Take “Pulp Fiction”, the movie. Imagine that you are in the film and that you play three characters, all screwed up, all criminals, in a city, Los Santos, which looks like two drops of water to Los Angeles. The strength of GTA is a very well written story but also the possibility of playing with friends, as Florent explains. He is a pharmacist in Namur, he still occasionally plays GTA, nine years after its release, he explains why: “It is an open world, it could be what you could call a sandbox. There are plenty of little activities, you don’t have to do the same thing all the time. You can simply play tennis against another player. You have car races, you have confrontations via weapons, because GTA is a bit like that too. When you create a character, you don’t fit into a mold, it’s not directive like other games. There is a great deal of freedom and at the same time, which is weird, it can be closer to the real world because you have a certain limitation by the economic system. You will still have to accumulate money to be able to reinvest afterward. For example when you have a robbery, you have to spend money to be able to carry out the robbery.“
Besides the economic system, the jeu tries to stick to real life, in all its quirks, with real social criticism. This is explained by Olivier Mauco. He is a doctor of political science, author of a book on GTA, researcher, teacher and creator of video games: “It is the best-selling cultural property and at the same time one of the most critical of the consumer society, of entertainment, of the media. That’s what’s quite interesting: in the end, you don’t have to be obsequious to find the greatest number of people, but on the contrary you can be completely cynical, critical, play all that out. We play with codes, beliefs, established orders, that’s what makes the power of GTA 5 and sometimes video games.“
And it’s true that it’s hard to find more fierce and joyful criticism of the United States anywhere than in GTA. Its unalterable success is due to all these little things, this freedom, this ability to interact as you see fit in an open world. In the same way that we regularly talk about cinema, music, TV series on our antennas, we should perhaps talk more about video games for adults. Because the gamers are there and the importance of video games is still underestimated among most people, in my humble opinion. We have no idea of the economic and cultural importance of video games.
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