The political geographies of Liberty City

Abstract

Liberty City is a virtual city, created for use with several versions of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), a best-selling series of video games concerning the world of crime. Millions of people all over the world have spent large amounts of time exploring this virtual space, making the city an important cultural artefact and a meaningful landmark in the urban imaginary on a global scale. The aim of this paper is to analyse Liberty City in terms of the imagined urban political geographies nested in the aesthetics of this space in the video game GTA IV. In order to develop this analysis, a theorization of urban politics will be presented, where politics is identified as consisting of representation, government and contestation. The paper will introduce methodological notes concerning the analysis, carried out mainly on the basis of a personal exploration of Liberty City. The paper then outlines the neoliberal political unconscious embedded in the urban dimension of Liberty City and proposes final theoretical reflections on the possible relations between the urban, the political and the aesthetics of video game practices.

Keywords:

• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Liberty City
• video games
• virtual cities
• urban politics
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Anna Richter, Annalisa Colombino, Federico Clonfero, Gena Feist, Ugo Rossi and the anonymous referees.

Notes

MMORPGs means massively multiplayer online role-playing games, a genre of online games in which a large number of players interact within a virtual world. A popular example is World of Warcraft (Bainbridge, 2010).

Entertainment Software Association: http://www.theesa.com/facts (cons. June 2011).

D. Sabbagh, ‘Grand Theft Auto IV records 609,000 first-day sales’, Times Online, 1 May 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk. F. Paul and S. Orlofsky, ‘Take-Two's Grand Theft Auto 4 sales top $500 million’, Reuters, http://www.reuters.com. E. Purchese, ‘T2: Grand Theft Auto IV sold 20 million’, http://www.eurogamer.net, 10 March 2011.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto (cons. June 2011).

The approach is fully developed in Rossi and Vanolo (2012).

Particularly Atkinson and Willis (2009), Barrett (2006), Chess (2005), DeVane and Squire (2008), Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2006), Leonard (2006), Miller (2008), Murray (2005), Schwartz (2006) and the essays in Garrelts (2006).

Specifically, questions were referred to the evaluation of the perceived realism of the virtual urban space and of the gaming experience in general; the nature of the fun and enjoyment deriving from playing; the memory of specific situations and spaces/buildings in the city; the interaction with other characters in the game; the memory of public and social spaces; the memory of social problems appearing in the game.

A map of Liberty City is available at http://www.gta4.net/map

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alberto Vanolo

Alberto Vanolo is researcher and lecturer at the University of Torino, Italy, in the Department of Culture, Politics and Society.