The Appeal and Intense Boredom of Grand Theft Auto
My love-hate relationship with the phenomenon
Grand Theft Auto. My oh my, what a fascinating specimen. The appeal of Grand Theft Auto impressively reaches across multiple demographics; younger gamers con their unwitting parents into buying it for them, and grown gamers lavish it with adoration and awards. For over a decade now, the Grand Theft Auto franchise has constantly found itself as the centerpiece of controversy and AAA gaming spotlight, and gamers far and wide have eaten it up with every release since it made its first bigger fully 3D debut in 2001. Today, the newest entry, Grand Theft Auto V, still enjoys a very active player base, thanks in large part to Grand Theft Auto Online. Rockstar Games, the developer, deserves credit for their pop culture monster they’ve created.
For the uninitiated, Grand Theft Auto, in concept, is a criminal simulator. In every game, players take on the role of an “everyman” kind of character, and are dropped into a large open world with almost no rules and very little boundaries. Each game takes place in a realistic modern city, a recreation and parody of famous locations in the USA. There are towering skyscrapers, the ghetto, sidewalk for miles, and anything you would expect to see in twenty-first century civilization. It should be recognized that Rockstar Games specializes in realism. In every title, players are given a story to follow and “missions” or “quests” like any typical game, generally with a character that starts as a nobody and climbs the metaphorical ladder, but the true fun for many fans is not the story. In fact, it’s everything but the story. Grand Theft Auto V, for example, has a well-written story about three different protagonists and their three very different lives, and it’s been called fantastic. However, it’s when the game goes off the rails that players flock to it. At any given time, you can steal a car, go on a crime spree by robbing stores or murdering civilians, have an epic gunfight with law enforcement, or even fly an aerial vehicle of some kind and have all sorts of crazy shenanigans. Grand Theft Auto gives you a real-world playground, painstakingly created, and doesn’t give a crap what you do with it.
As for me, my history with the franchise has been up and down, like a roller coaster. I remember when Grand Theft Auto 3 came out on the PS2, way back when in 2001, the first fully 3D Grand Theft Auto game that started the series’ meteoric rise. How could I not remember it? It was so controversial! The news was ablaze with discussions about the sex and violence in the game. I was in fifth grade at the time, and I of course owned a PlayStation 2. I was quite the avid gamer, and there was little in the way of gaming that I hadn’t done by that time, but Grand Theft Auto at its big debut with GTA3 was uncharted territory. Here was this game where you could actually shoot innocent people and be a criminal, something that was so taboo I was specifically told by my father that I was not allowed to play it. Instead, I was doomed to watch people like my older cousin play it on his PS2, laughing along with him and marveling at all the violence; I’m pretty sure even without a timer like we have in modern day that my cousin must have clocked in hundreds of hours in that game, but that was how strong the appeal of the game was. Watching Grand Theft Auto in action was like watching pornography: visceral, sinful, permissive. I remember even being a little bit scared when he first offered to let me play it without the eyes of his or my parents watching.
All of my friends at school were talking about it. It was the talk of the town, so to speak. I never was given permission to play the game at home, but fortunately for me I had other means of playing it. My parents were separated, and at my mother’s house the rules on video games and entertainment were much more lax, so on frequent occasions over the years I found myself indulging in the sinful pleasures of Grand Theft Auto alongside my stepfather and my siblings. This was my only way of playing the games. It was done in secret and never spoken of at home. Alongside my little brother, who in spite of his younger age was also a gamer who liked GTA, I fondly remember doing the old “I die, then it’s your turn” routine with him since GTA did not have a proper multiplayer during that time. My secretive playing of GTA was sparse, true, but it was during these years when GTA was new that I was afforded the pleasure of playing Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto Vice City, knowing full well that some adults in my life felt like the series was the ultimate example of something a kid should not bear witness to. It had so many new and interesting caveats though, from the perspective of a young gamer. How could I pass up a game like this?
“Wow, you can shoot people?”
“Wow, you can actually have sex with prostitutes?”
“Oh man, you can steal cars and jump off of buildings?”
“Huh, so you run from and kill hordes of cops?”
I’ll never forget when Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out. In some ways, that entry was the peak of the series for me. It had more to do than the previous entries did. More freedom, more criminal shenanigans, and even more sex. On a certain day that I was off of school, not long after its release, I was staying with my mother instead of at home with my father and I was about to have the house to myself. This was going to be one of the longest periods of playtime I’d have with the game for many years. My parents were going to work and my siblings were going to be out of the house as well, possibly at daycare. It might have been the winter or summer after its release, if memory serves. Back then, day one purchases of games weren’t nearly as important to me as they are now. Anyway, I was going to have the house to myself. I got up early so I could maximize my playtime, and spread the map of the game world that came in the box out on the living room floor, allowing the temporary connection of the PS2 to the “big TV” there instead of our smaller one in my bedroom. Closing the door behind her as she leaves for work, my mother waves goodbye with a smile and says, “Okay, don’t have too much fun.” It sounds silly now, since Grand Theft Auto is so popular and available that it’s a household name, but back then it was a unique experience. I still remember the familiar sounds in my head, the distance you had to run from CJ’s house before you enter the city proper, finding that lone parachute on top of one of the skyscrapers, and even the feeling that society had progressed for allowing you to play as a black protagonist. It was cutting edge stuff. San Andreas might honestly be my favorite game in the series so far, even if I didn’t spend as much time with it as I would have wanted to. Heck, my dad still expresses misgivings and disdain for the series itself, and I’m a grown man now.
That’s the story of back then, which brings us now to modern times. I’m an adult and I can play whatever I want, whenever I want. So have I spent endless days in Grand Theft Auto, unfettered by restrictions and taboo? Well…no, not exactly.
I didn’t own an Xbox 360, which was released in 2005, until I was out of high school. I spent my time in high school working a simple job at the local Piggly Wiggly, which I had to ride my bicycle to and from a few miles every day to make it. Video games were frowned upon at home, where I had enough drama to deal with without making things worse. By the time I had one, nevermind the PS3 which I never got to own either, Grand Theft Auto IV from 2008 had already come out and been released for a while. It was widely renowned for being amazing, and I had a passing interest in it, naturally, but never actually got around to playing it until years later. You’d think then that I’d love to spend all the time in the world enjoying it when I did get my hands on it, but I didn’t. I never got around to diving headfirst into it the way my friends did.
For some reason, it just didn’t hold my interest. The older me just couldn’t wrap my head around it. You’re a what in this game? You relative wants you to go bowling? The moment-to-moment activities were of no consequence to me. My younger brother played it so much that he basically memorized it, and was then obsessed with the updated multiplayer in its expansion, “The Ballad of Gay Tony”, but I was all but uninterested. The provocative imagery did catch my eye, I enjoyed the art direction and the wall poster that came with the game, but there were many other games on my list of things to play. By that point, I was just now discovering games like Dragon Age: Origins, and the first Mass Effect game, both of which would go on to be two of my favorites ever. I was trying to hit the ground running on lots of games that I’d already missed out on, catching up on valuable gaps in my backlog, and Grand Theft Auto was not at the top of my list. For whatever reason, that old sinfulness that the series possessed like an illegal drug just wasn’t there anymore. Seeing the game’s faculties in the light of day, after spending so many years being forced to avoid it and beat around the bush, felt like learning that Santa Claus isn’t real. It wasn’t that the concept didn’t appeal to me on a base level. Shooting guns are fun. Driving cars is fun. I wasn’t so much drawn in as I was mildly curious by the promise of sex in the game, I had sources for that elsewhere I guess you could say. To quote my grandmother: “I’m old, not dead!” Nevertheless, the sum of its parts didn’t equal a game that felt like a must-play title.
It’s the same story with Grand Theft Auto V in present day, which still enjoys a healthy player base. GTA5 was released in 2013 to critical acclaim. I’ve bought that game on two different platforms now, and both times I’ve started to play it and lost interest. I appreciate the story, and the scope of it, but every time I get into it I begin to feel bored. I have no interest in the multiplayer at all, the game’s constantly updated online community. My brother on the other hand, who is now also an adult plays it all the time and is basically a pro at it now, and begs me to play with him. He tells me stories and muses on all the times when he’s completely annihilated younger players, or thwarted cheaters, and it all sounds like fun over the phone. Somehow, and I can’t pinpoint an exact reason, the multiplayer in GTA5 is just…boring to me. I can’t bring myself to get into it even though I want to.
You hop in your car and you go crash into people, I guess. You shoot strangers. You fly a plane. It sounds fun on paper, but every time I find myself sitting down to play it I end up turning it off not long after. I just can’t reach the point where I feel like I’m “into it”, that old feeling gamers know and love when it becomes more than a game to you. It’s not like a good RPG, for example, where I feel like I can’t stop playing until I beat it. I don’t feel challenged like I do in a game like ‘Bloodborne’, where my imagination is stoked and I get the urge to conquer the nightmare. I don’t know what it is about Grand Theft Auto, but it just doesn’t tickle my fancy anymore. What’s more weird about it is I actually really appreciate the story in GTA5. I’ve played several hours of it, might be about twenty-five percent of the way through it, and I love the attention to detail. Objectively, it is impressive. Story wise, I think Franklin’s rise from the ghetto to being a man of his own was fun all on its own. I prefer it to the multiplayer to be honest. I think the multiplayer, Grand Theft Auto Online, is one of the more boring things I’ve played in quite a long time. The story mode holds my interest more, and I try to play it “honest”, which means I enjoy following the traffic signals, walking to places, making it seem realistic. Unfortunately, it’s not possible one-hundred percent of the time, and the game eventually breaks down and forces me to get reckless. Such is the nature of the game.
I have wracked my brain back and forth trying to find out why I can’t stand Grand Theft Auto anymore, when as a teenager it felt like playing something explicit and sinfully fun. Is it possible to appreciate something without liking it? GTA5 has so many appreciable qualities: a well-realized open-world, excellent dialogue, biting satire, great soundtrack, interesting characters, but none of those things equaled up to a game that made me feel like I had to play it. The online portion offers a redux of the game world where you can play a created person of your own and basically be a mob boss, and there’s a lot of potential, but it doesn’t hold my interest either. My brother still invites me to play though, telling me we can use his substantial resources to boost my character, but I can never find the wherewithal to boot the game up again.
Was it the forbidden nature of the game’s concept that appealed to me as a child? The series is rated Mature, which means it’s for players over eighteen of course, but that doesn’t stop players younger than the game’s rating from playing it. Any seasoned gamer can tell you scary and amusing stories of fighting with squeaky voiced youngsters in online video games, and that’s proof enough without actual statistics that a video game or work of art’s target audience is not always who it attracts. Grand Theft Auto is actually notorious for its appeal to younger players. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to pooh-pooh anybody’s pastime, and I’m not trying to generalize and say Grand Theft Auto is immature. For me personally though, something about the series evaporated in between those crucial growing years in my mid to late teens and early twenties. Maybe if I had constant access to it, I would have played the games to death like other people I know. Or maybe as an adult, I would simply rather spend time in a world that’s not so similar to actual real life. I’m not so sure anymore. I’d also started asking myself questions like, “Is slaughtering police officers or being shot by them really the message we want to send to kids?” I was at odds with my own opinions on art and freedom of expression. Rockstar’s other realistic games, like Red Dead Redemption and LA Noire, didn’t do much for me either. As fun as being a cowboy sounded in Red Dead, and as intriguing as being a detective in LA Noire sounded too, I didn’t finish either of those games (ironically, my father, who still games, liked them a lot). I’m still trying to finish Red Dead Redemption! LA Noire too is in my Steam backlog, waiting for a rainy day.
To look at it in a joking way, is driving a crappy car and getting frustrated with traffic, two prominent things in GTA5, what passes for fun now? Does the prospect of rulebreaking or “cops and robbers” appeal to a younger audience too? Or is it maybe the “go anywhere, do whatever you want” aspect of it, the unbridled chaos? It’s not exactly an unheard of question: a Google search for terms like, “average age of gta players”, or “gta 5 demographics” brings up many threads from people wondering who all is playing the game, and stories from their experience with encountering players with high-pitched voices that betray their age. We all know it’s simple for any video gamer of any age to toss on their headset and chat with other players. I didn’t have that capability when I was a kid, but if I did I know for sure I would have been doing the same thing.
Maybe the next inevitable sequel in the Grand Theft Auto series will offer something that catches my imagination and gives me that desire to finish it. By then, my gaming habits may have changed again. Until that day comes, I will likely continue to pussyfoot with Rockstar’s intriguing concepts based on real world ideas, not quite a superfan and not quite a naysayer. It’s a love-hate relationship, where I’m simultaneously drawn in by their artistic prowess but pushed away by the parts of it that seem not worth my time, for lack of a better way to put it.
It’s not you, Rockstar, it’s me.
This article was written by Super Jump contributor, Chris Anderson. Please check out his work and follow him on Medium.
