This is New York City's Brighton Beach neighborhood, an oceanside community of primarily Russian folks on which GTA IV's Hove Beach (y'know, where Niko starts out) was modeled, as you can probably recognize just at a glance.
I decided to take these snaps even though I haven't played the game in a few months. We're coming up on about four months from the release of GTA IV, and while nobody has yet formulated a scientific algorithm for the exact period of time before post-release luster-loss sets in, I think GTA IV has hit it -- actually, I think it's been in the post-release slump for some time now.
Here's how it works -- starting at about six months prior to release, the hype machine builds, reaching a fever pitch during the magical week. And in the week that follows, said highly-anticipated title is the greatest thing since sliced bread; reviewers use hyperbolic superlative adjectives, the top five Digg stories pertain to said game, it makes mainstream media headlines in spots like the New York Times or Slate (Newsweek doesn't count, because we cheat by having N'Gai).
Fast forward a month later, and the backlash begins with a strongly worded post from the blog community, perhaps one single acerbic writer who doesn't get what the fuss is all about. This, too, draws massive internet traffic, as seas of enamored fans flock to the dispute. And then, well, wait, wait, says someone else, Dissenter Zero might have a point -- and then before you know it, we're not talking "most breathtaking open-world experience EVER," but we're talking more like "ludonarrative dissonance," and things like that (these are not actual quotes about GTA IV, as far as I'm aware, but might as well be -- "ludonarrative dissonance" refers to BioShock, actually).
Now here we are four months out of the magic date and we're not even talking about it anymore, except to say, "hey, that was a pretty good game."
This is generally the career arc of major releases in our hit-driven business, isn't it? I mean, it's the anatomy of a fad in any medium -- in four months, Michael Phelps' Olympic performance will no longer be a water-cooler topic, and no one will mention The Dark Knight anymore. Part of this behavior pattern seems to have to do with buzz -- when your friends and neighbors are excited about something, anything, it tends to raise your own level of positive sentiments around it.
In other words, perhaps some of us were more excited that our friends were excited about GTA IV than we were about the game itself; we weren't so much impressed with the title as we were so glad to be joining in the experience. Anyone who wasn't playing GTA IV in its release week just "wasn't a real gamer," and probably felt a touch resentful and left out, no? These are emotional responses that have nothing to do with the quality of the game or how people felt about playing it.
Just recently, some SVGL readers cited Braid's lack of replayability as one of its design flaws. GTA IV is a game that needs not even be replayable, really -- it's so huge that you could conceivably get hundreds of hours out of it and never do the same thing twice. And yet, less than half a year later, a great many of us have just moved on to the next big thing. My impression of my friends' GTA IV habits is that they match my own -- we took a quick blow through the title and set down the controller, and stated, "okay, I've seen everything there is to see here."
BioShock went through the same fever-backlash-bottom-out, and while it's still getting mentioned nearly daily in posts and articles all over the Web (as is GTA IV, mind), is anyone still playing it? Does it still matter?
Despite games' interactive nature and their tendency to encourage the player to invent new experiences with each sit-down, are hundred-hour magnum opus titles really of value for just a couple of months, before becoming precious museum pieces, part of our cultural lexicon but no longer really playable? Do we mine from it our most favorite moments, our top tens and our design lessons largely to convey them onto the next hitmaker, for reflexive comparisons?
Is that okay?
I dunno, man. While I was snapping these Hove Beach photos, I felt a little stir of delight once again at how well GTA IV had managed to capture its New York vibe -- and realized it'd been a long time since I felt much of anything toward the title.
And that's a little bit humbling, especially since back in the day I could play Hudson's Bomberman on TG-16 for years. I'm not even kidding; years. I could play the original Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy over and over, I must have played some 16-bit platformers to completion a hundred times (Altered Beast, Legendary Axe, et al).
Why is it that the more complex games get, the less time we spend playing them?
