Highly Questionable – Grand Theft Art-o

The Grand Theft Auto series has become something of a cause célèbre in all the pretentious posturing over whether videogames are (or at least, are capable of being) art. In truth, it’s a debate that’s as irrelevant as it is interminable. When a horse called Justin can become a commercially successful artist (Google it), surely the more pertinent question is whether being stablemates with an equine Tracey Emin is really something that’s worth aspiring to?

For the time being, let’s make do with the compromise that Grand Theft Auto V is, even if not art, undeniably state of the art. Its ambitions, both narratively and geographically, are as prodigious as its title suggests. A story of epic illegality trisected between three audacious crime addicts, set in an open world allegedly bigger than those of GTA IV, Red Dead Redemption, and GTA: San Andreas combined. A re-imagined slice of Southern California bathed in sun, sin, and trademark Houser brothers’ brand satire.

From the city of Los Santos, GTA V’s glittering, grimy codpiece, out over the avarice of the Vinewood Hills and on to inbred backwater towns where copulation with a close relative isn’t so much an unrepeatable error of judgement as an Olympic sport, landscapes have been created with almost Stephen Wiltshire levels of intricacy. Even in the game’s vast uninhabited expanses, where the indomitable Mount Chiliad stands watch over stately forests, sun-baked deserts, and the rolling waves of teeming seas, environments have been drawn with a National Geographic reverence for nature; an Ansel Adams eye for capturing the rugged beauty of the wilderness.

It’s a land that’s been sculpted with immense diversity and meticulous attention to detail using now archaic PS3 and Xbox 360 hardware. In relative terms, that’s about the equivalent of John Constable knocking up The Hay Wain using a stick and a cave wall. (And let’s not forget, no matter what any art historian insists, that The Hay Wain clearly depicts a cart-jacking gone wrong. A couple of country bumpkin homeboys, probably high on horse manure dust, who’ve lost control of their whip in a hot pursuit with the local five-o and binned their sweet ride into a river, instantly earning them a five truncheon wanted level.)

Franklin is such a stereotype it’s like he’s been created by the Rodney King Memorial Racial Profiling Unit.

As far as characters go, Rockstar’s subjects in GTA V have also been dragged straight off of videogaming’s bleeding edge. The game’s indigenous population are naturalistically animated, theatrically voiced, and possibly the most diverse cast of cartoonishly desperate and depraved characters ever created. What the developers have delivered is something that comes within a few millimetre-perfect polygons of an unofficial Pixar penal colony.

Together, Rockstar’s trio of protagonists – Michael, an old school bank robber turned shrink-bothering stool pigeon, Franklin, an upwardly mobile gang-banger who’s a cool head in a set of hot wheels, and Trevor, everyone’s favourite new post-modern psychopath – form an unholy trinity of father, surrogate son, and mentally unstable step-uncle perfectly equipped for turning GTA V’s alternate City of Angels into a crime heaven.

Of the three, Trevor is instantly the most arresting and important. A step forwards for the medium, he’s the type of non compos mentis character who’d carry out the acts you perpetrate, rather than the likes of his GTA companions and the Nathan Drakes of the world who’ve become videogaming’s chummy face of sociopathy. There were times after completing some of Trevor’s more exuberant activities that I felt like I should go and hand myself in at my local police station. In all my years of playing, he’s the controllable character I actually felt I had least control over – and I’ve played Kung Fu Rider.

Despite this, after the unsettling brutality of his introductory cut-scene, Rockstar has Trevor meandering back and forth across the schizophrenia spectrum with much method acting, but little actual method to his madness. And his two accomplices fare no better. Early on in the game’s story Michael himself remarks that he’s a cliché, while Franklin is such a stereotype it’s like he’s been created by the Rodney King Memorial Racial Profiling Unit. Grand Theft Auto was doing the whole Byronic hero thing before the American entertainment industry’s current anti-hero infatuation began, yet GTA V struggles to make its roguish champions anything more than amalgams of their obvious inspirations.

Of course, what mustn’t be overlooked here is that we’re talking about multiple playable characters who you can switch back and forth between freely. A quick couple of button taps, and the camera withdraws to the skies before descending, physically and morally, into the life of your unrepentant recidivist of choice. It’s a first for the series and a majestically handled new mechanic, quick, visually slick, and, most importantly, not only preserves player immersion, but enhances it.

With such an ambitious new centrepiece in place, it’s somewhat surprising that, control improvements aside, the rest of GTA V feels so traditional. Both the story and gameplay structure are resolutely formulaic. And while the extravagant heist missions around which much of the narrative revolves make for immensely entertaining and intricate action crescendos, they’re more elaborations than innovations on the standard series fare.

Even the satire, as sharp, scattershot, and scathing as it continues to be, seems like it’s starting to go a little stale around the edges. Especially when the game’s mockery of the most grotesque aspects of modern day culture is undermined by the way GTA continues to rely on, and revel so lustfully in, society’s more serious ambivalence and addiction to violence with only an occasional hint of self-awareness. But then again, GTA V remains the only game in which you can rob a liquor store, run a triathlon, and ride in a Learjet all in the same afternoon.

Derivative but pioneering, shallow but complex, conservative but progressive, superficial but insightful. A state of the art game that’s also a pretty decent encapsulation of the current state of the videogaming art. But is it art? Well, in the second of his recent Reith Lectures, Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry commented that the modern equivalent of the Sistine Chapel was probably being created in some digital lab by programmers, animators and games designers. Judging by his own irreverence for the establishment, perhaps Grand Theft Auto V was exactly the kind of thing he had in mind.

That said, in all my time in the game, about the only thing I didn’t come across was a painting horse. So GTA V, art? Nah, I guess not.

Thanks so much for reading. Hope to see you again soon.