Gran Turismo 5
by Polyphony Digital/ Sony
for the Sony Playstation 3


So here I am, with a copy of Gran Turismo 5 sitting on this desk, and I don’t feel like playing it at all. I wish I did, but there are so many other games to play that when I want to play a game, I don’t want to play GT5.  But I want to want to play it.


Why do I have that desire? When this game clearly fails to fill me with enjoyment, with the actual desire to whittle away my free hours by playing it, why do I feel this need to actually still feel like playing it? Part of it is merely buyer’s remorse. I plopped sixty of my own dollars down for this piece of software, dammit, I want a good game out of it.


It’s clearly more than that, though.


I’ve invested hundreds of hours of my life in Gran Turismo games (including the one-off Tourist Trophy, about motorcycles, which were rumored to be included in GT5 but are, no surprise, completely absent). If there is any series of games that I probably develop a blind “will buy the next one when it comes out” consumerist mentality for, it’s the Gran Turismo series. And yet, when I play GT5, all I do is miss Gran Turismo 1 & 2. Those games were the games I spent days playing. Those games made me happy and made me feel something in a way GT5 never comes close to. Gran Turismo 1 & 2 stopped being “only videogames”, and became:

• The tools for dealing with my loneliness. When I went to college, I found myself feeling very alone. I picked the wrong school, and I felt myself surrounded mostly by people I didn't want to even talk to. The one thing that kept me sane was my first serious relationship, who lived an hour and a half away and who I travelled to see almost every weekend. When she cheated on me and dumped me, I felt horrid. I was a pretty uptight, straight-edge-ish fuck, so drinking wasn't an option. So I played GT1. I played the hell out of it on an old Teknika TV from 1985. I drove and drove and drove. It was something i could do, some kind of silly escapism that offered a feeling of moving forward. When I transferred schools, and things got better as they eventually did, I still turned to GT1 and eventually 2 to deal with my own fucked up emotions.
  
• The things my father and I could actually talk about. My father decided, in the summer before I went to high school, that he didn't want to be with my mom any more. He didn't want to be with anyone at the time, but he eventually decided he wanted to marry my current stepmother about a year later. I was a shitty confused teenager; he was a shitty confused middle-aged man. You can see where this goes. But GT1 somehow made us talk to each other; when my dad bought me GT2 for Christmas, this only grew. It somehow made us able to be in the same room and be able to not fight with each other even if for a little while. Sure, it was a distraction, a convenient tool for avoiding the various issues we had with each other. But we could talk about it, he acting mostly as a coach about racing techniques and tunings, me acting as our driver. We grew past this, but even later in college, when I spent a summer helping him open a hobby shop after he got laid off from his job, we still played GT together (though by then it was part 3).
    

These games mattered to me somehow, but why? Is it just personal to me, to the me that was living in those years as a confused teenager/twenty-something trying to deal with moving away from home while still trying to figure out how to talk to his own father? Or is it something about those games that made me feel that way?

Gran Turismo 5 wants me to feel that, like it is more than just a game about driving some cars around in circles. GT5 wants to be my life. The real-world tie-ins, the constantly updating list of challenges, the in-game competition to become a real-world driver, the camera mode to take pictures of each of your lovingly recreated cars (or at least the 200 or so that actually got finished in time for the game to come out), all of it aimed at making GT5 more than a game about driving a simulated car.
For all of that, I never can forget that I am playing a video game. I can never lose myself in the game. Like I said, maybe the problem here is me, in that I have grown up. I gradated college and moved on from that relationship, and am soon getting married and starting that whole part of my life. I talk to my Dad fairly regularly about all sorts of things. When I play video games, I just want to play a game I can be involved in. GT5 is so determined to be more than a video game, to be some bizarre idea of a "way of life", that it misses out on being a video game. Instead, it becomes a menu simulator, so determined to let me do whatever I want that it takes me far too long to get to doing what I want.

Those menus sure are pretty, even if they are confusing to navigate and rather obtuse in what they do. Yet, for all their overly complicated design, they never feel like they are anything other than menus, like if the pause screen menus of Metal Gear Solid 3 were the main portion of the game, required you had to navigate numerous layers of them to get to actually playing Metal Gear, and somehow added a lot more load times in. For a game that takes up a big chunk of my hard drive, GT5 sure has a lot of loading, staring at screens, waiting for the game to catch up to me. The menus and the loading never let me forget that this is a video game.

At its heart, “being a video game” seems to be all that Gran Turismo 5 is even “about”. What a dumb as shit thing to think about, though. What is this racing game about? But I find myself asking it whenever I play the game. What is its reason for being here? Why am I playing it? Is this even worth doing?

This sort of basic dumbed down existential dread isn't what games are supposed to fill me with. Ostensibly, GT5 is supposed to be about driving, feeling the joy of driving different cars, maybe even racing them, though if we are being honest, Gran Turismo has never been about racing, really, but it had to be a video game, so there had to be something to do, and racing is probably the easiest thing to do with cars in a video game.

In previous GT games, it still felt like my goal was to experience a somewhat accurate simulation of driving a car. In GT5, it feels like my goal is playing a videogame. It’s a video game with numbers that go up, with lots of little numbers to play with in any number of scenarios, but it never feels like I am doing much more than playing with those numbers. Just toiling away with them, trying to configure them through the proper spreadsheet and following the exact right course of actions for the game to give me a little reward, another car to make my number of cars go up or another little bit more money to make my fake bank account go up. Maybe my A-Spec (or B-Spec if I don’t feel like actually driving) level goes up too, but all that really seems to indicate is how long I have been playing and how efficiently I have used that time. Again, spreadsheets.

Gran Turismo 5 aims to be another iteration of “The Real Driving Simulator”, but it ends up feeling like a menu/spreadsheet-based simulation of a simulator that roughly approximates what driving would feel like. The layers of separation between the player and reality in this game are almost unimagined otherwise. At its core, this is still Gran Turismo, and plays just about the same as GT always did. There are a few minor tweaks (the line from Forza shows up) and some new cars/tracks, but the core is still the same. This core game is the first layer between the player of the game and actually driving, but it is the same layer that we have in every video game simulation, and that is OK. I play games; I accept it.

On top of that, GT5 adds some immediate problems to the actual experience of racing in the problematic notion of “premium cars”. Originally, when GT5 was announced (see the appendix for more on this convoluted history), it was planned that all of the cars would have fully modelled interiors, and that car damage would be available all the time. At some point, Polyphony figured out how much extra work this would be (in their defense, probably a ton), so of the many cars available in the game, only about 200 of them have interiors/can be damaged. So when in a race, you might be in one of these “premium” cars, but if not everyone else is, damage is not available at all. I have yet to actually race in GT5 with damage on because of this. Yes, I could set up my own race outside of the main mode of the game to do this, but it is a major issue that in the main “GT Life” (very revealing title there) mode, the damage feature is completely irrelevant. So premium cars are an additional simulation layer to the races, removing the player further from the idea of actually racing by having the player debate “Is this a realer car than others? How does this change things? Why is a major feature of the game applied to only about a fifth of the game?”

So two layers away from actual driving already. When you add in the layer on top of that that is the aforementioned problematic navigation of the menus to do something simple like buy a new set of rims, and we have another (huge) layer between player and driving. I end up being so far divorced from real driving that the actual subtitle should probably just be “The Real Driving Simulator Simulating Simulation”.

As a long-time video game player, I am used to having to deal with simulation as a basic layer between me and the actual actions of the game. At their best, games let me forget this barrier, and just feel like I am there, “in the game” in so much 90’s PR speak. With each subsequent layer, each additional barrier, it becomes harder and harder to fall into thinking “I am driving this car and winning this race” and easier and easier to think “I am playing a video game that wants me to think I am driving this car and winning this race”. And when the game seems built around making me care about it and use it as an important part of my life, the dissonance becomes too much to bear, and the whole thing falls apart. Instead of just having that problem in the driving (which, the aging GT style of simulation definitely does, especially when put on a modern console), GT5 has it at each layer, in car selection, in menu navigation, and so on. Each part of GT5, despite the valiant efforts of Polyphony at “more than a game”-dom, reminds me that this is a game. This is a game of driving, but before I can get to that, I have to get through the game (with all its unique mechanics) of picking how real a car I want, but to get through that, I have to get through those menus, pointlessly complex and clearly meant to be navigated with a mouse, despite there being no mouse available.

All of this just makes me not want to play the game. All of it was present in previous GT games to some degree or another but by now, the fifth iteration of the main series on its third generation of hardware, these barriers to simulation have become so prevalent, so loud, so painful, that I can’t get past them. With each subsequent iteration of a game series (and by this I mean series that are meant to evolve, not series with sequels like say the Silent Hill games), I want the game to improve somehow, try something new, develop somehow. And yet, with GT, new features have been added occasionally, but the old problems, the old barriers to truly getting to the game have gotten worse. I shouldn’t be able to ride other cars around turns, but I still pretty much can in most of GT5.

I have changed too, I admit. I see these barriers of simulation more now than I did ten years ago. It’s just something that happened to me as I played more games. I see them even in games where what is being simulated is pure fiction. Sometimes, the barrier is what we are interacting with, and it works fine. In a tactics game where I command units (such as the recently released Frozen Synapse), all I am doing is interacting at the barrier level. The actual actions taking place are removed from my direct control, and that is A-OK. However, when a game is designed around trying to make those barriers disappear (as one could ostensibly assume “The Real Driving Simulator” is), every new barrier that pops up is yet another problem for me. I can’t get around to feeling what the game wants me to feel because there are too many things blocking me.

Despite how much I may want to want to play the game due to my own history and the previous iterations of the series, I just can’t do it. Learning to give up on a game like this is probably an important step, but it doesn’t feel right. Leaving Gran Turismo behind feels a little like leaving part of myself behind, but that part of me isn’t right any more, and that is for the better.


Appendix:

With any game, there’s some story to the development, but most of that is private and behind closed doors. Because of the prominence of the game, and Sony/Polyphony’s silly marketing methodology, GT5’s development was an amasing public mess. So without further ado, here’s:

The bizarre and entirely too convoluted history of Gran Turismo 5.
(completely optional stuff, but it helps to know when thinking of the final game)

The story of GT5 begins, for the most part, at E3 2005. Sony was getting ready to roll out the PS3, and to generate hype for the PS3, Sony rolled out something called Vision Gran Turismo. This was received largely as an announcement of GT5, but was really just GT4 running on a powerful PC, in higher resolution with more cars on the track. It was generally agreed on that Sony would be releasing GT5 on the PS3, and that was that.

GT5, however, was not a PS3 launch game. Things got very strange from here. In November of 2006, the PS3 launched, and in December, Polyphony released something called Gran Turismo HD onto the fledgling PlayStation Network. Though nobody really talks too much about this particular failed project, it is an interesting footnote to the whole GT5 saga.

GTHD had been formally revealed to the public via Famitsu in September of 2006, and was going to be a very strange project. GTHD was planned to take the series in a more "iTunes like" direction, in Yamauchi's words. Basically, consumers could either download the PSN version (with less cars/tracks, but cheaper) or buy the disc version (which had more cars/tracks, but still not all of them available). From then on, customers could pick and choose which cars/tracks to download. Ideally, this sounds like it could be neat, but it quickly became apparent how much of a money-making bullshit scheme the whole thing was. People started to run numbers. Based on the pricing Polyphony had hinted at, purchasing all the cars/tracks/expansions for the game could run well over $1,000. This too ignores the problems of racing online against people who own cars you don't, and so on. When all this was revealed, not too many people were happy about it.

Before GTHD could go on too long, the project was scrapped, and Polyphony claimed that GT5 was their new top priority. GTHD has been planned to fully launch in 2007, but since it was scrapped, all efforts were put behind GT5.

More accurately, all efforts were put behind Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, a shorter, "budget priced" (here meaning it cost $40 in the US, as opposed to the now normal $60) taste of what was to come in GT5. Prologue released worldwide in late 2007 and early 2008. For most other games, this would be called a bit-too-expansive demo, and be given away, but for some reason Sony decided that they could make money selling it, and apparently they made a pretty tidy amount; recent numbers say the game sold about five million copies. An overpriced demo sold 5 million copies. To make the delays of GT5 even more frustrating, Polyphony spent time updating and releasing new versions of Prologue, adding new cars and such to the demo, finally releasing GT5 Prologue Spec III as the final version (of a demo).

Prologue had been done similarly before, for Gran Tursimo 4, but there were major differences. In GT4:P the player could earn licenses and transfer those over to GT4, getting a head start on the final game. In GT5:P, no such head start opportunity existed. Polyphony promised players that there would be some benefit to playing Prologue, but when the final version of GT5 appeared, the only bonus players could get from other Gran Turismo games came in the form of being able to upload 100 cars from the PSP game, a game with its own convoluted history, which was originally supposed to be able to connect with GT5 in much more meaningful ways than the final product ever could.

A quick note: the Prologue had a free demo of its own on the Japanese PSN. A demo had a demo. And one has to think Polyphony Digital is somehow just laughing at us all, at this point.

When Prologue was released, it has been approximately 4 years since Polyphony had put out a complete game. It would be almost 2 more (depending on your region) until the finally released Gran Turismo 5 in late 2010.