"... much of Liberty City’s map is made up of direct analogues of real New York neighborhoods and locations... It seemed a perfectly logical and human impulse, to prove to myself that I was somewhere recognizable by finding the one place in it that was most recognizable to me. Yet there was no way that the game could satisfy this impulse...
... the proportions of this version of Manhattan were an optical illusion. The parts that everybody would notice were blown up larger than life; the parts that virtually no one would care about were shrunk to nothingness. Faced with this catastrophic revelation, I turned to a life of crime...
Unlike the missions, objectives and narrative elements of a traditional video game, which constitute the game itself — the things you’re supposed to be participating in and following along with in order to actually play — these same aspects of G.T.A. are more like sophisticated distractions to keep you from immersing yourself too deeply in its fictional city environment."
A Role Player Game (RPG) normally uses "missions, objectives and narrative elements" to help you explore the game's detail areas. As XX's unmet desires exemplify, game worlds modelled by a centralised design group will likely always lack good tangential detail areas. And though a game can put you in the driver's seat, more often than not you're just taking someone else's directions - or at least trying to discover ways to reach goals which someone else has established. Does this define/constitute escapism?
If it were a Serious Game for education, it might have missions based on learning particular skills, so the ends are met by the means. If it were a web 2.0 game with mash-up incentives, you might be designing missions and expanding environments, in the process learning new skills and mirroring the real-life process of building civic character.
Grand Theft Auto is MAD for NYC [New York Times]
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