GTA IV Trailer Inflames Big Apple Politicians

GP writes "The GTA4 trailer isn't 48 hours old yet, but NYC politicians are up in arms because the game's setting, Liberty City, is a virtual version of the Big Apple." Obviously these guys never played GTA3, since it was also set in the "fictional" Liberty City, that also felt a lot like NYC.

MOD THE TROLL DOWN!!!

MOD THE TROLL DOWN!!!

Up in arms?

They're not up in arms. Some uppity reporter went to the Mayor and the council and said, "Hey, Grand Theft Auto is set in NYC. What's your response?" And neither reponse was particularly vitriolic. Much ado about nothing.

Re:Up in arms?

Just realized.. The submitter created this story in order to generate traffic to his site. Good work, assclown.

Re:Up in arms?

Yup. Could the /. editors stop these nonsense advertisement ploys? Good lord...

Tom

Re:Up in arms?

I'd like to complain too since it will give me some karma.

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10% offtopic and 90% funny? Looks like you LOST karma!

Re:Up in arms?

This is why I never RTFA until after I post a comment.

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Uh, no.

GamePolitics.com is a site that covers video game stories that touch on politics. This is a story that was created elsewhere (like the first poster mentioned) and is exactly the sort of a story GamePolitics.com covers.

They don't need the /. traffic,

NB: Blantant Self Promotion. Ignore Story, please.

annoyance.

Oooh!

Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland.

I think I speak for all gamers when I say this would, indeed, be awesome.

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Governor of Disneyland Inflamed by Slashdot Comment [blogspot.com]

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God damnit, master cheif in the shiney light-up mouse ears we now sell is a mental image I never wanted...

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Not really, would you really want to wait in line for an hour at the beginning of each level? Red vs. Blue could probably make something of it, but I don't think it'd make a very fun game.

How terribly unfair

This city is a completely unrealistic setting for a story about petty crime, gang violence and ethnicity-oriented organized crime. This is an affront to the citizens, and an insult to its elected officials who work hard to keep it clean. Liberty City is a finest city you will ever find, and for Rockstar to continue smearing it is abhorrent. Why can't they pick a genuine crime-infested hell hole, like New York?

Ok, and?

Obviously these guys never played GTA3...

Er, really? You think that huh?

Exactly what would lead you to write a sentence where you'd seriously think it's in question whether politicians who have no understanding whatsoever of video games would have pla

Run your city and quit whining

Hey, if you're going to have your game take place in a huge, crime-infested, urine-soaked hellhole, it just makes sense to model it after a real-life, crime-infested, urine-soaked hellhole!

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The panel would prefer you use the term "peepee-soaked, heckhole."

that's not new york city.

that's washington, dc.

The reason NYC politicians are up in arms

New GTA missions include smoking in public, rampant ingestion of trans fats, distribution of black market foie gras, and preemptive spying on puppet people.

What kind of message does this send to the kids?

I was more impressed

That Peter Vallone not only knows of, but has apparently played Halo!

Seriously, this is a gigantic non-story. The two best pull quotes they could manage say nothing directly negative about the game at all.

When "Slow News Day" is way too fast

How 'bout "Dead Stop News Day"?

Meanwhile, the house committee [house.gov] on "intellectual property" ponders how to implement a licensing regime for ephemeral copies of recordings each time they pass through a computer's RAM.

Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to bitch about rejected stories or (in this case) ones that have been pending for a week... couldn't help it this one time.

Thank Goodness...

...that we have movies that only reflect the great qualities of that city. If movies showed violence, cop killing, etc in N.Y., I am sure we would see equal outrage.

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This is complete nonsense. There is no royalty required to use the "likeness" of a city. NYC doesn't even charge for shooting permits; you can literally get a permit and close down streets for a shoot without paying the city a dime. City and state governme

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This is complete nonsense. There is no royalty required to use the "likeness" of a city. NYC doesn't even charge for shooting permits; you can literally get a permit and close down streets for a shoot without paying the city a dime.

Not entirely true. The permit is free, but you have to pay for police and traffic officers that are assigned to your detail. The city decides if you need police and traffic enforcement officers. Actually closing down a whole city street involves police a

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That is absurd. The likeness of a city is not protected under any law. Do you have any proof to back up that statement?

This anecdote isn't proof, but it is relevant. Also, spoiler warning.

The commentary track on the Fight Club DVD claims that to avoid the

Safest?

I live near Chicago ( Joliet ) and travel extensively through ought the USA. "Safest"? and New York do not belong in the same sentence in my opinion. To me, New York is just NASTY. I did a job just across the Brooklyn Bridge in Williamsburg at a public housing project. The guards there leave after dark for fear of being shot.

I think one of the reasons that New York politico's don't like the New York / Liberty City parallel is that it is just to close to home, and NYC really is very similar to the virtual world inside GTA.

Chicago is a much nicer, safer, cleaner and just better city than New York. Notice that game makers don't generally use it.

Cheers

 

Re:Safest?

Chicago's a much nicer place than New York in a lot of ways, and even more forward-thinking—the greenroofs movement in private development, for example—but New York is still the safest big city [google.com] in the country according to the FBI's comprehensive crime statistics, as it has been for many years. It's safer than most suburbs too, for that matter, thanks to its population density.

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You can thank former mayor juliani (however it is spelled)for that.

I remember going into NYC back in the early 90's and it was scary. You could see a difference after he became mayor and this difference was more rvident the more the news stations complaine

Re:Safest?

You can thank former mayor juliani (however it is spelled)for that.

Crime was dropping before Giuliani took office. And it's dropped faster under Bloomberg than it did under Giuliani.

Crime dropped *nationwide* while Giuliani was in office, largely as a result of Bill Clinton's initiatives in both crime prevention (through educational programs, etc.) and in enforcement (100,000 new officers nationwide for community policing, of which about 5,000 ended up in NYC - that's 5,000 cops walking the beat that the city never had before, and Giuliani had nothing to do with them).

I guess he created a floating precinct idea were an entire police station was mobile and could be located where ever the need for extra enforcement popped up in less then 24 hours.

There's no such thing as a "floating precinct". William Bratton and his lieutenants came up with most of the ideas that lowered crime, but the two biggest things that you can credit from an enforcement standpoint are just those 5,000 extra cops and the computerized COMPSTAT crime tracking system that was both devised and implemented by deputy commissioner Jack Maple.

Since 9/11, Giuliani gets credit for way too many things that he had little or nothing to do with. Most New Yorkers did not like him in the waning days of his mayoralty, and most credited Bratton and Clinton more with the reduction in crime than Giuliani. (I'm not sure if you can still find old gallup polls anywhere, but the polls did reflect that.)

And how did Giuliani repay Bratton for his hard work? By asking for his resignation and hiring Bernard Kerik, a personal friend with ties to the mafia, to replace him.

You're going to be hearing about this a lot more if Giuliani presses ahead with his presidential campaign.

Re:Safest?

Chicago is a much nicer, safer, cleaner and just better city than New York.

...with apparently a massive inferiority complex.

Re:Safest?

Chicago is a much nicer, safer, cleaner and just better city than New York. Notice that game makers don't generally use it.

That's because Chicago has something New York has long forgotten: Class. In Chicago, crime isn't spilling onto the streets. It's locked away in the Government itself.

If you wanted to set a crime game in Chicago, it'd have to be about stealing election votes, selling illegal drivers licenses, and collecting kick backs from major Government projects. The final mission would be to break into Meigs Field at 2AM and illegally destroy the runways (using tax-payer funded crews, no less).

In some places, it's called the mafia. In Chicago, it's called the Government.

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Umm, no. Chicago has something called racial divide. It appears to suburban residents like the OP that Chicago is safe because they only stray into very small nearly exclusively white enclaves like Lincoln Park or the Gold Coast. They never go to the s

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No, not really. There are many Hispanic neighborhoods that have similar income demographics but are generally safer.

The materialistic view of crime worked well in the 1960s when the US was 90% white and 5% black with everyone else mixed in.

Today, it's a d

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Erm, Williamsburg isn't near the Brooklyn Bridge. As I write this, from my apartment about ten blocks from the middle of Williamsburg, in a lovely, safe, neighborhood, I am somewhat confused as to what you're talking about. Plus, I'm sure Chicago's housing

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I live near Chicago ( Joliet ) and travel extensively through ought the USA. "Safest"? and New York do not belong in the same sentence in my opinion.

Chicago has roughly the same murder rate as New York, but half as many people.
Therefore, Chicago has a murd

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Safest is of course relative. In the county I was born in the only murder that happened there in years was some guy who happened to be driving through when he decided to kill his wife. That was 5 years ago.
I doubt the "safest" city in the USA can say the

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Uh... no. Chicago is about 3 times as dangerous by every stat here:

http://www.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=ne w+york&s1=NY&c2=chicago&s2=IL [areaconnect.com]

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its not that bad in ny :) been here my whole life. NYC is pretty safe overall. There are a few trouble spots but even they're not as bad as it seems. Yes there are housing projects, but dont forget people do live there, and not all of them are criminals.

Rockstar Games to NYC City Council

Thanks for the advertisement, we sure appreciate it.

*laugh all the way to the bank*

hmm

Obviously these guys never played GTA3, since it was also set in the "fictional" Liberty City, that also felt a lot like NYC

It felt nothing like NYC. Seriously, Rockstar hasn't really done a good job capturing the feel of the cities they parallel. Vic

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It isn't what you think it is like, It is what I tell you to think it is like.

I think the perspective is off by default. If rockstar really did do this, they might have issues with the game being accurate enough to plan a crime and some grieving family try

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[Liberty City in GTAIII] felt nothing like NYC.

Agreed here. As one who grew up in Nu Yawk, I'm hard pressed to think of a single feature in that game's Liberty City that was reminiscent of the city in any way. It was very much a generic Hill Street Blues [wikipedia.org]

Sequel idea

Set it in the Greater Toronto Area next time! GTA: GTA. ... anyone?

Good thing it wasn't Boston

If Rockstar had set IV in a virtual Boston, there's no telling /what/ the city government might have done. Detonate game boxes because they might be bombs, probably.

Deus Ex?

Wasn't "Liberty City" the name used for New York in Deus Ex?

And yet, Activison is off the hook?

There was a game called "True Crime: NYC" that has frickin NYC in the title, that was a GTA-like game. I don't see anyone complaining about that.

Case closed.

um...

"Obviously these guys never played GTA3, since it was also set in the "fictional" Liberty City"

um... or the first GTA, which was the original source of the GTA Liberty City? seriously, can no one remember anything more than 3 years ago?

Re:Politicians.

No one was outraged.

"Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland."

No outrage there - just a politician answering a question asked by a reporter. He was spinning the question to point out how safe NYC is. There was no outrage.

"The mayor does not support any video game where you earn points for injuring or killing police officers."

This quip shows no signs of outrage either.

Re:Wait. . .

GTA 3, VC, and SA used the same engine, and are thus from the same generation, kind of like episodic content, while still being full length games. GTA 4 has a new game engine so it's a different generation. Though this distinction wasn't really maintained in GTA 1 and 2, as they used the same engine, as well as there being another game London 1969 between them.

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It should be controversial. What's so special about police officers? Why doesn't his lack of support extend to any game where you kill people?