[Jonathan Schipper / Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle / 2008]

I'm still spending a lot of time in Liberty City. It is a peculiar addiction that I can't quite shake and it utterly confounds my girlfriend (she hates the cascading gunfire). There is some intangible quality to GTA IV, an aesthetic pleasure that emerges from the combination of the clunky controls, the velocity and the spot on specular reflection - I just can't stop playing. I haven't seen the surfaces of automobiles so lovingly rendered since David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash, which is of course based on the 1973 novel of the same name by JG Ballard. On the topic of Ballard, please note the following:

Ballard saw cars as the signifying symbols of the 20th century. James Dean, John F. Kennedy, and Lady Di are just three of the many pop culture figures that died in car accidents. Ballard even renders the assassination of JFK as a car race in the essay "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race". Class differences in Grand Theft Auto IV mostly manifest in car brands. The vehicles Niko drive get better and better throughout the game. Yet the great efforts Niko Bellic undertakes to further his status only push him deeper and deeper into a swamp of corruption and violence. Towards the inescapable crash. The city is in a state of downfall, ridden by corrupt police forces, street crime, poverty, mentally deranged inhabitants and unscrupulous politicians. A sign at the highway reads: "The world needs a strong America to tell it what to do". GTA is a synonym for cynicism, Liberty City the antithesis of the American Dream.

This excerpt is culled from Grand Theft Auto IV Considered as an Atrocity Exhibition, a text on GTA IV by Martin Pichlmair in the most recent issue of Eludamos, an online journal for computer game culture. Although categorized as a "review" Pichlmair's text reads more like a minor aesthetic treatise, a qualitative summation of the game in light of Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. The brief text is worth a read as it contextualizes the game quite expertly. It also hints at what game reviews could be if the medium wasn't (primarily) written about with the same pizazz as consumer electronic reviews. If you're interested, here is a link to Pichlmair's text.