Why True Crime: New York City Doesn’t Work

As a part of my on-going research for my thesis, I have been playing a handful of games that I will muse on for the blog. As has been my experience in the past, it is a particularly bad game that inspires me to write. Today I had the displeasure of playing True Crime: New York City for a couple hours. Why did I choose the game? Well my research is on representations of the city in games and my focus is on New York City—a natural fit on the surface. The interesting thing about True Crime: NYC is that the game’s city is a pretty accurate representation of the real Manhattan. But what would seem like a technical accomplishment is actually an example of why our everyday world cannot be directly translated into game. So, besides the glaring technical bugs, bland gameplay, and trite story, why is the space in True Crume: NYC unnavigable and why is the place not compelling?

I present you with a scenario: driving along in your unmarked cop car on the highway, the police dispatcher informs you of a robbery in progress a mile from your position. Seems simple enough, right? After all, the location is practically right next to you. But the problem is that the geographic distance of the target location has nothing to do with the actual route you need to travel to get there. I found myself driving for at least a minute in the opposite direction until I found an exit I could take, and another minute until I was actually on a surface road that could take me back to where I started by the robbery. By then, it was too late–the crime had been perpetrated and the assailants escaped. 

Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City defines five elements that can be used to describe the imagability of the city: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. True Crime: New York City fails at establishing all five of these in a game context. In my previous example, I was moving along a path of travel but needed to stray from it. Unfortunately, my vehicle was unable to transfer between paths in a way that supported the game’s goals. Sure, it makes sense that I cannot drive off-road in the real world to get where I am going, but the game demands it and I should be able to do it.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a good example of how the rigid path of the highway can be broken so the player can move between districts. Driving the freeway over Los Santos, the designers included breaks in the barrier walls so that the player can drive straight off the road and fall to the roads beneath. While unrealistic, it serves the needs of the game. Paths are purposely porous in San Andreas so that transferring between districts comes naturally. 

Even comparing the representations of Manhattan’s spatial distribution in True Crime: NYC and Grand Theft Auto IV reveals how missions can be designed to accommodate the grid that is New York City. For one, GTA IV has more linear missions, so the designers can pick starting and ending locations for travel based on the availability of roads. In True Crime: NYC, however, the dispatcher does not care which direction you are traveling when assigning you the side-missions. As a result, I found myself racing down one-way streets against traffic hoping to make it to my destination on time. The traffic patterns and car control just are not up to handling this movement. Even with my sirens blaring I was constantly getting t-boned in intersections (clearly they only programmed it to affect traffic traveling in front of you). 

The problems of the space of the city translate into problems of place-making. It may be shaped like New York City, but that’s about as close as it gets. The strongest city ambience is the fantastic licensed soundtrack which features songs from a lot of NYC-based rock and hip-hop artists. Unfortunately there’s no persistent soundtrack, so getting in and out of a car changes the track, but it at least helps set the gangster-crime theme. The NPCs take the form of only a few model types, meaning it’s possible to stand in a group of pedestrians who all share the same face though different clothes. It might bill itself as a sandbox city alive and breathing, but this is just a facade. The is hardly any difference between Washington Heights and Hell’s Kitchen. Though it includes many New York City landmarks, they only serve to highlight the disparity between the real place and the place of game action. 

True Crime: New York City is a shining example of what doesn’t work in games. If a designer wants to translate a real place into game form, they need to think about the ways the player will want to navigate that space and compare that to the demands they are making of the player. The awe of traveling in an accurate recreation of New York City is diluted by  the fact that there’s no good reason to explore all the space provided. It was an ambitious project for a 2005 game, but it is clear the designers did not aspire (for whatever reason) to meet their ambition. I’m not convinced that the task is futile, but it certainly will require the full attention of a design team to be executed successfully.