![]() There are two car manufacturers whose names are misspellings of ’anus’, a clothing firm called “ProLaps”, and an airline called “Air Biscuit”. ![]() In this world, there’s a kids cartoon where space marines conquer the galaxy in a giant dildo. This is where GTA may be perfectly and uniquely placed to take on reality: it’s already laced with crass incongruity, its very molecules teeming with bizarre juxtaposition. He’s not funnier than a Jetski company being called “Speedophile”, though. Love or hate the man (and you shouldn’t love him), Donald Trump himself was effortlessly funnier than anyone writing lines for his Spitting Image puppet, and visibly more grotesque than Alec Baldwin in a fatsuit. At the mere prospect of what was to come, the world’s leading comedy writers were already throwing in the towel.įive years, countless crises, a pandemic, an endless string of fatuous SNL sketches, and a bizarrely jokeless revival of Spitting Image later, it’s hard not to conclude that satire is dead. Armando Iannucci (another Scottish export famed for parodying America as an observant outsider) said as much back in 2016 when asked about the prospect of a post-coalition revival of The Thick of It: "I now find the political landscape so alien and awful that it’s hard to match the waves of cynicism it transmits on its own.” For context, this was said in the weeks before Brexit became a reality, when the presidency of Donald Trump was generally regarded as a remote possibility. What isn’t overblown is the existential issue that satirists of all kinds face that the real world is now absurd beyond parody. Existing somewhere in the space between them is something beautiful that only video games can do, and something innately understood by an audience which has never known a world without them. Audiences are smart enough to understand 9000 different Spider-Man continuities running concurrently people are more than equipped to make a distinction between player freedom and narrative rigidity. Hobbies: waging a bloody one-man war against the LCPD for no apparent reason.Īs an aside, ludonarrative dissonance is an overblown problem. GTA 4's Niko Bellic: PTSD suffering former child soldier of the Yugoslav Wars, in America seeking a better life. This is a series which started with silent protagonists existing only as a conduit for player agency, but grew so invested in its character arcs that it came to embody the term “ludonarrative dissonance” – wankspeak for the phenomenon of player action being incongruous to character motive.Į.g. I’m not sure it even works outside of Scotland.īut BAWSAQ and choose-your-own-adventure prostitution persist as heritage markers in a game universe that has, against all expectation, matured and refined over the years as the world it intended to darkly mirror degenerated into a screaming parody of itself. It’s a world in which the stockmarket is called BAWSAQ a sort of school jotter gag more likely to raise an acknowledging “hm” than a real laugh, and not exactly a deft skewering of late capitalism. Grand Theft Auto is so old that it carries its legacy jokes in the same way that Windows 11 features an MS-DOS command prompt. But evidence of its unrefined, uncouth past remains in abundance – particularly in its long-toothed mainstays. Nowadays, the form no longer has anything to prove: its legitimacy is self-evident, and needs no grasping-at-straws intellectualising. ![]() We felt inclined to defend video games as a medium back then, as it always seemed precariously balanced on the cusp of mainstream acceptance, never quite tipping over (see: blowjobs, murder). “Actually, Grand Theft Auto is a clever satire of the American Dream” is the sort of toe-curlingly obvious declaration that tiresome pseuds like me used to come out with in the early 2000s, in order to assert the artistic merit of a game in which you could get a blowjob from a prostitute to replenish your health, then murder her to get your money back.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |