GTA:SA is amazing, not just for the great locations, but for the authentic West Coast feel, the music, and the incredible depth of gameplay. Not too long ago, you'd have needed to buy 5 or 6 different games to get what GTA:SA packs into one: 3rd person shooting, stealth, dancing, street racing, motocross racing, RPG elements, car customization, BMX, taxi driving, swimming, billiards, etc.

Hmm. Yeah, the screenshots are nice. Interestingly, GTA has always been (and continues to be) created on a relatively rudimentary graphics engine. So, it's not the number of polys that are pushing your phenomenological buttons there.

But, games aren't about the screenshots. GTA:SA's massive environments, combined with the verisimilitude you're tracing here, threatens to reduce what my colleague Michael Mateas calls "formal affordances." The game provides a host of environments, many rich in verisimilitude, but relatively few formal affordances to guide the player toward what he or she should do or why. Now, I know the freedom of GTA is what the game is most known for, but does it count as freedom to walk up to nearly every one of those monuments only to find that they are mere slabs of collision detection (pace Clive)? This was obscured or at least accomodated in the other GTA titles, largely because the environments were modeled after real settings without recreating their points of reference.

Anyway, we're playing this game tomorrow in the Georgia Tech Experimental Game Lab. I'll let you know if we come up with any additional observations of note.

I am waiting for games to take the quantam leap,
wherein total immersion occurs with a bio sensor.
This was dealt with in a comic episode of the Red
Dwarf show. Episode: Better Than life.

They missed this hotel (sorry, can't remember its name):
http://the-inbetween.com/dump/gta_deja_vu.jpg
and considering the size of San Andreas, they probably missed a lot more.

It's the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown LA. The hotel was immortalized by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in which he discusses the hotel as an example of pomo architecture.

Ian, am I right in assuming that by "formal affordances" you just mean that the graphics suggest interactions that aren't actually possible? If so, games have been doing that since Myst (and even well before then, really), though I will agree the disconnect is especially pronounced with locations appropriated from the "real world".

I think a "formal affordance" is like a clue about how you are supposed to act. For example, in platform games, you know that when you see a platforms, you know there is probably a way to get there, even if it isn't apparent, or requires a leap of faith. Basically, the form of the game gives you clues about how you play it.

I think.

In a very cursory sense, formal affordances provide you with a reason to make one decision over another (e.g. plotpoints). Material affordances give you more options to choose from (e.g. buildings to look at). You can read Michael Mateas's full discussion here.

One of the things Michael and I were talking about yesterday is the utter lack of development of character-to-character interactions between Vice City and San Andreas. The character interaction is still very rudimentary. Rockstar seems to think that adding larger spaces creates more freedom.

Hey, when and where can I get your article about paper gaming and family gaming?