B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

A new generation of what we still call video games allows enthusiasts to wallow in blood-splattered gore, but they are also a way for those with gentler interests to listen to music, to communicate, to explore the texture of the city. And in their complex modelling of space, architecture and urban form, they require of their creators both the literary and dramatic imagination of a scriptwriter and also the spatial perspective of an architect. They are also a powerful way to explore what design has become in the ethereal digital world that has supplanted material design.

Never previously having laid a finger on a PlayStation console, or an Xbox, I had to be walked through Grand Theft Auto IV by a very polite and infinitely patient member of the Rockstar Games team that designed it. But as an adolescent, I did have a brief, though intense, interest in model railways, which was enough for me to recognize in GTA IV the most elaborate train set in the world.

The affluent middle-aged men who are now Rockstar Games freest-spending and most numerous customers are some of the same people who a generation or two ago might have spent days on end in their garden sheds or their attics, surrounded by intricate spaghetti coils of 00-gauge track, trying to run their own railways, moving them to timetables that attempted to match the real world. It’s an enthusiasm that still exists, but is mostly the preserve of elderly rock stars of a nostalgic temperament. They build miniature worlds in extraordinary detail, full of interconnecting branch and main lines, passenger, freight and express trains. Period steam locomotives may be electrically powered, but they have connecting rods that move. The lines are controlled with colour light signals that actually work. The landscape is tamed with tunnels and bridges, and populated by architecturally exact recreations of grand terminals and modest country stations.

The digital version involves hours in the game room with a sixty-inch flat screen plugged to an Xbox, pursuing the same kind of pleasures, but with the added attraction that you get to kill people. GTA creates a world far more complex than even the most elaborate of train sets. It is, of course, still a world programmed to run on predetermined tracks, but with so many possible alternative routes that it gives the illusion of a system with free will. It is devised with enough cultural ambition to envisage a world in which making the trains run on time is not the only measure of achievement. GTA is a game that is capable of asking critical questions about the nature of the world it describes. Imagine a train set that allowed the possibility of cottaging in the station lavatories while changing trains, and you get some of the jolt that Rockstar gave gaming when it launched the Ballad of Gay Tony expansion of the GTA IV format.

The Manhattan portrayed in Grand Theft Auto is stripped down to four boroughs, and it goes by the name of Liberty City. There is no Staten Island - its suburban terrain was judged lacking in dramatic potential - but northern New Jersey is renamed Alderney, suggesting the British origins of Rockstar’s founders and a certain dry wit. The game allows you to experience Liberty City from a helicopter, a car, on foot and in the subway, or any combination of them. Liberty City may lack a third physical dimension, but it has sound and light, and an astonishing level of realism in the way in which it is modelled. It works in accelerated 24-hour cycles, so the city goes from day to night and back again, with digitally controlled traffic adjusting itself to rush hours and quiet periods. Players can marvel at the views, and at the architecture. They can, if they wish, go shopping, cruise around in a car, listening to the live radio station of their choice. And of course they get to kill. They can splatter policemen and FBI agents, professional assassins and innocent bystanders, with a range of impressively detailed weapons, from rocket launchers to AK-47s.

When government departments start talking about investing in what started out as the private concerns of pale young men with ironic stubble and black T-shirts, there is a good chance that we are looking at a once brilliantly successful aspect of Britain’s creative industries that is already past its glory days. The official attention suggests that they are on the way either to benign irrelevance, or to being overtaken by Taiwan and South Korea. What is called, somewhat misleadingly now, the video games industry is pretty much such a phenomenon. There are calls for investment in an academy for video-gamers, for tax breaks and new degree courses. Meanwhile, the string of gamers, programmers and designers who set light to the gaming boom across Britain either moved abroad, merged or closed down.

But you can see why the politicians got interested. Grand Theft Auto IV sold 3.6 million copies in the first week after its launch at the end of 2009, for which it grossed $500 million for Rockstar Games’ American owner, Take Two Interactive. Two years later, it had sold a total of twenty-two million copies. Its predecessor, GTA III, which marked the jump into realistic representation, had sold twenty-seven million copies from 2006 when it was launched. Given that Rockstar’s first iteration of Grand Theft Auto, launched in 1998, sold just 150,000 copies, it’s clear that something dramatic had happened to gaming.

Rockstar seemed like the perfect example of the emerging post-industrial economy. There was no need for geographical concentration, for factories or offices. Rockstar worked like a federation of craft guilds: the visuals come from one outpost, the code-writing from another. Because the black-T-shirt wearers, unlike investment bankers, corporate lawyers and footballers, have no apparent interest in Michelin stars, shopping for art with Larry Gagosian, or visiting the theatre, there are Rockstar Games studios in Lincoln and Leeds, as well as in Vienna and San Diego. There are signs now that the explosive growth of video games may have petered out. Rockstar’s competitors have announced lay-offs. Rockstar’s parent company reported a loss for the financial year 2012, in part because of its trouble launching Grand Theft Auto V. But it was also a reflection of the maturity of gaming, and the escalating costs of a production process that can involve hundreds of people working for two and three years at a stretch. When it was finally launched, Grand Theft Auto V - set in Los Santos and the surrounding countryside - earned $1 billion in its first three days on sale.

What made Grand Theft Auto III and IV stand out was that they really lived up to the claim that the video game was a new cultural form: somewhere between the nineteenth-century novel and the spaghetti western. It can certainly be described as a designed artefact, one which invites its users to explore urban and architectural space with a new perspective. Early cinema-goers were terrified by the experience of watching an express train coming straight towards them. Grand Theft Auto’s players are well aware that they are in no danger from the helicopter gunships that chase them around the streets of Liberty City. But they play for the sense of an immersive experience that they get, one which takes them much deeper into the picture plane than the conventional cinema can achieve.

The achievements of Grand Theft were technical, visual and literary. What made it possible were two British brothers, who may well have had black T-shirts and stubble when they brought Rockstar Games to New York. But Dan Houser had also been to Oxford. And his purchase of what had once been Truman Capote’s house in Brooklyn Heights certainly suggests that he is anything but a member of the nerd class.

The explosion of the video-gaming industry reflects many aspects of the early days of Hollywood. It has produced its own share of moral panics to match anything that introduced censorship to the film industry. There have been complaints about nudity, the sex and the violence. Like the novel, and the feature film, gaming needed its own visual and narrative techniques. Rockstar was responsible for creating them.

In Dan Houser, gaming may have found its Wilkie Collins, if not its Charles Dickens. He is a master of a new cultural form, one which has not yet fully evolved and stabilized. Just as the novel required new literary techniques to analyse the life of the mind and the internal monologue, Rockstar played a big part in the evolution from the early era of arcade games, which revolved around zapping relentless ranks of ever-more menacing aliens and spacecraft with a button, into an open game that created a cityscape or, in the case of Red or Dead Redemption, a western landscape, which allowed the player to roam at will. It was a landscape that could be experienced from multiple perspectives, rather than only the first-person view of the shooting games that were limited to a labyrinth of interlocking rooms.

Like the novel, which, no sooner had it emerged, also demanded the emergence of a new form of literary criticism, so writing about gaming has moved from the early enthusiasm of the fanzine to more traditional forms of cultural criticism. The New York Times described Grand Theft Auto IV as ‘a thoroughly complete work of social satire disguised as fun; violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, and sly’.

But for an insight into what GTA IV really represents, you need to look to more specialist critics, who examine the meta-sources of the genre. Analysis of GTA IV, on the one hand, focuses on technical questions. There are issues with frame rates that undermine the naturalism with which space is delineated, and pop-ups, which disrupt the flow of play. There has also been a fascinating discussion of the way in which players interact with the characters that populate GTA. The premise of the game is that the better shape you are in physically, and the better your armour, the better your chances of survival. But you also do better if you are part of a loyal posse. That means regular socializing with your gang members. So the game has a friends-management system. If you don’t respond to their text messages, they lose interest, and your vulnerability increases.

But the other level of discussion is on the aesthetic and spatial level. ‘A bank heist moves from bank to vault to street to subway and back into the street, shooting cops all the way, without a single pause in the action of a single screen. Everything unfolds in the impressively continuous city, without a single seam showing,’ was how one gaming critic described the technical tour de force at the heart of Grand Theft Auto, sounding remarkably like a film critic talking us through the achievement of a Kubrick or a Hitchcock. It’s also how a new generation of architects will approach the process of navigating and designing space.