A good friend of mine is a conscientious gamer because he believes it’s worth keeping his hand in with gaming culture as insurance against an uncertain future. As someone who likes games and works in the tech industry, he’s pretty confident that computer-based gaming is going to improve exponentially over the next three decades, which means that by the time he retires he’ll be able to get lost in some amazing gaming worlds. His business empire may have crumbled but he’ll be able to build a new one in Eve Online. His love life may be over but he’ll be able to chase girls in the dance clubs of Second Life, and he may have lost his driving licence but he’ll still be able to crash spectacularly in Burnout Paradise.

He’s only half joking. What does it mean when we say that games are getting better. It means partly that they’re getting richer, more immersive, more convincing and increasingly good at creating the illusion of a living world. That’s really what the breathless excitement about GTA IV is about: gamers mesmerised by an ever more convincing model of the real world created with silicon. This goes right back to Douglas Adam’s famous definition of computers as modelling tools: eventually you want to use the computer to model a complete world, whole and entire, just as painters, novelists, and film-makers do.

The smart cookies over at the 1UP Show have a great special on GTA IV in which they discuss their initial reactions to the game. They nail the quality that has got people excited about the game, which is the sense that it creates a living, breathing city that you want to hang out in. They point out how the occasional small inconsistencies – such as the way your character throws away his motorcycle helmet carelessly on the pavement, only to immediately spawn a new one on your next ride – break the illusion that you’re inhabiting a real world.

The richer and more powerful the simulation becomes, the greedier you become for even more fine-grained and particular realism: one Rockstar exec once suggested making players in GTA San Andreas fill their cars up with petrol on long journeys, to the laugher of his colleagues who told him to take it easy (who wants to play “queuing for petrol”?) That may seem daft, but in the current version of the game you have to stop to pay tolls on the bridges – it slows the action down, but it adds a weirdly pleasing sense of realism.

GTA IV shakes it like a Harlem queen

Grand Theft Auto is cracking game, which deserves great reviews, not daft moral panic. It’s also a remarkable virtual world

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  Michael Parsons

What’s happening is that we’re attacking the problem of world simulation from a number of angles. There are flatter online worlds like Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel, and much more immersive, vivid stylised worlds like World of Warcraft. There are complete sandbox worlds like Second Life, and slick, incredibly detailed gaming worlds like the cities of the Grand Theft Auto universe. They all take slightly different approaches, but they’re all in the same business.

They’re trying to move people’s minds out of this realm and into another. Right now they’re doing so in the context of gaming, but as the 1UP’s commentators point out, these worlds are becoming so compelling that you can imagine all sorts of other uses – imagine someone taking the GTA engine and using it to build a model of Rome, so that you could sneak a quick walk around the Vatican during your lunch hour. Imagine being able to pop into a simulation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York for a quick, virtual high-culture hit (no automatic weapons allowed).

More importantly, what would it be like to get the chance to go in a virtual time machine when you’re 80 and walk around a simulation of the city or town you grew up in when you were 20? Much of the pleasure of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was the nostalgia inspired by its Back to the Future journey to the 1980s, providing the same guilty pleasure as a DJ playing tunes from 20 years ago. I can imagine sneaking off from a game of bingo in whatever grim rest home I end up in, popping in some software, and getting a chance to explore New York in the 1970s, Paris in the 1890s, or San Francisco in the 1960s – a stock meme in science fiction which is a lot closer to reality than people realise. It may seem a grim vision, but it sounds a lot more fun than shuffleboard. See you in the queue for meds, I’ll be the one with the gamertag on my Zimmer frame.

This is my last column for Times Online for now. Many thanks for all the great feedback, and as always you can reach me at michael.parsons@cnet.com

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Michael Parsons, now Editorial Director, Consumer Media, for CNET Networks UK, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology

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