Tim Travers, Rolling Stone's movie critic has proclaimed GTA the "best summer popcorn movie" but I couldn't help but opt out of the merry round of high-fives going on over at Kotaku. For a couple reasons:
First, GTA IV doesn't really break any new ground. It's a better looking, more detailed iteration of GTA III. Travers claims it's a "wow of a start" (whatever that means) on the road to cinematic artistry. I loved what I saw of GTA IV. It's a visceral experience with excellent pacing. The game did not drag for a moment, and it's detailed universe is a huge improvement to Liberty City's literal and figurative jagged edges in GTA III. But mechanically, it's nothing new.
Secondly, and most importantly, I don't want to see games moving in this direction. I think Will Wright (boy am I in love with this fella lately) was dead on when he claimed in a recent interview that "...game designers suffer from envy...and many of them want to be film directors."
What excites me about games, is that they offer a limitless realm of open-ended, non-linear narrative, participative story-telling, and general interactivity that movies inherently cannot. The problem is, the more games try to be like movies, the more they limit their potential. Sure, GTA IV's story is among the best in the medium, but if we're honest with each other, we have to admit that one can find a more compelling story in the worst episode of CSI: Miami. Travers compares it to Tarantino and Scorsese, which makes sense in style, but certainly not substance. I only played the game for a few hours, but it was enough to find hackneyed dialogue and stereotypical characters a-plenty. That's OK, though. I don't expect games to live up to the best films in those terms. It's when they go where movies can't -- that's why I care enough about games to be writing this. GTA IV takes advantage of gaming's unique potential more than a lot of games, but not nearly as much as it could.
Christ Kohler of Wired wrote a much more thoughtful piece about the merging of passive and active media in Metal Gear Solid 4 yesterday. He goes easy on MGS4's long cutscenes because they're so gall durn fun to watch. Kohler is careful to point out that he doesn't think movies squeezed into games is the future of the medium, but he claims that good cutscenes can improve a game. Fair enough, but they certainly don't warrant all these think pieces.