalized streets of New York, er , Liberty City.
