Game Development Reference
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in reviews. This may be in part because the presence of sex and violence is
simply understood by gamers, but the design of the games also drives this.
Other expected details, like the depth of the game world or humor, fre-
quently get extended praise within reviews. From a communicative stand-
point, all of these details construct and change what is memorable about
the game when it is played. As the violence is woven throughout missions,
like in most fi rst-person shooters or war games, players begin to see vio-
lence as a background issue, one to be discussed in terms of game play and
game design, rather than a discussion about whether or not it is appropri-
ate. The violence in the game is not unique. Other games involve shooting,
so a gamer's recall is focused on what makes GTA dif erent. The most
notable aspects of GTA are the complete world in which players are placed
and the humor that makes them laugh. At this point, GTA has honed the
formula of what works to the point that almost any version of the game
that enacts a deep world with dark humor will be well received. GTA has
crafted a niche for itself based on the ability to create an interesting, immer-
sive game world where players know they will be amused and able to focus
on the 'fun' in the game. The fl ourishes in game design function rhetori-
cally to diminish the elements of the game that ring alarms for external
critics concerned about sex and violence.
The GTA series reached a critical pinnacle with GTA IV . A substantial
piece of what makes this version of the game distinct is the presence of
Niko, who gamers are clearly encouraged to imagine as other. In part, the
characters in GTA can do bad things because they are not us. They are
people in a world similar to ours, but dif erent enough that players are not
encouraged to think too much about the relationships between the world
represented in the game and the world that exists outside of it. The satiri-
cal references within the game may encourage some refl ection, but always
through humor. By presenting Niko as an other, fresh of the boat and not
from Liberty City, the simulated world of GTA takes on an additional level
of cognitive distance. Niko is fun to play in part because we need not ask
questions about whether or not a character like Niko could be created from
'one of us.' Niko is the product of both a traumatic war and an immigrant's
displacement in a new land. Niko would play quite dif erently had he been
constructed as a middle child from middle America who moved to Liberty
City to go to college, only to fall into a life of crime. A character like that
would make the world of GTA feel too real, too close to too many of the
people playing, which would disturb the fantasy of the game. The ef ort
to make a native of Liberty City the focal character in GTA IV: The Lost
and Damned led to the construction of an unlikeable character that players
reviled. Casting the violence into the background of the game is not solely
the role of the humor within the game, as a distant protagonist helps carry
part of the burden to draw players into the game. The most troubling part
of GTA is not that one can shoot people, but that one commits wanton
violence as someone who is carefully coded as dif erent from the person
 
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