Uni and work has really gotten in the way of my valuable GTA time. Thank GOD my basketball team had a bye this week, so I was allotted some solid game time (see what i did there? ;)) Unfortunately for me, my mother has taken the liberty of watching me like a hawk and dictating my life- “why does he keep swearing?”, “this language is absolutely foul”, “what the hell kind of game are you playing?”, “why did you let your sister play?!”, “why are you so bad at driving?”, “aren’t these games for boys?”… etc. MUM, PLEASE. LEAVE ME IN PEACE. All my guy mates are warranted the peace and quiet required to play this heavily addictive game, and we spend hours on end in a party chat room yelling at our TVs in unison. It’s quite sad, really. My favourite thing about these kinds of games though, is the narrative. The fact that all the missions are linked together- it may not strictly be hypertext, but in a way, i’d say it is. We complete missions, which act as a link to the next part of the story.

So reiterating my point from earlier today, yes, in a way video games are hypertext narratives. Similar to the Sims (which I find almost equally as addictive), as you are the “controller” (to a certain extent) you are able to create your own story, more so in the Sims as you create your own life and narrative. In terms of author interpretation, video games? ehhhh, not so much. There is no way that you can see the personality of the author or game designer through a video game. I agree with Adrian in the sense that the narrative is the thing with the personality- you can see within the game, or the characters in the game, that they change and develop and they are a certain way- but this doesn’t mean the author is. So, what? Just because the game has car chases, bank robberies, strip clubs, dysfunctional families and crazy killers, does that mean the author does? No! (I hope not), honestly, the only facts we can really draw from this is that the game was marketed to a certain demographic- mostly males, aged…. what, like 15-30? All we can deduce about the author is that he knows what his target audience wants. And what the audience wants, the audience gets.

No complaints here!