The political geographies of Liberty City:
A critical analysis of a virtual space
Alberto Vanolo
Dipartimento Interateneo Territorio, Politecnico e Università di Torino Viale Mattioli 39, 10125 – Torino (Italy)
Draft; final version available at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13604813.2012.662377 http://unito.academia.edu/AlbertoVanolo
The political geographies of Liberty City:
A critical analysis of a virtual space
Abstract
Liberty City is a virtual city, created for use with several versions of Grand Theft Auto, a best-selling series of video games concerning the world of crime. Millions of people all over the world have spent large amounts of time exploring this virtual space, making the city an important cultural artefact and a meaningful landmark in the urban imaginary on a global scale.
The aim of this paper is to analyse Liberty City in terms of the imagined urban political geographies nested in the aesthetics of this space in the videogame GTA IV. In order to develop this analysis, a theorization of urban politics will be presented, where politics is identified as consisting of representation, government and contestation. The paper will introduce methodological notes concerning the analysis, carried out mainly on the basis of a personal exploration of Liberty City. The paper then outlines the neoliberal political unconscious embedded in the urban dimension of Liberty City and proposes final theoretical reflections on the possible relations between the urban, the political and the aesthetics of video game practices.
Keywords
Grand Theft Auto IV; Liberty City; Video games; Virtual cities; Urban politics; Neoliberalism.
1. Introduction: spaces and video games
Social sciences, including geography and urban studies, have recently manifested a growing interest in video games, intended as cultural artefacts. Several authors – often situated at the convergence of fields like human geography, technology and media studies – have developed reflections on the nature of video game experiences, virtual environments (as MMORPGs1) and ‘coded space’ in general (Graham, 2005; Dodge et al., 2009); the sociabilities of video games (Bainbridge, 2010; Myers, 2010; Li et al., 2010); the relations between video games and the bodies of the users (Bardzell and Odom, 2008; Ash, 2010a); the affective spaces experienced in video games (Jarvinen, 2009; Graham and Shaw, 2009; Ash, 2010b); the sense of geographical space developed in gaming practices (Flynn, 2008; Lammes, 2008; Kabisch, 2008); and new ‘game cultures’ in general (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006). Moreover, social sciences are developing a lively methodological debate on the nature of investigations and research into ludic cyberspaces (Boellstorff, 2008; Bardzell and Odom, 2008; Miller, 2008). A key node of these lines of reflection concerns the hybrid nature of video game spaces, mixing up the traditional, blurry categories of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’. It is in fact evident that for many people, cyberspaces have become fully integrated into everyday lives, becoming an integral part of daily realities, with relevant consequences for both the material nature of existence as well as for the imaginative and discursive realms (Lévy, 2002; Shields, 2003). Focusing on video games, Atkinson and Willis (2007) introduced in this vein the concept of ludodrome, intended as
‘the played space of in-game environments, but also (…) the way in which real space may be suffused with elements of simulated space and the blending of this elements in popular culture’ (Atkinson and Willis, 2007, p. 820).
The player, in this sense, may be thought of as a mediator between the space of the game/simulation and that of daily reality, and gaming may be influential in shaping player’s interactions with real-world spaces through processes of slipping (temporary interpretation of an element of urban contexts in the language, narrative or physical constructs of a game world) and segueing (a more sustained interpretation of the real urban environment in these terms) (Atkinson and Willis, 2007).
More in general, new technologies are today nurturing an ongoing process defined by Henry Jenkins (2006) as convergence, intended as the construction of new and ever-changing relations between technologies and users, with the continued evolution of people’s skills and ways to think about social connections, politics, popular culture. In this sense, video game analysis is inherently embedded in wider social, geographical and political environments, and according to Dodge at al (2009, p. 1285):
‘Software studies seek to create an expanded understanding of code that extends significantly beyond the technical. It offers cultural and theoretical critiques to how the world itself is captured within code (…)’.
Given the quantitative relevance of video games in contemporary culture (according to ESA in the USA, in 2010, 72% of households play video games2), the relatively scarce number of video game analysis carried out in the field of urban geography may lead to the overlooking of a relevant element in the shaping of urban imaginaries and urban cultures. This paper contributes ‘to deconstruct and map … the complex spatialities of cyberspace’ (Kitchin, 1998, p. 403) by focusing on two perspectives, the urban and the
political, and on the case study of the digital space of Liberty City, in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. As part of a personal ‘convergence’ process, I have carried out my geographical analysis of Liberty City by applying and developing reflections and concepts from debates in urban geography, and by providing a personal digital exploration. I will argue here that Liberty City is a stereotyped representation of a neoliberal city (an argument also developed, through different perspectives, in Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009), and that video games allow exercises of redefinition of what philosopher Jacques Rancière (2000) calls ‘partition of the sensible’: by setting alternative aesthetic divisions between the visible and the invisible (for example the presence or absence of violence, marginalization, welfare, military force, as it will be argued) video game aesthetics have a relevant socio-political dimension. In this sense, and following the contribution of Atkinson and Willis (2009) on the pages of this journal, I will argue that the analysis of digital spaces may have a major role in understanding the way new thinking about the urban is developed in the convergence process of technologies in everyday life.
The paper is organized as follows: the next section will introduce the objects of the analysis, specifically, the video game Grand Theft Auto and Liberty City. The third section provides an analytical framework with which to theorize the politics of the city, and in which urban politics are identified as representation, government and contestation. The fourth section deals with the methodology used to gather the data for the analysis, which in turn is fully developed in the fifth section. The concluding remarks lay out some final reflections.
2. Grand Theft Auto and Liberty City
Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is the name of a popular series of video games produced by the
company Rockstar Games, available for personal computers (PCs) and for several gaming computer consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox. It is arguably one of the most popular series of recent years (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009). The fourth episode, which is widely known through the acronym GTA IV, sold 609.000 copies on its first day on the market in 2008, about 6 million copies in the first week, and more than 20 million copies up to March 2011.3 The full Grand Theft Auto series has sold approximately 120 million copies of its various versions all over the world4, and probably a number of copies have been also acquired and/or played through the resale of used games, legal renting and/or through the sale of fake, illegal copies.
Although video games are usually stereotyped as being children’s games, they are actually very complex cultural products, and are frequently targeted clearly and directly to adult consumers (according to the above mentioned ESA statistics, the average game player in 2010 was 37 years old). In fact, GTA IV is intended for mature users (over the age of 17 in USA and 18 in most European countries; for a geographical analysis of age restrictions in the GTA series see Kerr, 2006).
The narrative plot of the Grand Theft Auto series generally involves the player’s being drawn into (or back into) a world of crime, usually to save a relative. For example, in
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, the main character (CJ) left the city of San Andreas to
escape gang violence after the death of his younger brother; at the beginning of the game, he returns home to attend his mother’s funeral and is framed by crooked cops who force him to work for them in a criminal enterprise to save his older brother’s life.
GTA games take place in specific, broadly urban spaces that are pivotal in the construction of the fictional experience (Dyer-Withford and de Peuter, 2009). The protagonist is allowed to steal, rob, beat, hide, use a number of different guns and escape with stolen cars, among other activities, in order to acquire both money and ‘social status’ in this distorted, criminal milieu (Chess, 2005; Higgin, 2006; Barrett, 2006). One of the main characteristics of the games – common to other virtual environments – is that the narrative plot is not necessary pivotal to the game experience, as many players find that it is not really necessary to engage in these missions in order to enjoy the game; rather, much of the fun comes from wandering in the urban environment, exploring it, and experiencing a sort of sense of freedom in that virtual urban space (as discussed later) (Atkinson and Willis, 2009; Dovey and Kennedy, 2006; Miller, 2008). As in other video games and virtual worlds, the technology behind the video games is so powerful that enormous urban spaces have been recreated in detail, including streets, parks, buildings, monuments, unique pedestrians, waterfronts, urban fauna (for example pigeons), and a wide variety of many other common urban elements (Tavinon, 2009). Many parts of the cities are aesthetically and visually pleasant and the game provides the opportunity for a virtual tourist’s gaze on the unusual: in this case, on an unfamiliar and exotic digital city (Featherstone, 1998; Holmes, 2002). In this direction, Atkinson and Willis (2009) refer explicitly to the flaneuristic dimension of playing Grand Theft Auto. Also, during the game the passage of time is accelerated, virtually: in GTA IV one minute of time corresponds to half an hour in the context of the game; as such, during a 48-minute game the sun moves from dawn to sunset with city streets changing colours; during the early morning garbage men work in the streets, and some districts busy during the day become deserted at night, while other parts of the
city become populated by different people and characters, as for instance nightclub users.
The various games of the Grand Theft Auto series are set in different digital cities. The analysis developed in this paper focuses on one of these, called Liberty City, as represented in one of the latest of these games, GTA IV. Liberty City appears to be a parody of New York, developed on separate islands that are connected through bridges and tunnels. Rockstar Games invested heavily on a comprehensive research effort, which spanned time-lapse video recordings to monitor traffic patterns and rainfall in New York, photographs of more than 100.000 locations, and regular site visits to investigate the ethnic ‘character’ of different corners of the city (Bowditch, 2008; Dyer-Withford and de Peuter, 2009). Considering the millions of copies of GTA sold worldwide, it is plausible to argue that Liberty City is a highly ‘visited’ place. Also relevant to our analysis is the fact that the game experience is relatively long; while it takes just a few minutes in order to get the basics of the game, in order to master the character’s movements and the game controls, the player must spend approximately the same amount of time playing the game as one does to watch a movie, usually two or three hours. In GTA IV, the player receives additional points if he or she succeeds in completing the main missions of the game in less than 30 hours (there are other ‘facultative’ missions). Thus, 30 hours can therefore be considered as indicating a higher level of achievement. Ultimately, a number of people have spent and are spending dozens of hours in Liberty City, and therefore the urban imaginary resulting from this space of representation may arguably have a deep impact on the urban social imaginary all over the world.
There are, of course, limitations to the ways in which it is possible to interact in this virtual space; the kinds of exploration of a ‘city’ that are possible through an electronic device are different and partial compared to a physical and geographical experience (Miller, 2008; Tavinon, 2009). However, it is important to stress once more that Liberty City is not a ‘non-existing’ place; on the contrary, as argued, it may be conceptualised as a ludodrome, a mediated space between immersion in urban simulation and a real world that is simultaneously destabilized and blurred by gameplay (Atkinson and Willis, 2007). The fact that Liberty City is a relevant cultural experience in the life of a number of persons is also testified by the development of new and emerging ways of creating personal convergence processes (Jenkins, 2006). For example, it is worth mentioning the phenomenon of Machinima, which is the use of real-time 3D graphics from video games to create cinematic productions: on the web (www.youtube.com or www.machinima.com, for example) it is easy to find a number of movies developed by GTA IV game-fans using images and animations from the game (as ‘Last stand’, ‘Flatliners’, ‘Catch the train’, etc.). Also, many fans continuously develop discussions, share their experiences and knowledge, compare their photos and game results on the web. These are all important examples of the social and political importance of spaces like Liberty City, a space that – as I will argue – suggests specific ways to think about the contemporary city.
3. Three dimensions of urban politics
In order to organize reflections on GTA IV a schematization of urban politics based on a triad of interconnected dimensions has been adopted5. Clearly, these three dimensions do not cover the entire universe of possible approaches to the analysis of urban politics; however, they do represent essential bases for the organization of a critical viewpoint on the politics of urban space.
First, politics as representation refers to the production of images, discourses and narratives concerning the urban, and particularly those images intended to nurture projects driven by economic and political elites. The production of these images, discourses and narratives may be done with the purpose of, for example, promoting the material and symbolic regeneration of the city, perhaps in the various typologies of post-Fordist, post-modern, global, creative or green cities (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). This line of interpretation draws inspiration from the writings of Michel Foucault on the idea of the order of discourse, as well as from the writings of Jacques Derrida on deconstruction (Martin et al., 2003). Representations of cities possess an intrinsically performative role; different representations may generate in our mental and cultural universes different modes of framing social phenomena and issues, thus opening the way for differing responding interventions and discursive tactics in reaction to a given representation, and thus limit the acceptable modes of conduct (Rossi and Vanolo, 2011). Because of their importance in the collective imaginary, cities and larger metropolitan regions are faced with complex and controversial manifestations of the politics of representation, or a kind of translation, which is fostered by a variety of
linguistic and cultural codes (Mondada, 2000) that may be arguably and partly found also in many ludic digital cities and other urban representations in pop culture (see for example Bogost, 2006; Wyly, 2010). Most typically, discursive and communicative practices and strategies selectively identify and target urban spaces, producing different stereotyped imaginaries. For example, representations might distinguish neighbourhoods considered to be ‘attractive’ from those stigmatized as ‘deprived’, ‘unsafe’, and/or ‘declining’, and thereby influence behaviours (Wacquant, 2008). Representations wield therefore a performative power, which forges discursive objects, making an important contribution to the reproduction of existing socio-spatial inequalities in contemporary cities.
Secondly, the politics of representation is intimately linked to the practices of governing cities that is, the sphere of politics as government. As outlined by Rose (1999), the politics of space draws on a variety of intellectual technologies and practical tools; the processes of administering spatial entities such as a city or a neighbourhood demands the deployment of a wide range of technical and intellectual instruments, as well as regulations and policy tools (embedded in the software code in the case of a digital city). Taken together, these measures and devices engender a ‘governmental rationality’ with the aim of adapting the conduct of individuals and the citizenry as a whole to the government’s moral imperatives and related institutional goals (Allen, 2003). The politics of space as government consists of the combination of these political-administrative procedures and tools, along with the related implications in terms of knowledge and morality (Osborne and Rose, 1999). The government process, therefore, does not consist only of the execution of laws and other formal regulations; it is also
based on the specific modalities in which social and economic problems and issues are presented, the modalities in which governing bodies interact with public and private actors, and the modalities in which societal advancement is expected. A key distinguishing feature of neoliberal societies, particularly in the view of Nikolas Rose and other theorists of governmentality, lies in the advent of novel structures of social power (Rose, 1999). These structures replace conventional patterns of political representation and social consensus, based on class consciousness and on the state provision of social services, and transform individual citizens and local communities, including cities, into subjects increasingly responsible for their own wellbeing, as regards, for instance, issues of safety, social security and other fields in which the State once retained an exclusive role of control and competence (Osborne and Rose, 1999; Brenner and Theodore, 2002).
Thirdly, politics as contestation is strictly connected to the abovementioned work of Jacques Rancière (1998, 2000), who suggests that politics is not directly related to the exercise of power, as in the traditional Foucaultian perspective. In his view, one should distinguish between police (‘la police’) and politics (‘la politique’). The first refers to the preservation of a pre-fixed social order and to the position ‘naturally’ assigned to the members of a polity, on the basis of a ‘rational’ partition of the space of opportunities; the latter is fostered by the process of contestation of the order being imposed by the ‘police’, which is inherently controversial and modifiable, in the name of equality and justice. Therefore, according to Rancière, politics is not to be identified with the set of power relationships described by Foucault, but with the common space created by the contestation of the policing order, which is produced by the existing government
arrangement. The police thus creates an order which transforms members of the community into governable subjects. The politics of contestation questions this relational and physical arrangement (Dikeç, 2005).
The act of contestation produces a number of geographies that are made of, and nurtured by, a wide array of socio-spatial practices, claims and expressions (Rossi and Vanolo, 2011). The sphere of politics as contestation is qualitatively different from the two afore-mentioned spheres of representation and government in that politics as contestation aims at reintegrating egalitarian and progressive stances into an urban politics (Boltanski, 2009). Without this contestation, politics would otherwise be reduced to merely representing and reproducing the already dominant imaginary through politics as representation, or to governing and administering societies through already existing politics as government.
In addition, the contestation perspective outlined here differs from conventional views of grassroots movements: the politics-as-contestation perspective does not include the manifestation of social movements as claims of identity and allegiance to specific social groups, as post-modern theorists have stated, or to demands for access to social services (Castells, 1997). Rather, drawing on feminist and pragmatist approaches (Brown and Staeheli, 2003), the politics-as-contestation perspective maintains that social groups organize themselves in order to assert their presence in the public sphere and to reconstruct the whole political and moral. This politics of presence – which is connected to the politics of representation – assumes therefore an intrinsically aesthetic dimension: Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ corresponds to the aesthetic coordinates setting the division within a society between the visible and the invisible, and therefore what is a political subject/topic and what is not. This is a pivotal concept in the analysis of
Liberty City: the presences and absences, particularly with reference to urban representations of violence, marginalization, welfare, social relations, as further discussed, reveal much of the kind of idea of urbanity developed in Grand Theft Auto.
4. Experiencing Liberty City: Theory and methodology
The analysis of a digital space like Liberty City poses important questions concerning theory and methods (see Hine, 2000). Like any other cultural object, there is first the complexity of the decoding process: every game experience is fully mediated by the cultural perspectives of the player (Hall, 1997). This problem is further complicated in video games, since the experience is interactive and based on a complex and technologically mediated relation between the player and the character (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006). In GTA IV the main character is Niko Bellic, a Serbian immigrant who arrives in Liberty City by ship at the beginning of the game (see Figure 1). He has no experience of the city and he knows nobody, apart from his cousin Roman, who introduces Niko to the urban environment. This narrative puts the character immediately into the situation of being an outsider and a stranger, suggesting at the same time the idea of Liberty City as a separated utopian or dystopian space (the island, in the philosophical tradition of term, since Thomas Moore – see Edmond and Smith, 2003). The character speaks English with a marked Eastern European accent and has no familiarity with the city. Much of the game architecture is based on the effort to construct analogies between the experience of the player and that of the character. Both are strangers in Liberty City; both have to ‘explore’ it. It is possible to go to shops and to dress Niko Bellic in a number of different ways, in order to make the game
experience more ‘unique’ and therefore to strengthen the identification of the player with the character and to create a sense of emotional attachment. For example, if Niko drinks too much, the screen becomes blurred and foggy, and it becomes difficult to move and to get back home, developing a synergy between what happens to the character and what happens to the player (concerning the bleeding of experiences interior and exterior to the game see Ash, 2010a; Myers, 2010).
In addition, in the experience of video games the user is subjected to a severe discipline
of the body, to use the Foucaultian expression. The player sits in front of a television or
monitor, without moving his or her gaze away (Figure 2). He/she must learn how to move the character’s body through a ‘control’ device, such as a joypad or a mouse, developing techniques in order to organize the orientation in the digital environment (for a very detailed analysis see Ash, 2010a; see also Gregersen and Grodal, 2009) and therefore nurturing a specific ‘technological unconscious’ (Thrift, 2004). Finally, the entire gaming experience, including moving in the urban space, is defined and bounded by the game’s limitations; for example, certain parts of the town and many private spaces are not accessible (Chess, 2005; Miller, 2008). Significantly, if the player behaves in a way coherent with the expectation of the game’s designers, that is, succeeding in the game by completing the missions and moving the storyline forward, he or she is rewarded with more spatial ‘degrees of freedom’. In this case some parts of the city that were previously inaccessible become available. This happens through narrative devices; for example, a certain bridge, unusable because of maintenance work, may suddenly open to allow the player to explore another part of the city. Thus, the only way to fully enjoy the game is to ‘submit’ oneself to a very tight discipline.
Figure 1 Niko Bellic performing a fight in Liberty City
Source: Grand Theft Auto IV Screenshots Courtesy of Rockstar Games, Inc.
Figure 2 The discipline of the body of the player Source: Photo by author
With these specifics in mind, my analysis of the game has been mostly carried out with an autoethnographic approach to the extent possible in the virtual environment (see Butz, Besio, 2009; Hine, 2000). Since the game provides detailed statistics, it is possible to monitor the accuracy of the exploration of the game: I have been able to play 71% of the situations, and I have fully developed the main narrative and explored all of the boroughs making up the city. It is worth noting that the game, in the strict sense, never formally ends: when the main story reaches a narrative conclusion, the player is still free to move through the city, shop, steal cars, date women and experience other situations.
I have also carried out a bibliographical analysis of a relatively small, but growing literature on the social and critical dimensions of gaming Grand Theft Auto, ranging from cultural analysis, to game studies, to geography6. This allowed me to start organizing the main arguments of the paper, and particularly the classification of observable elements of Liberty City in the three thematic categories of politics of representation, government and resistance in order to build up a first draft of the
storyline of the paper (Boyatzis, 1998). Subsequently, I have started playing again the
game for 20 hours (in different game sessions) annotating on my pocketbook descriptions of environments and game situations, and shooting photographs using a digital camera. I have also observed other people playing the game by looking at internet movies (easily available on youtube.com), and relevant qualitative materials furnished with descriptions of gaming experiences in online forum groups, where messages are posted by game lovers in virtual communities. In particular, the two forum groups at http://www.gtaforums.com and http://www.forum.gta-expert.com have been analysed. The qualitative materials have then been analysed and classified.
Further, in order to discuss, analyse and reinterpret my reflections, I have carried out extensive interviews with 10 players who had at least a 20 hours experience of the game. The sample consisted of people aged 20 to 40 years old, 80% male, living in Italy, without specific competencies in the field of urban critical analysis (basically game-fans contacted through my webpage, presumably mainly visited by students). Interviews have been proposed in the form of individual colloquia, where first gamers where asked to freely talk about their experience, and then specific questions about their perceptions where asked7. Then, in a second step, I have briefly exposed them to my interpretations of the Liberty City space in order to observe their reactions and evaluate their feedbacks. Interviews have been conducted in Italian (the extracts proposed in this paper have been translated), transcribed on my pocketbook, and subsequently classified in thematic categories as in the case of the qualitative materials from my direct exploration.
5. The political in video games
Liberty City is, first of all, a representation of the city in the era of globalization (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009). Even if Liberty City is a parody of a city, it aesthetically presents many distinctive features of the current urban experience, such as multiethnic quarters, segregated housing, various public spaces, spectacular architectural structures and landmarks8.
‘It is so various. One time I took a taxi and just let the driver move from one side of the city to the opposite one: I saw so many blocks’ (interview, 3 September 2010).
Many parts of the city emphasize the typical features of the creative city stereotype; the borough of Broker and part of Bohan are evidently gentrified space, and in the green area of Outlook Park or on Walham Parkway, it is possible to experience the typical Richard Florida-style environment, including watching people skating on bike paths, listening to music by street artists and walking on the seashore. At the same time, many spatial referents emphasise a Fordist heritage: old abandoned factories and the Monoglobe, a monument of an old world exposition, lie in a borough that is a parody of New York’s New Jersey. One of the darkest parts of the city is the peripheral area of Alderney, where heavy industries are located close to the main national penitentiary. These descriptive examples demonstrate that the urban experience in Liberty City is quite varied. Various parts of the city are physically, socially, economically and ethnically completely different from each other, and this is obviously built up by supporting aesthetics grounded in different stereotyped vision of the city, for example juxtaposing the ‘creative’ city centre to the ‘industrial’ periphery. This construction opens complex reflections concerning the topic of game realism: Liberty City looks so vast and detailed that it provides a strong impression of accuracy, an impression confirmed in most of the interviews.
‘It is realistic. The Chinese quarter looks like a real Chinese quarter!’ (Interview, 4 July 2011).
‘It is like a real city: there are streets, squares, buildings, parks and a lot of different people’ (Interview, 3 September 2010).
But, at the same time, many users have no direct experience of New York or other American cities. More importantly in epistemological terms, because Liberty City does not exist as factual reality, the idea of ‘realism’ sounds quite odd. According to Galloway (2004), drawing on Jameson (1992), it is more correct to think in terms of ‘realistic-ness’: Liberty City is a copy of a copy, or a simulacrum of realities produced through multiple representations. Gangster films, crime movies, other video games and pop culture in general play a fundamental role (Atkinson and Willis, 2009; see also Bogost, 2006).
‘I have the impression the exploration in GTA is similar to the sensation of seeing a city in a movie’ (Interview, 4 September 2010).
Curiously, the construction of Liberty City as a place that is attractive to users starts from the beginning of the game experience; the game manual, provided in the box together with the game DVD, is designed as a Lonely Planet tourist guide, and describes places, restaurants, bars and fun things to do in the city. On the first page, the statement ‘Welcome to Liberty City’ precedes an explicit and ironic paragraph of introduction to the city:
‘Discover the history, culture and diversity that make this booming metropolis the capital of the world, at least according to the over-caffeinated locals. We encourage you to explore Liberty City’s four boroughs and its islands, each with its own distinct atmosphere and personality. You will soon see for yourself that there is truly something for everyone’.
This kind of approach strengthens the flaneuristic dimension of the game experience, as testified by the previous quotes from interviews. To put it differently, the aesthetic of the game manipulates the geography of affect of Liberty City, intended – according the
sense of affect developed by Thrift (2008) – as the capacity of generating pre-cognitive emotions as surprise, fear, anger, disgust, joy (see Graham and Shaw, 2009; Ash, 2010b), in a cultural construction that is curiously quite close to that of actual city marketing campaigns.
‘The highway along the Ocean is so beautiful; it was a pleasure driving and listening to the radio. I think I have also seen that in an advertisment video for the videogame’ (Interview, 9 September 2010).
At the same time, Liberty City may be interpreted as a space of government, and precisely of neo-liberal government. The capitalist imperative is evident; every aspect of life appears to be commodified, or reduced to a mere object of desire to be consumed (Barrett, 2006). This includes the role of females; most women are represented as stereotyped sexual objects, with a marginal role in the game storyline (as in most videogames; cf. Leonard, 2006). The game has become quite popular and discussed on the media because of the possibility to pay prostitutes for sex. It is also possible to date women, and the possibility of ‘scoring’ at the end of a date is correlated to the way the player is dressed, the kind of car he has, and the venues where the night out is spent. In the framework of this spatial analysis, it is important not to focus on the eventual violent messages that are carried out (ironically or not, depending on the cultural perspectives used to deconstruct the cultural content of the game), but to reflect on the political unconscious that is deeply rooted in the virtual space of the city as a space of government. The argument here is that, even if Liberty City is ironic, and probably critical, of the stereotypical American neoliberal lifestyle, it still supports through affective and aesthetic constructions a strongly neoliberal way to look at and think about
cities. Consider the use and representation of public space: in the game, it is simply dangerous. The character can be robbed, beaten, hit by a car and eventually killed, all of which are serious possibilities. On the contrary, private space is safe: you can sleep, watch television, relax, accumulate things in your house. The attributes of these spaces produce a strong dichotomy.
‘It is also funny to try and stay at home, just relaxing and watching the stupid television programmess’ (Interview, 8 September 2010).
More significantly, social space is aesthetically empty in terms of public structures: the game is very accurate in its presentation of bars, clubs, restaurants, buildings and parks, but there are few visible public structures. For example schools or libraries are invisible in the ‘police’ order of Liberty City. There is a hospital, but it is clearly a private hospital: a sign in front of it bears the slogan, ‘Quality health care at a price’.
‘I do not remember any school in the game… maybe I just saw a school-bus’ (Interview, 15 September 2010).
In a different example, after robbing someone, the protagonist may shout that he will save the money for retirement (occasionally Niko comments on situations in the game). The absence of welfare is simply a matter of fact, naturalizing this absence that is de-subjectivating welfare by aesthetically moving it out of the ‘partition of the sensible’. On the contrary, the main visible presence of the public hand is penal and punitive, in the form of police and jails; Liberty City is definitely a revanchist city (Smith, 1996; see Chess, 2005).
‘There is police everywhere in the city, and so aggressive’ (Interview, 9 September 2010).
The whole game is framed around the dichotomy between legal and illegal activities. The few legal activities that can be carried out in the game, such as visiting a certain part of the town, dating a woman, having dinner out or shopping, are mostly made possible through the medium of illegal activities, such as stealing a car or money, in order to pay a ticket or a bill, for example. Illegal activities have to be conducted far from the gaze of the police, but it is difficult to keep an eye on every corner of the street. The police may be everywhere, and it often happens that the user is inadvertently seen, chased and eventually arrested, or even shot in the case of especially anti-social behaviours. The message is clear: the Panopticon-style environment means that Niko can potentially be watched almost everywhere (Chess, 2005; Higgin, 2006). Cameras and police helicopters abound in the game, thus disciplining the body of Niko Bellic in a rigid way and naturalizing the military presence.
Finally, Liberty City can be analyzed as a space of social struggle and contestation. At first, there seems to be little space for collective agency in Liberty City. Public space is represented as a site of violence and fear, and numerous elements in the landscape evoke, in an ironic way, the fears of terrorism. The sense of public space as a place of violence and fear, along with the spectacularization of this violence seem to destroy any kind of potential social ties. In other words, individual acts of violence seem to be the main means of exerting one’s agency (Barett, 2006). At the same time, the city is visibly divided into ethnically segregated and clustered areas. The Chinese, Latino, Eastern European, Italian and Black districts are aesthetically present and visible, as characterized by different kinds of buildings, cars, shops and inhabitants. Racial stereotypes abound in the game; the black population drives loud, gangster-style cars,
while the Asian population produces the typical Chinatown landscape (Figure 3; see Higgin, 2006; Bogost, 2006; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009).
Figure 3 Niko driving a motorbike in a Chinatown-style street
Source: Grand Theft Auto IV Screenshots Courtesy of Rockstar Games, Inc.
However, with the lack of welfare and urban sociability and with the proliferation of individualized spaces where the strongest survive, forms of ethnically oriented cooperation for deviant behaviour visibly emerges (Figure 4). Gangs and collective criminal networks allow the population to survive, work and earn money.
‘You have to build connections with other gangsters, and you are free to choose who to ally with, and who to fight’ (interview, 8 June 2010).
Figure 4 Niko facing a local gang
Source: Grand Theft Auto IV Screenshots Courtesy of Rockstar Games, Inc.
Networks seem particularly weak, since many tend to betray friends for money during the game, but cooperative relationships do emerge and being successful in the game implies that some useful friendships were constructed. The condition of the outsider is also often stigmatized: the protagonist is insulted as an immigrant. On the other hand, in some parts of the city he can benefit from the help of other outsiders, often those coming from Eastern Europe.
On a more general level, the public space is crowded with political messages of contestation; the corruption of police and politicians, for example, is often aesthetically represented with irony in graffiti on the walls of the city.
Analogous to ethnic segregation, a strong vertical hierarchy emerges, based on the amount of money the user possesses and his levels of aggressiveness. Basically, the
richest, strongest and most violent survive (DeVane and Squire, 2008; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009).
‘If I punch someone, he will immediately react. This is realistic’ (Interview, 4 September 2010, emphasis added).
This logic lies in the background of the game, even in small and often unnoticed details. For example, if the player dresses the character elegantly with an expensive suit and with a tie and then punches a homeless person for no reason, the latter will start a fight. Someone in the street will surely call the police, but once policemen arrive, they will immediately arrest the homeless person, regardless of their innocence; at the same time, other homeless people may eventually intervene. Is this ironic? Probably, considering that the multiplayer game mode available through the internet is called ‘Deathmatch. It’s kill or be killed, capitalism style’.
6. Concluding remarks: Politicizing videogames and virtual spaces
This paper aimed to analyse the kind of politics of the city embedded in Liberty City, and particularly its aesthetic ‘partition of the sensible’, and most of the arguments focused on the idea of Liberty City as a stereotype of a neoliberal city. Assuming GTA IV is a digital space of activity and a site of meaning, the analysis developed the idea of Liberty City as an hyper-real neoliberal set of politics performatively driving the behaviours – in this case the gaming – of the players.
As stated in the beginning of the discussion, it is not the purpose of this analysis to scientifically state whether GTA IV is an ironic attempt to criticize actual urbanism,
since this interpretation depends largely on the cultural framework of the audience. According to my interviews, while some players thought that Liberty City is a violent space celebrating individuality and domination, others decoded the narrative as an ironic critique of money and power. What is relevant here is that the video game space allows the construction and the experiencing of different imagined ‘partitions of the sensible’. Video games like Grand Theft Auto IV allow the player to immerge in an environment where political presences and absences are manipulated, and where different personal identities can be performed, as being a gangster, being of a different gender, etc. Liberty City is a ludodrome where to experience violence and life in an extreme neo-liberal urban environment, and in this sense cultural products like this may also have a pedagogic role. The game, in fact, grants the opportunity of playing with multiple (dis)identification (the different ways of being and experiencing Niko Bellic; see Žižek, 2006), immerging in a space regulated by an exaggerated order of the visible where welfare and justice are absent or invisible, and violence and greed are ubiquitous. The result of this cultural-pedagogic exercise is not straight-forward: on the one hand, some players may be led to assume that there are no alternatives to exploitation and violence in the neoliberal city (Redmond, 2006); on the other hand, players may also be led to a radical critique to the brutalization, racism and greed characterizing the neoliberal city. The impact of the video game spaces on ideas of urbanity has been previously explored on the pages of this journal by Atkinson and Willies (2009), who developed the idea of the transparent city, intended as the process of generation of the sense of a less stable, habitable, social and physical fabric and a more mutable hyperrealism wherein we are less able to detect what is authentic, real and stable and are more clearly influenced by game-world elements and patterns. In line with this argumentation and with the
reflections developed in this paper, I suggest the idea that the gaming experience involves a convergence process that, in the fields of the political, enacts the experimentation of new ‘partitions of the sensible’, new aesthetical politics, new presences and absences in the urban field. In fact, following Rancière (2000), both politics and aesthetics are focused on the distribution of the sensible, as politics takes form through the disruption of a certain aesthetic organization or the eruption of a distinct aesthetic. In this sense, as the video game experience is obviously a highly visual and aestheticized experience, it involves the development of a relevant political and technological unconscious, a sort of thirdspace in which to hybridize the porous boundaries between fantasy and reality, the real and the imagined, the self and the other. In line with Bryant and Pollock (2010), it can be argued that Liberty city is neither fantasy nor falsehood: it is a place creating a logic for the arrangement of actions, producing a cultural space – the ludodrome – that may also be intended as an ‘urban science game’ or, paraphrasing Clarke (1997), as a ‘videoludic city’.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Anna Richter, Annalisa Colombino, Federico Clonfero, Gena Feist, Ugo Rossi and the anonymous referees.
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Alberto Vanolo is researcher and lecturer at the University of Torino, Italy, in the Inter-university Department of Territorial Studies and Planning. Email:
1 MMORPGs means massively multiplayer online role-playing games, a genre of online games in which a
large number of players interact within a virtual world. A popular example is World of Warcraft (Bainbridge, 2010).
2 Entertainment Software Association: http://www.theesa.com/facts (cons. June 2011).
3 D. Sabbagh, ‘Grand Theft Auto IV records 609,000 first-day sales’, Times Online, 1 May 2008;
http://www.timesonline.co.uk. F. Paul, S. Orlofsky, ‘Take-Two’s Grand Theft Auto 4 sales top $500 million’, Reuters; http://www.reuters.com. E. Purchese, ‘T2: Grand Theft Auto IV sold 20 million’, http://www.eurogamer.net, 10 March 2011.
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto (cons. June 2011). 5 The approach is fully developed in Rossi and Vanolo (2011).
6 Particularly Atkinson and Willis (2009); Barrett (2006); Chess (2005); DeVane and Squire (2008);
Dyner-Witheford and de Peuter (2006); Leonard (2006); Miller (2008); Murray (2005); Schwartz (2006); and the essays in Garrelts (2006).
7 Specifically, questions were referred to the evaluation of the perceived realism of the virtual urban space
and of the gaming experience in general; the nature of the fun and enjoyment deriving from playing; the memory of specific situations and spaces/buildings in the city; the interaction with other characters in the game; the memory of public and social spaces; the memory of social problems appearing in the game.
