1.
Last week, a friend emailed me at work with an urgent question: the computer he'd ordered had arrived, he was going to swing by Best Buy on the way home to celebrate the arrival with a new game purchase, and he needed my advice: Civilization IV, or Grand Theft Auto San Andreas?

I agreed right away that that was a big decision. Both were pretty well-reputed sequels of games that had, at some point or another, taken over both of our minds (we have, in the past, driven 300 miles to essentially spend a weekend playing Vice City-- our band has, in fact, written a song about it; and, for me, starting up a game of one of the Civ franchises essentially means opening up a portal to an alternate time-sucking universe which will devour all of my leisure time and make formerly essential things like eating and working on this website seem like irritating hassles).

There are lots of different axes by which you could judge which of the two games would be better to buy-- real-time first-person shooter vs. turn-based godlike detachment; tactical vs. strategic; satirical vs. earnest; Axl Rose cameo vs. Leonard Nimoy cameo. But, while thinking over how to advise him, I came up with the best possible axis on which to compare the games: level of crime.

2.
The Grand Theft Auto franchise is, of course, the poster child for crime-based video games. I mean, it's right there in the title. People bemoan the car theft, armed robbery, assassinations, prostitution, brawling, general lawlessness, and bad fashion inherent in the series, and they're generally right (although, one last time, people: you do not have to sleep with and kill hookers to win the game. You can, sure, but you don't have to, and by this point I'm pretty sure that Rockstar Games just leaves that in there because they know it stirs up controversy and, thus, publicity).

The Grand Theft Auto franchise is loaded with bad behavior, and it's fun as hell. These two facts are almost certainly related. My wife, whose intelligence and judgment I admire immensely, will occasionally catch me playing GTA and catalog all of these crimes. I'll nod, shut off the game, and settle in with her for a few hours of watching Tony Soprano or Al Swearengen kill people and abuse hookers on DVD. People who aren't comfortable with video games (among the over-30 set, we didn't all have the luxury of growing up with a Commodore 64) may not recognize it, but a bout of GTA offers a release very similar to the one obtained by watching The Sopranos or Deadwood: a brief entree into a world where the dreary rules that govern everyday life have been tossed out into the street.

It's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. The Sopranos and Deadwood aren't just wonderful just (or even primarily) because they dump you into Id Central-- they also offer up wonderfully-acted and well-written characters, with humor and psychological insight and innovative storytelling. GTA can't compete on that level, although it does have something pretty awesome on its side of the balance sheet: near-complete freedom of will. You get to control the misbehavior, rather than just sitting back and passively enjoying Swearengen's manipulations and gut-stabbings.

3.
Civilization, by contrast, has a squeaky-clean image. No one talks about it as anout-of-control cultural bulldozer corrupting our youth and teaching them to steal cars, etc. If Civ gets mentioned at all, it's in the context of what a great, educational game it is, and how teachers should make their classes play it so that they'll understand the forces of history.

In case you're not familiar with Civilization, let me give you a quick primer. The game starts in 4000 BC, where you control a band of settlers who can start a city (your competition consists of similar bands-- generally controlled by the game's AI, although Civ4 is pretty well-set-up to allow multiple humans to play each other, allowing you that long-dreamed-of opportunity to literally bomb your roommate back to the Stone Age). This city, once founded, can create more city-founding settlers, or military units, or civic improvements like libraries which allow you to research technologies, which in turn open up more military units and improvements. This beautiful, immensely addictive process continues through the modern era and slightly beyond: if no one has won by other means (and more on that in a moment) by 2050, the player with the most well-developed civilization (determined by size, population, technological achievements, military size, nuclear arsenal, and treasury) is awarded the victory.

But this sort of win is rare; it's far more common for someone to achieve one of the other victory conditions well before 2050. There are cultural victories, where your temples and theatres and universities and entertainment industry (in Civ4, hit movies can be counted as a national export) dominate the world. Or there's the diplomatic victory, wherein the other civilizations like you enough to vote you Secretary General of the UN (this is, of course, the least realistic of Civ4's winning scenarios; I like Khofi Annan well enough, but I'd hardly call him the winner of Earth's civilization). Or the Alpha Centauri victory, where your technological and manufacturing capacities allow you to be the first civilization to colonize a nearby star system. Or the most common types of victory, world domination and world conquest (for practical purposes, they're the same thing-- the differences do have meaning, but only in Civ game terms. The important thing is that if you set out to conquer the world, you'll achieve one of these victories, and exactly which one depends on your methodology).

It's been my experience that the vast majority of Civilization games, no matter

Not a good time to live in Madrid.

which version, end in world conquest. It's just too tempting not to give it a try. To keep the AI from rampaging across your borders, you have to maintain a formidable military. And you inevitably reach a point where, to build your spaceship for the peaceful Alpha Centauri victory, you need aluminum, but don't have any, while your poorly-armed neighbor does. And you have twenty divisions of tanks just sitting around getting rusty and eating up your national budget. And, aww, fuck it, let's see if we can't take all of these bastards down.

In the real world, I was opposed to the war in Iraq on the grounds that, at the very least, it was an attempt to trade human lives for a stable supply of oil. In Civilization, the only question when I'm considering invading a sovereign country to take their resources is, “Can I get away with it?” I think that the real-world European treatment of American Indians pretty much has to be considered genocide, but years of Civ experience have led me to develop a firm “This land is my land” policy-- any civilization unfortunate enough to start out on the same continent as me will be driven into the sea as soon as I have the slightest military edge, to prevent irritating border skirmishes in the future. I abhor pour encourager les autres gestures in the real world, but if I don't like what a rival Civ is up to and don't have enough force to take them all the way down, I'm not above sending an expeditionary force to capture a couple of their cities and burn them to the ground, just to show I mean business.

I, like any resident of the real world who thinks about this stuff, still have occasional nights where I can't get to sleep thinking about how the arsenals of warheads that scared us so much during the Cold War haven't gone anywhere; but if a game of Civ is winding down and it looks like I'm going to win on points no matter what happens, I'm prone to launching all-out nuclear strikes on the rest of the world just to shake things up.

4.
So, then. The game that gets held up as the most immoral development of the new century allows you to wreak havoc on an individual scale; the tweedy strategy-nerd game practically begs for you to commit war crimes. Your worst day as a Grand Theft Auto character would get you a few nights of national news coverage and the cover of the National Enquirer; a typical game of Civilization would get you branded as History's Greatest Monster.

And this is ok, of course, because in both cases we're dealing with imaginary situations which are completely removed from the real world. Nobody suffers here but electrons, as is the case with all of Tony's enemies/associates/friends/relatives buried in shallow graves around New Jersey.

To get back where we started: in the end, Grant bought Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. It's unclear at this point how much of a role his conscience played in the decision.