The First Hour of GTA IV Is Boring and Perfect

In only its first hour, Grand Theft Auto IV breaks one of videogames' most sacred rules--every game must be fun. The first hour isn't only not fun, it's actually boring. Most of it is spent with nothing to do, no one to see, no missions to complete and all the while stuck in Brooklyn, or “Broker” as the game calls it.

I don't plan on explaining anything more than the first handful of missions, but it should be said, this will contain spoilers.

'Fun' is an empty word. It's probably better to say the opening of GTA IV is less than thrilling. The missions are bland and infrequent. For the most part you taxi characters around, grab some new clothes and go on a date, a boring date. You go bowling at the game's version of Coney Island, whose park, your date reminds you, sounding disappointed and just a little confused, isn't even open this time of year.

After each mission you drop off your cousin or date and sit in the car. You could drive, but you don't have anywhere to go. You don't have anyone to see. There's nothing at all to do. It's the perfect feeling for a game with such a vast, open world.

Veterans of GTA would probably take this chance to explore the world and create the kind of mayhem we expect from Rockstar. In fact, if you're bored in an open-world game, especially GTA, you're probably not playing it right. But this is before the game has formally taught you how to fight or shoot (you haven't even seen a weapon yet) or even, simply, how to evade the police. You could figure it out, but you'd have to teach yourself. The game won't help you.

Instead the game emphasizes your loneliness. You're given a cell phone after the first mission and a few instruction on how to use it. The cell phone is the origin of missions in GTA, either through calls or texts from someone on your contact list. In the beginning of the game, the phone is silent and your contact list is meager.

On your first date, during some awkward conversation, the woman you're out with explains why she's there with you. She's new to Liberty City too, and she's lonely.

Putting it together, the one scene, of all the classic mobster movies it could offer homage, GTA IV's first hour recalls the scene in The Godfather: Part II, when the young Vito Corleone steps off the boat onto Ellis Island. This is when we watch him wait in an immigration line, when the immigration authority discovers he has tuberculosis and quarantines him. We last see Vito the child in a room, alone, with nothing to do but sit.

It's a basic trope from the stories of hard-knock immigrants, and from what I've seen so far, Niko Bellic is turning into the Vito Corleone of The Godfather II. Like Vito, Niko befriends a feckless, wanna-be thug and shows him how the real one gains power. It's in the fist and hitting harder than the toughest guy on the street. Like your first boss in GTA IV says, “might makes right.” I'm guessing I'll kill that guy soon.

But at the beginning all the game wants you to know is Niko is alone,  and it's boring. That feeling might be the easiest one for games to create. All they need is to give the player nothing. Speaking in terms of game mechanics, in the input-output, if-then statements that make videogame rules, this one is the most basic, and boredom is the simplest feeling to elicit from players. Instead of avoiding it, though, GTA IV found a way to use it to create the one thing games almost never accomplish: because you're bored, you empathize. You and Niko have the same feeling at once.

Watching a child stand in a line isn't thrilling. Seeing him alone in a room isn't fun, but in The Godfather II it was moving. It's what made that movie a classic story of the immigrant realizing the American Dream and not just the story of a crime boss killing his way to the top. It's why The Godfather can show a close-up of a man shot in the eye, or another filled with the full clips from a small army of tommy guns, or a senator covered in a dead hooker's blood, and still remain a classic. That's also why Scarface, the inspiration for GTA: Vice City, can depict equally vile scenes but never rise above a thrilling ride.

I'm still too early in the game to know if GTA IV is a masterpiece on the level of The Godfather, but with this game, Rockstar, for once, picked the right source material. Even though that meant keeping me bored.