Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, June 26, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Straight Outta Compton meets Space Invaders! As those of you who've followed my blogging for a while, you remember I can get far too overly optimistic about the potential of certain video games. (The Jan. 29, 2002 entry which was only--hey!--two years ago! I would've sworn it was at least five...) Hell, even I remember, although apparently I can't get the timeframe right.So I'm trepidatious to express any enthusiasm whatsoever about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It's a sucker's bet. And yet, when it was announced that GTA: San Andreas was going to be about gang-bangers and correspond to the early '90s Compton era in roughly the same way that GTA: Vice City did to '80s Miami, I had a moment of hope. I actually thought: "oh my god, this is Rockstar's chance to actually make a socially relevant videogame." Maybe it's just the console videogames that I play but, generally, there are not a lot of African-American protagonists in them (the exceptions I can think of are Def Jam Vendetta, wherein famous rappers punch people out, and sports games, which i don't play, which mainly feature real African-American atheletes as the stars). I was actually giddy when Champions of Norrath made the "erudite wizard" characters black (expect this entry to be filled with lots of humorous p.c.-inspired pratfalls like this one, where I spent three long minutes agonizing on whether to use the term "African-American" since, thanks to the fantasy setting, the characters are neither "African" nor "American."). I mean, not only were they playable characters, they were actually "erudite?" I thought this was pretty great. So GTA: SA is going to be, out of the gate, one of the biggest sellers of the year--the GTA license is a 900 pound gorilla in the world of gaming. The fact that it will have an african-american protagonist has the potential for great good--or great evil. Consider the first bit of flavor text released by Rockstar: Five years ago Carl Johnson escaped from the pressures of life in Los Santos, San Andreas... a city tearing itself apart with gang trouble, drugs and corruption. Where filmstars and millionaires do their best to avoid the dealers and gangbangers. Now, it's the early 90s. Carl's got to go home. His mother has been murdered, his family has fallen apart and his childhood friends are all heading towards disaster. On his return to the neighborhood, a couple of corrupt cops frame him for homicide. CJ is forced on a journey that takes him across the entire state of San Andreas, to save his family and to take control of the streets. Corrupt cops; a hard-knock life; friends heading for disaster. These are the classic elements of an african-american cinema that was both bloodily violent and socially aware. I think it would be cool to have a main character in GTA that could actually grow and change during the course of the game, as the characters in movies like Deep Cover and Belly grew and changed (well, if Belly had been able to do what it was attempting, anyway). Part of my hope for this are the interviews with the Rockstar honchos who talk about how the character has to eat to keep his energy and, if he doesn't exercise, he'll gain weight throughout the game. If the game-makers are smart, they won't make this automatically a minus: I mean, Biggie Smalls was actually a sex symbol in hardcore rap, for Christ's sake. It would be great to have a game where the women coo and call you "Big Daddy" or laugh and holler "Fatty-fatty-fat-fat" depending on your cash and your cred. And so I'm hoping that maybe we'll get a character that can grow and change internally as well based on your decisions in the game. GTA: Vice City, with its opportunities to purchase properties, opened up a kind of RPGish play. GTA:SA could be an RPG that would put a shitload of white people in the shoes of a struggling black kid. It's a pain in the ass when you commit a traffic faux pas in the GTA games in front of a cop and suddenly you're in a high-speed chase--what about when you're not doing anything and the cop wants to pull you over anyway? In GTA: VC you could go into stores and rob them. What about stores where you're just trying to get supplies but security starts fucking with you anyway? It could get preachy pretty quick, I admit, but if done right and done well, GTA: SA could put people right where hip-hop put white guys like me back in the late '80s--one step closer to understanding a situation how different things can be in someone else's shoes. Like I said, I can get too overly optimistic. I mean, this is GTA, for crying out loud: the series that got attention for the allowing the players to not just pay hookers for health-restoring sex, but to beat them to death with a bat when you were through and wanted your money back. GTA3 was the first game I ever played where my roommates seriously told me I was going to hell for playing. It's far more likely that the game makers are figuring out how to push the envelope of game-play--the forums I hang around had far more discussion on whether Rockstar could put the three full cities, as promised in PR material, on one game disc or two, or how the cross-country driving option would work, than whether a game with a black man shooting cops will draw more national controversy than two previous games of white guys shooting cops. (For the record: I think so.) But then what do I know? Maybe the fact that nobody has discussed this yet proves that video game culture exists in a state of post-race consciousness. After all, I never saw anyone else that even commented on the color of Champions of Norrath's erudite wizards. Maybe they just saw, you know, erudite wizards. I wish I knew. posted by Jeff Lester | 6:30 PM | |
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