Gawker: Kotaku

The Media Universe Of Grand Theft Auto

Nick Denton — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:34:53 EDT

Grand Theft Auto IV is not so much the apotheosis of modern console entertainment as the first post-modern video game. While it provides the usual bloody entertainment, the latest installment of Rockstar's hit title is also a fully-imagined alternate world—complete with a witty satire of 21st century media. Serbian hardman Niko Bellic, the game's central character, can browse a self-mocking version of photo sharing site Flickr ("perfect for hopeless losers who like to spend days categorizing, alphabetizing and organizing their online galleries") and scour the missed connections on Liberty City's craplist.net ("sorry for checking out your 13-year-old daughter"). Most absurd of all are the mock cable shows—though they contend with their real-world equivalents. The newscasters of Weasel News are even more rabid than Bill O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox News. If you have a friend with a Playstation, get them to show you I'm Rich, a celebrity show which in this episode profiles a cocaine heiress called Chloe Parker and as absurd as Paris Hilton. A campy British narrator—resembling that of the Daily Show's John Oliver—provides the voiceover.

Chloe Parker went from tycoon tot to tycoon twat... She's got it all. Daddy, money, and one of those tiny little dogs that rich people keep in their vagina... Her penthouse in Algonquin's exclusive Little Barkings district is a palace in the sky complete with a motor drawbridge, torture dungeon, and servants with scurvy. This is real estate we can only watch on television and masturbate over. (After the jump, the clip, and two screenshots from Liberty City's self-mocking version of the web; and here's blow-by-blow coverage of Grand Theft Auto's new release from Kotaku.)

Liberty City's Architectural Inspiration

Nick Denton — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:13:36 EDT

Restaurants and bars in Liberty City are like other landmarks based on places in New York, the real-world city on which the universe of the latest Grand Theft Auto game is based. The names, locations and designs are all slightly off, like a riddle made for trivia-night nerds. Ed Levine has risen to the challenge. Liberty City's rowdy Steinway (here's the video) is pretty clearly based on Astoria's Bohemian Beer Garden. But Levine, a food blogger, has identified possible models for half a dozen virtual eateries and drinking holes—even this bland and Starbucks-like coffee shop which he places in a gamer's version of Midtown's Rockefeller Center. [Serious Eats via Kottke]

Grand Theft Auto's Warped View of New York City

Nick Denton — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:01:06 EDT

The Liberty City of Rockstar's crime-celebrating Playstation game, Grand Theft Auto, was always based on New York. In the videogame's fourth outing next week, the city is much more fully realized—but intriguingly off-kilter. For example, Liberty City (like the metropolis upon which it is modelled) has five boroughs. Broker is the equivalent of Brooklyn, Queens is Dukes, the Bronx is Bohan and Manhattan is Algonquin. And the fifth? Staten Island was too dull, so the makers of Grand Theft Auto have annexed New Jersey, renamed Alderney. (Both Jersey and Alderney are islands in the English Channel.) As you can see from these screenshots from the game below, Liberty City is recognizable, but altered, disturbingly. Of course, the screenshots we want are from the live gameplay. The central character of Grand Theft Auto, a tough immigrant called Niko Bellic, has in this latest version of the game the ability to perform new actions, such as calling women for dates. He can also become intoxicated, causing him "to stumble and the camera to blur and bounce about". Any GTA fans: please send video of a drunk Niko on the equivalent of the Lower East Side. After the jump, spot the differences between the real New York, and Grand Theft Auto's vision of the city.

Celebrate Art, Win a Grand Theft Auto Video Game

Richard — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 10:01:15 EST

One of our delightful sponsors, Rockstar Games, has painted murals around New York City to celebrate (promote) the release of Grand Theft Auto 4, a quiet, peaceful video game about making friends. Want a free copy? All you have to do is a take a photo of yourself in front of one of these murals, then post it here in a comment. The first 20 to do so win a free copy of the game and our undying respect. The locations are:

Williamsburg - Bedford & N5th
Harlem - 112th Street & 1st Ave
Lower East Side - 2nd St. & Ave A
SoHo - Lafayette btw Spring & Prince Street

Photos of the locations after the jump. Murals will be up through 3/19. Happy hunting!

Harlem

Lower East Side

SoHo

Williamsburg

This Game Is An Entirely New And Better Internet

Nick Douglas — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:27:04 EST

My favorite kind of game is role-playing games that turn repetitive real-life work into repetitive game work with fewer rewards. I'm not impressed by PMOG, the massively multiplayer RPG played by just surfing the web. It's cute, but it's too distracting for anyone doing Serious Business on the Internet. I want to intentionally waste a few hours. The real game to play is Forumwarz, which launched early this month. It's stupid, insulting, and really damn clever. [UPDATE: I've started playing and the game is requiring me to have cybersex with a predator. This game rocks.]

In Forumwarz, you don't play something stupid like a dwarf. You play something stupid like an Internet user, who goes to forums, wreaks havoc, gets points for lowering the quality of discourse to nil, and repeats. This gives the satisfaction of acting like a moron without the repercussions of actually screwing around on the web. Your constant raiding of Internet forums like YouBoob ("You'll spend hours searching for pornography at YouBoob - but you'll never find any!") and Fanfiction Freaks builds you "cred" and helps the secret plans of a shadowy Illuminati figure who gives you new quests.

Forumwarz knows its stuff. The game references 4chan, Fark, emo kids, camwhores, Ron Paul, and everything else that makes the Internet beautifully stupid. Blogger Andy Baio, who interviewed the game's creator, says there's even a minigame riffing off R. Kelly's "Trapped In The Closet."

The gameplay is actually simple and well thought-out. The copy is clever. And because users can create new levels, the jokes don't run out. If Kingdom of Loathing wasn't witty enough for you, and you'd rather be caught watching porn than playing World of Warcraft, give it a little try.

Forumwarz! Interact with the web's greatest intelligences and wits!

I'm Not Offended, I'm Just Bored: Why Gaming Journalism Should Stop Treating Women Like Meat

Nick Douglas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:46:43 EST

I'm not saying gaming news should become as mature a genre of journalism as politics, business, and world news. It's still a new field and will always be as subjective as covering music or film, with the accompanying celebrity culture. But now that women outnumber men in online gaming, party games like Rock Band appeal to both sexes, and casual games (popular among women and adults) are the fastest-growing segment of the gaming industry, gaming journalism should be an all-inclusive genre. Why does it still pander to a core audience of straight young males with outdated misogynistic material, to the boredom and frustration of all of us who can get laid outside of World of Warcraft?

I'm not talking merely about tech and gaming journalists who write about sex and porn. Wired is doing its job when it analyzes the business of porn; Gizmodo is just playing when its staff leaves the CES tech conference for the AVN porn conference next door to poke fun at the dildos. Gaming journalism doesn't need to sanitize itself; gaming gets dirty and so should the writing. Plus, well, I wanna read about sex.

What needs to stop is the boy's club, in which women are only featured as sex objects. Forget being offended by it; I'm just sick of it — if I want titillation, I'll go to porn or, you know, an actual woman. Maybe I'll read Esquire, where they at least pretend to respect an actress's work before showing off her calves. See, it's not just that gaming journalism is obsessed with sexy women, it's that the obsession takes such an awkward form. The practice is found all over the industry. Some examples:

Porn Stars Love Video Games! Popular site GameDaily interviews porn stars about whether their boyfriends can play video games, and which game characters they'd like to get with. In the interest of service journalism, each micro-interview is smaller than the photo of the porn star above it. (No male stars, natch, but then again who ever wanted to hear something from the mouth of a male porn actor?) GameDaily also wants you to read "Babe of the Week" and "The Most Outrageous Boobs in Gaming."
Strip Halo 3: Porn stars get naked on video while playing a shoot-em-up with ugly guys.
Shooting Range: Industry leader Electronic Gaming Monthly sent a team of girl gamers to a shooting range to test their real-life skills. Am I picky for being annoyed that they were chosen for hotness?
Digital Lust: Now folded, Gamestar Magazine was an unapologetic tits-and-games mag. These "behind the scenes" photos from a holiday gift guide shoot looked so much like the start of a soft porn gallery, I felt surprised when I scrolled to the bottom and saw the model still had some lingerie on.
Gaming's kinkiest costumes: "Got a fantasy? Chances are there's a game to match," promises this gallery from Games Radar. The copy is full of "then go talk to a real girl" asides, which only make it sadder that the site is so desperately reaching for the never-touched-a-girl audience.

The industry is addicted. Like a GOP presidential candidate, they're too afraid of losing the base to appeal to normal people with reasonable options. No wonder they're losing attention to mainstream coverage (who says GQ can't review video games?) and sites like Penny Arcade, a biting comic and review site in which a pre-teen girl — the niece of one of the authors — is the maturest, most capable gamer. Gawker Media's gaming site Kotaku, says editor Brian Crecente, goes out of its way to stop boy's-club coverage. Both sites have enjoyed years of rising traffic.

Sure, it's probably unhealthy to train men to treat women as sex objects. Screw that, it's unhealthy to the industry to alienate half its audience, and likely most of the other half too, particularly the part that's not living in its Mom's basement with little disposable income. We're not aching for a flash of tit from a girl made of polygons; we're not desperate to hear that our favorite girl from Bang Brothers wants to cuddle with Raiden from Mortal Kombat. We have money, we consider ourselves normal and maybe even cool, and we want to buy video games that don't suck.

Chuck Klosterman asked in 2006 why there was no Lester Bangs of video games. Writer Clive Thompson answered the cultural critic in Wired News: A. No one would hire him; B. He's already here and he writes Penny Arcade; C. The research takes too long; and D. The medium needs a new approach. I say E: The 18-year-old future Lester Bangs of video games is at some site being forced to compile "Twenty Hottest Asses of Xbox 360."

'New Yorker' for Nintendo DS

Chris Mohney — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 13:10:32 EST

Most of these fictional tie-in games for the Nintendo DS range from lame to silly — usually just a book cover or movie poster slapped in for the briefest of chuckles, if that. However, as usual, Jason Kottke takes/kicks it to/up the next level/notch, with his "The New Yorker Draw Your Own Cover Electronic Entertainment With Noncompulsory Co perative Mode." It's the diaeresis that seals it.

Odd games [Kottke]

Second Life: Rape for Sale

Chris Mohney — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 08:50:19 EST

What's the fun of enjoying your second life in Second Life without a little ultraviolence? Click the above to enlarge. We're not as conversant with SL's moral conventions as your average nerd, but it surprises even our jaded souls that you can indulge in rape fantasies (options: "Rape victim," "Get raped," or "Hold victim") for a trifling 220 Linden dollar things. Nice that the purchase takes place in an evocative back alley, with the actual rape set in some kind of red cobblestone gimp-dungeon.

Second Life Lets Would-Be Creepies Live Out Fantasies [Adrants]

Comic Stylings of Charlie Murphy Forestall PlayStation 3 Riots

abalk2 — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:30:04 EST

Pity the poor geeks huddling together in hopes of being one of the first folks to get the new PlayStation 3. Adding to the indignity of standing on line for days (time that could be better spent masturbating to grainy images of Lara Croft), they're now becoming crime victims: A man was shot in front of a Connecticut Wal-Mart early this morning; Gizmodo runs down the rest of the craziness. Here in New York, however, the lucky throngs who were able to make it inside the SonyStyle store last evening (including Gawker videographer Richard Blakeley) found themselves in the presence of Sony Chair Howard Stringer, Ludacris, and comedian Charlie Murphy, who showed that there's humor to be found even in the sorry spectacle of aging virgins getting robbed. It's a performance you won't see anywhere else, unless some other website sent a guy with a videocamera.

1 shot in Conn. Playstation waiting line [AP]
PlayStation 3 Melee Watch: Campers Get Violent[Gizmodo]

Earlier: The Huddled Masses, Yearning for a Playstation 3

The Beginning of the End of YouTube Beginning

suki — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:50:09 EDT

Ever since the Google/YouTube buyout was at its rumor stages, Mark Cuban wouldn't shut up about how it was going to be a legal land mine, and while we have yet to see a lawsuit against Google, he has been kinda right as takedown requests are happening more frequently than pre-buyout.

But here's a new one - a user being asked to remove copyrighted material from their own website. No, not video that he uploaded, but video that he found on YouTube and embedded on a blog. A firm representing The Premier League, England's top soccer league, sent a letter of warning to 101greatgoals, telling the blogger to take down YouTube videos whose copyrights belong to the Premier League.

Now, as much as we understand the copyright issues at work, we depend on YouTube for our soccer fix and we wonder if the Prem is not shooting itself in the foot by resisting a potentially effective word-of-mouth marketing tool. But the bigger question here is what this could mean for blogs like, say, Deadspin, whose most popular content often comes from contraband footage from YouTube.

But the best part about the BBC article? It reminds readers that beginning next season, the BBC website will simulcast all matches televised on the network, so they'll have to come to the Beeb for all the highlights that would theoretically be banned from YouTube. Not even BBC is immune from corporate synergy, it appears.

Goal footage warning for website [BBC]

Correction: GoogTube most certainly is fighting a lawsuit, albeit one that Google inherited from YouTube.

Rockstar's Kinder, Gentler Video Game

abalk2 — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:10:17 EDT

So today Rockstar Games, scourge of finger-wagging politicians everywhere, unveils its newest title. The Times, whose growing coverage of video game culture is especially impressive when you consider that anyone who plays video games is functionally illiterate, describes the new entry an attempt by Rockstar to avoid controversy and further federal investigation. Well, we've yet to play the thing, but if the ads are any indication, they've succeeded admirably.

With Bully, Rockstar Looks to Beat the Grand Theft Auto Rap [NYT]

Related: Kotaku's Coverage of "Bully"

Kotaku: Live From E3

Jesse — Wed, 10 May 2006 13:47:00 EDT

Who doesn't love video games? (OK, fine; we don't. But we hear they're huge with the kids.) If you're into videogames, then you've got to be into E3, the gaming industry's huge annual confab in L.A., at which all videogame things new and exciting are unveiled and discussed. Naturally, Gawker Media is there, in the form of our pimply-faced brother, Kotaku. For all the inside scoop on the gamers' inside scoop, check out Kotaku Live From E3, all week long. With reporting, insight, and tons of streaming video, it's just like being at the L.A. Convention Center yourself, except that you don't get to eat the free food.

Live From E3 [Kotaku]