via
TVR:
In case they didn’t cover it in your weekly programming, the biggest debt write-down in human history occured on 3.9.12.
SDA Announces a Credit Event Has Occurred
No need to worry, the ISDA, IMF, ECB, US Fed, Euro Zone Leaders and every other Frankenstein group have everything under control. Don’t worry that they changed their minds more times than your wife changes shoes before coming to this “solution.” This time they’re sure. Sure this is going to be a huge benefit to the Greek people. Sure the triggering of CDS’ in no threat to financial institutions and sure overall payouts will be around the $3.2B in net outstanding CDS contracts linked to Greece. And sure the exact level of payouts will be determined on March 19. I am sure not one of these sureties is accurate.
The biggest debt writedown in history, will be followed-up with additional bailout funds being given to the money masters, I mean the poor people of Greece. It’s for the children. IMF head, Christine Lagarde wants to contribute $36.4B from the IMF to the $169B upcoming bailout. Ms. Lagarde says this will be needed to avoid a disorderly default that could be destabilizing. I guess skyrocketing suicide rates and pleas from Greek parents to give their children up for adoption is considered stable. Their oppression reeks of their greed and disgrace.
The restructuring will shave $138B off Greece’s $487B debt. Non-elected Minister Lucas Papademos called the deal a “historic success”. He continued, “For the first time, Greece is not adding debt but taking debt off the backs of its citizens.” You’ll have to forgive Papademon, like his friends, he often confuses the words debt and money. I’m sure he meant that they would be taking money off the backs of its citizens. Forget about the upcoming madness with Spain, Portugal, France and finally the US. Do you really think the “net” 3.2B CDS Greek exposure is the true liability? I’ll help you with the answer. If they sold a couple hundred billion in fictitious insurance and immediately took the proceeds and levered them, say a 100x and dumped it on themselves, proclaiming, “It’s raining!”, do you think they will be able to cover the insurance claims now? I guess we’ll find out if chopping off the head of a zombie bank can really kill them.
Institutions Will Not Enter the Gold Market in Force
Worth their weight in paper – It is my belief that financial institutions will not play a large role in this gold bull market until it is too late. I want to clarify that I am not referring to central banks or Sovereign Wealth Funds that are already some of the biggest players in this bull market, especially those in the East, like China. Rather, I am referring to the investment banks, securities firms, mutual fund and insurance companies.
Comments like those made by Warren Buffet in this year’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders are indicative of the feelings of many money managers and executives in the financial sector. Warren stated gold is an asset that is “forever unproductive” and that “it [gold] will never produce anything.” The common belief is that gold is not an investment, but a speculation. This is because money managers don’t understand gold or how to value it. More on how to value gold later.
Gold doesn’t pay a dividend and doesn’t generate easy transaction or administrative costs. Many investment managers I work with don’t even consider gold an asset. The whole system is built so that each component works together – they facilitate deals, offer services and issue and sell paper for profit. It’s a symbiotic relationship between all groups that will not be broken. Gold is not part of their business model. It is for this reason that I believe institutions will not be large players in the gold market and will ultimately be severely impacted by the dollar collapse. The coming currency collapse will destroy the entire financial system. They are a ship of fools sailing off a cliff.
The Manipulation of Markets Will Only Increase Until They Don’t
We have reached the point where manipulation (aka policies by governments and government sponsored entities need to continuously increase to keep the debt-based monetary system from collapsing. Similar to the fictitious interest rates in the US Bond Markets, the gold and silver manipulations must continue until the last. No matter how you choose to store savings, you should understand the manipulations will continue until they cannot any longer. If you can understand how this will end, you will not only be able to handle the short-term volatility, but will see it as a gift.
Like a thief in the night, the financial system’s ship of fools will find their gold has been removed and they’ve thrown their silver away.
How to Value Gold
I believe James Turk has the best way to value gold. Keep in mind using this formula assumes that 5,000 years of history is not wrong and in fact gold is still money. I tend to put more faith in 5,000 years of human behavior than digits on my computer. James determines “fair value” by dividing Central Bank Foreign Exchange Reserves by Central Bank Gold Reserves. Using this calculation, the “fair value” of gold is over $11,000/oz and rising. How high’s the water Mama? $1,700 and rising.
Gold Oil Ratio (GOR
Last week I mentioned that the price of oil was dropping versus gold, as I would expect in either a hyperinflationary or hyperdeflationary depression that coincides with a financial collapse. In 2005, the GOR was 6.6 barrels of oil/oz of gold. Today, the price of oil has dropped to about 16 barrels/oz. That means I can buy almost 2 ? times the amount of oil for the same amount of gold. The historical norm is between 15-20 barrels/oz – so we are around the historical average now. I know about peak oil and peak everything theories. Whether peak oil is true or not, it’s going to feel like peak oil if your savings is in USDs.
Rising Taxes
With budget deficits running completely out of control, new and existing taxes are going to be levied on the public. We have new taxes for ObamaCare and the potential for the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2013. All told, 41 separate tax provisions are set to expire this year, ranging from personal to estate taxes. In addition, there has been a 2013 proposal that could reduce the tax benefit of employee deferrals into a qualified retirement plan for certain high income individuals. We’re talking 401Ks and the like. The proposal would tax deferrals at a rate that is the difference between the employee’s tax rate for ordinary income and 28%. It is unclear whether this proposal will gain traction, but what is clear is the direction of future taxation to support ever growing debts.
No matter how high existing taxes go or how many new taxes are implemented; there is no way to cover the shortfalls. John Williams of SGS noted that even if the US were to tax 100% of all wages and corporate profits, they could still not cover the bill. Unfortunately, this won’t stop them from trying. The whole debate about who should pay what, is a perfect example of how the conversation is being directed. We are following their script without ever questioning why. How in the world are we ever going to pay them what they demand if they keep taking it out at a faster rate? Catherine Austin Fitts put it best by saying, “A negative economy is like having a hole in the milk bucket; it’s time we fixed the hole and filled up the bucket!” I’m not just talking about a little waste. I’m referring to the outright theft by those with access and power.
There’s a Hole in the Bucket
There are many holes in the bucket. A few examples include:
1 Federal housing programs like the FHA and HUD – Time Magazine exposed a scandal at the FHA where real estate speculators used the program to make huge profits at the expense of the poor. Builders pocket millions of profits from mortgage loans that far exceeded the cost of construction. These programs allow the government to write bank checks to those involved in the contracts. In the 1980’s it was disclosed that senior HUD staff used their positions for personal gain and when they left their positions they used inside contacts to win subsidies and new contracts. In 1981 Sam Pierce became Secretary of HUD under Ronald Reagan. After leaving his office, the US Office of the Independent Counsel and US Congress investigated mismanagement and abuse stemming from political favoritism. Through the 1990s many of Pierce’s closest aides were charged and convicted of felonies for inappropriate expenditures, but Pierce himself was not charged. HUD provides about $8B a year to public housing authorities (PHAs .
In 2006, The Miami Herald ran a series exposing the following examples of fraud and corruption:
• The PHA gave developers and nonprofit groups with political connections millions of dollars to build affordable housing, but they ended up building shoddy houses or no houses at all.
• HUD gave the PHA $35 million to tear down dilapidated public housing and replace it with new affordable housing. Six years later, half the money was gone and only three houses had been built.
• Instead of selling new houses to low-income buyers, the PHA allowed developers to make sales to wealthy investors who then “flipped” them for a profit.
2 Medicare and Medicaid – Theft in these two federal health programs range well into the 100’s of billions annually. Malcolm Sparrow of Harvard University, a top specialist in health care fraud thinks it’s likely that between $200-500B/year is lost to fraud (theft between these two programs.
3 Food Stamps – $1.7B/year lost to fraud
4 School Lunches – $1.4B/year lost to fraud
5 Supplemental Social Security – $4.6B/year lost to fraud
6 Unemployment Insurance – $4B/year lost to fraud
7 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families – $1.7B/year lost to fraud
And if we wanted to get belligerent, we could mention the Wachovia money laundering scam using funds from the Mexican (CIA drug cartel. To be fair to Wachovia, they were fined 1/3rd of a cent for each dollar laundered.
The hole gets bigger yet. We’ve got to pay for their military. And I mean “their” military. The American people are not asking to drop more bombs, they are being told. It’s a complicated agenda that we wouldn’t understand, so they have to choose for us. It’s for our own good of course. If it wasn’t already clear, they like to give you a second serving. In June 2011, The White House told Congress and America why it didn’t need their approval for military action in Libya. It was because it wasn’t a war – they should just say it’s because “we say so”.
General Smedley Butler, two-time recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor put it best: “War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”
The US taxpayer is funding global military operations in a big way. We have over 700 military bases in 130 different countries. The reported military budget for the US is $700B/year. More than the top 14 countries (excluding the US combined. Including off-the-books war costs, the annual US military spending is estimated to be about $1.25T. To add insult to injury, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly stated on September 10, 2001 that “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”
There’s a hole in the bucket and it’s getting bigger. It’s a massive gaping hole of fraud and abuse, waste of hard-earned tax dollars, corporate exploitation, criminal-predatory lending and governmental tyranny. Deceit masked in thousand page bills. There’s a hole in the bucket and we need to fix it.
Market Thoughts
Walking a Tightrope
Think of the market as a man walking on a tightrope with each arm tied to a team of horses. On one arm are the natural forces of deflation, on the other are the unholy forces of central bank intervention. The horses pull harder with each passing day, making it ever more difficult for the man to balance himself. As he wobbles with volatility, the crowd wonders which team of horses will succumb. Some betting on hyperinflation, others on hyperdeflation. All seeming to understand the man must fall eventually. Given the collapse in inevitable, CBs will ensure it’s not a deflationary collapse. They’ve already stated this and back-stopping banking deposits alone will require full-speed printing (FDIC is broke too . Collapse due to a deflationary spiral is a certainty, while printing is more profitable for those in control and postpones the day of reckoning the longest, if they can just keep their team of horses in equilibrium with the
deflationary horses. In the meantime, holding a portion of your portfolio in cash is a prudent option. Of course the amount you hold in cash depends on your situation. I am extremely bearish on the U$D and still hold over 20% in cash. I accept the 10% annual hit from inflation – it is the cost of protecting my PMs and it may allow me to take advantage of buying opportunities should the man, I mean market, wobble violently.
Unlimited Dollar Swaps
On the interventionist team, the US Fed is supplying an unlimited amount of dollars to the world via the dollar swap agreements. On Nov. 30, 2011, the world’s G6 central banks (the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank [ECB], the Swiss National Bank, and the Bank of Canada announced “coordinated actions to enhance their capacity to provide liquidity support to the global financial system”. Under this agreement, The US Fed will offer unlimited amounts of US dollars to other central banks at the US dollar overnight index swap rate (OIS plus 50 basis points (about 1% . These freshly printed dollars are being lent to the CBs respective banks, so that withdrawals and debt payments can be met. These swaps are, and will continue to be offered with no limitation until at least Feb 1, 2013.
Near-Term Market Movements
The US trade gap for December widened to a record $52.5B. More importantly, we have the Greek CDS’ and incredible debt financing to deal with this month. You know what we need to solve this nagging issue of insolvency? More credit! Or debt, or money, or whatever they call that digital and paper shit they are so good at creating. The “pushers” will probably make you
ask nicely, but not too worry, the doctor’s here and he’s got his syringe ready. The new injection will have its desired affect – junky affect. I’m expecting a continued downward movement in the world’s stock markets through the end of March and into early April. Any attempts at rallying will be met with new fears over the expanding debt tsunami. It’ll be plenty choppy – the risk is on the downside. I wouldn’t be caught shorting stocks, but I consider any allocation risky. PMs and commodities will move much higher beginning in April. $2000 gold and $50 silver by July.
God Bless,
~David Freedom
Click for the supplemental editorial audio.
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The MassDevice.com Regulatory Roundup: FDA clearances, approvals, European CE mark approvals and reimbursement wins for medical device makers.
Abbott lands FDA clearance for Freestyle InsuLinx blood glucose monitoring
Look out Hollywood, the video game industry is hot on your heels, poaching your talent and raking in the money. And one game has led the way…
The fastest-selling cultural product in history was created by people you've probably never heard of. While this year's Oscars honoured films in which the movie business sweetly congratulates itself on its own birth –
The Artist,
Hugo – the most dollar-hoovering entertainment release ever is not a film, still less an album; it's a video game. Coming out last autumn,
Modern Warfare 3 – a blockbuster military shooter made by a Californian game studio called
Infinity Ward – took just 16 days to gross $1bn, beating by one day the previous record set by a film about
blue people in space. And it wasn't a freak accident. Global annual sales of video games now dwarf cinema box-office and recorded music: in 2010, games grossed $56bn, film tickets $32bn and music $23bn. (The film industry as a whole still made more, at $87bn. Even social games on Facebook are enormous business:
Zynga, the firm behind
Farmville and
Words With Friends, is responsible for 12% of Facebook's revenue. Hollywood is old-school now. And one company in particular has played a pivotal role in this media revolution over the past decade:
Rockstar Games.
Rockstar's banner
Grand Theft Auto series has sold a total of 117m copies. And it's a cute irony of cultural globalisation that the most convincing digital simulation of New York yet made was built by a gang of Scots. In 2008, the $1bn-grossing video game Grand Theft Auto IV recreated in spectacular fidelity Manhattan and its environs as the setting for the adventures of Niko Bellic, an eastern European migrant intent on upward social mobility in the criminal underworld. Later this year, Grand Theft Auto V – whose
recently released teaser trailer has, like that for a hotly anticipated film, already attracted millions of views and countless pages of badly spelled fan speculation on the internet – will move the action to a virtual Los Angeles. Yet all the main episodes in this monster fun franchise are created in the UK by Rockstar North, an Edinburgh-based studio that began as a plucky startup in the bedroom-coding home-computer revolution of the 1980s.
Once upon a time, Rockstar North was
DMA Design, founded in 1988 by a group of friends in Dundee. Their first big hit was
Lemmings, a puzzle game in which you guide a troupe of the suicidally trusting furry creatures through a series of sadistically booby-trapped levels. Lemmings became a guilty hit in offices around the country, and with sequels and spin-offs had by the early 1990s sold more than 20m. But the cartoonish violence of squished lemmings transmuted into something much edgier when DMA brought out their next game, Grand Theft Auto.
The first GTA began production in 1995 under the working title Race'n'Chase. At first you could play either a policeman or a criminal, but the team soon realised that enforcing the law was not as much fun as breaking it.
Dave Jones, one of DMA's founders, now explains: "It was just so much more fun doing all the crazy wrong stuff. There was no way we could get as much fun from being the good guys. Eventually, we just dropped the two-sided approach and fully embraced the dark side." Visually, GTA was essentially a cartoon, with a vantage point like that of the satellite view of streets you get today in
Google Maps. You drove your car around the city grid, stopping off at payphones to receive instructions – rob this bank, destroy that vehicle – and mowing down cops or civilian pedestrians, whose tiny pixilated forms would squelch bloodily under your tyres. Bonus points were awarded for killing an entire orange-robed conga line of Hare Krishnas.
Max Clifford was hired to advise on the PR for the game's 1997 release. Cannily, he advised DMA to feed the tabloids the most outrageous details possible. "It was scary and impressive how he laid out his plan to manipulate the media and the politicians," Jones says. "It culminated in a two-hour feature on breakfast TV debating the game. At this point, the politicians lambasting the game had not even seen it – I think they were disappointed when they did, given the cartoony look." The tabloids duly issued calls to ban this sick filth, the British Police Federation said it was "sick, deluded and beneath contempt", and the game became a hit. Grand Theft Auto the countercultural phenomenon was born.
At the time, DMA's games were published by BMG Interactive, a London division of the German music group, where a young Brit called
Sam Houser took a close interest. When
I talked to him on the release of Grand Theft Auto II in 1999, Houser was bullish about the controversy over the first game. He recalled talking to the New York Police Department, who apparently didn't mind that youngsters were killing cops in GTA: "Well, you know what?" he recalled them saying. "There's a lot of people out there trying to kill cops, and we'd rather they did it in your game than on the street."
Houser is now president of the New York-based game-publishing powerhouse Rockstar Games, which he
co-founded in 1998 with his brother Dan, among others. DMA Design became its wholly owned subsidiary Rockstar North, one of several Rockstar studios around the world. (
Max Payne 3, due out in May, is created by Rockstar Vancouver. And Houser himself has been the GTA games' executive producer since the third outing, 2001's
Grand Theft Auto III, which was a technical revolution for the series – it no longer offered a flat, aerial vista of the city, but a perspectival, street-level point of view. The carjacking, shooting and running-over was close-up and visceral, and yet the game was also very funny, and had a rare depth beneath the lurid mischief. "It is a beautifully designed game with glorious cascading systems," says
Ste Curran, creative director at British game studio Echo Peak and host of the video games radio show
One Life Left. "The location is fun – it looks like a city, feels like a playground – and events unfold differently on every replay. That's what keeps the game interesting."
And then, of course, there are the prostitutes. Invite one of GTA III's streetwalkers into your stolen car, and in exchange for some cash you would regain some of your "health", after a chaste interlude of bouncing suspension. One designer, however, who tried beating the prostitute to death immediately after the transaction, got his money back and kept the health increase: win-win. GTA III was released on
another wave of controversy about how it was the game in which you killed prostitutes. Some commentators pointed out mildly that you didn't have to kill prostitutes; but the designers did make it possible – as they did not, for example, make it possible to rescue kittens stuck up trees. But then, that wouldn't have fit with the game's swaggering aesthetic, what Curran describes as its "perfectly pitched Molotov cocktail of pop culture and grimy, streetwise theft and thuggery". An employee at the time, who spoke on condition of anonymity, remembers that while the atmosphere within Rockstar was playful ("table-tennis tables and beanbags and toys on the desk and all that kind of Generation Y stuff" , the top people were also "very driven". Their laudable "passion for the games" also led to office shouting matches and a "face-time culture", with people routinely expected to "stay late even if they'd finished their work".
The next game in the series,
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002 , was a milestone in Houser's ambition to make "cinematic" video games. Stylistically, it was a loving tribute to the film
Scarface and the
1980s TV series Miami Vice.
Ray Liotta,
Peter Fonda and
Dennis Hopper were cast as voice-actors. Vice City was the first successful "period" video game, showing that the medium had become mature enough to riff on a concrete historical period rather than a pseudo-Tolkein alt-middle ages or a quasi-Blade Runner sci-fi future. Dave Jones, one of GTA's original creators, had left DMA after the release of the second game ("It was not my company any more" , and is now a creative director working with several studios. So what does he think of how Rockstar brought up his baby? "I thought it was great," he enthuses. "GTA III, and especially Vice City, for me were the pinnacles of the series. They kept a lot of the non-serious side of the game, which I personally still feel is the best treatment for it."
The sequel that followed, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004 , was less whimsically amusing, but even more provocative, set as it was among drug and prostitution gangs in LA during the 1990s. It was progressive in having a black lead character, almost unheard of in video games at the time. But San Andreas also became the most notorious game yet of the series. During the game's development, as a new book on the history of the GTA games,
David Kushner's Jacked, relates, Houser had been pushing hard to feature porny scenes, including representations of "blowjobs", "dildo sex" and "whipping". He was eventually convinced by his partners that this would be commercial suicide, since big retailers such as Wal-Mart would refuse to stock it. Right before the game's launch, the offending parts from the game's complex code were hastily "wrapped": they would never appear when you played the game, but they were still there, deep in the data on the discs. Inevitably, an enterprising hacker discovered them and released on to the internet
a software patch to let other players unlock them, too. This became known as the "hot coffee" modification – so called because in the deleted scenes the main character's girlfriend invites him into her house for "coffee". Moralists on both sides of the Atlantic went apoplectic.
Rockstar's anonymous employee vividly recalls the epic all-nighter when Rockstar was scrambling to re-release a new version of San Andreas purged of the sex scenes: "Pretty much the entire company got pulled in to help with the testing process in order to get a new version of the game out as quickly as possible to appease the American censors. That meant we had to work round the clock in shifts, sleeping on sofas to sustain us through the night so we could shoot imaginary gangsters and hoodlums in the head."
When
Bobby Kotick, the amiable CEO of rival major publishers
Activision Blizzard, was asked at a 2008 industry conference whether games had to be as violent as Grand Theft Auto, he defended Rockstar. "Fifty per cent of the audience that plays games is over the age of 18," he pointed out. "We're a broad-based medium today, we're going to appeal to the broadest possible consumer base, and you're going to see all sorts of product, and that's going to include gratuitously violent product." In any case, violent games have only ever been one part of the wider video-game story. As well as the
Call Of Duty series of military shooters (which includes the Modern Warfare sub-brand , Activision Blizzard also publishes the hugely successful elf-bothering online roleplayer
World Of Warcraft. Just as with films, different video games are made for different audiences. Another big publisher,
EA, meanwhile, produces popular sports games featuring snowboarding or football and the life-simulation game
The Sims.
Rockstar, in particular, wants its games to be taken as seriously as films are. It certainly pours a comparable level of resources into production, pushing games into what Ste Curran terms a "mega-budget era". For GTA IV, say, the budget was around $100m, it took three years to create, and used a cast of 861 actors speaking 80,000 lines of dialogue. Large video-game productions now have staff (like permanent film crews numbering in the hundreds; they commission symphonic musical scores, and continue to poach Hollywood talent. (The actor
Mark Hamill, once a fresh-faced Luke Skywalker, has been
playing a blinder as the Joker in the recent Batman games. A new mini-wave of noir-ish detective games, such as the French designer David Cage's
Heavy Rain or Rockstar's own
LA Noire, is pushing the technique of "motion capture" to new heights, recording actors' facial expressions as they speak and then applying those movements to digitally created physiognomies. (This is how
Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings films was created. For the moment this has the effect of driving video games even further into what some digital aestheticians call "Uncanny Valley", a strange no-man's-land where the more realistic an artificial person looks, the eerier its niggling departures from reality feel. But David Cage, for one, has predicted that fully "photo-realistic" video-game characters will be possible in around six years' time.
So what kinds of pseudo-films are today's most successful video games? If the immensely slick Call Of Duty series were a film director, it would be
Michael Bay, all deafening destruction and comedy geopolitics. (The last two Modern Warfare games were predicated on the notion of the Russians mounting a land-based invasion of the US and Europe. If Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series were a film director, it would be
Martin Scorsese – or at least that's who it really wants to be – but it takes more than an obsessive fan's line-by-line recall of GoodFellas to make art.
Reviewing GTA IV for the Wall Street Journal in 2008, the novelist Junot Diaz, a long-time fan, ridiculed the media hype that had compared it favourably to Coppola's The Godfather. "Like the pulps that are part of its narrative DNA," he wrote, "GTA IV operates in broad strokes, crude characterization and over-the-top stereotypes."
"Video games tell stories badly," says the game designer and critic
Ian Bogost, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (He designed the Facebook game
Cow Clicker, a satire on Farmville-style games that itself became a surprise hit. Even so, Bogost says, bad game stories are "charming", and perhaps even necessarily bad: "Maybe video games are meant to help us shed our obsession with storytelling, show us all the things between the story, like wandering around virtual space and exploring it like virtual tourists."
Virtual tourism is, indeed, the aspect of the Grand Theft Auto games that has been much more influential for the medium as a whole than their gangster-movie envy. They made popular and compelling an "open-world" style. If you want to progress through the game's scripted narrative, you must accept specific missions of telegenic spatter-mayhem; but that is not all you can do. Instead, you may just wander around and soak up the sights, which these days are impressive. That video games now provide a place where you can go to relax is itself a sign of their rapidly burgeoning capacity for rich simulation. "We have all been born 100 years too early," Dave Jones laments wryly. "I would love to build and play in the kind of environments we see in movies like
The Matrix and
Inception." But, he notes, we are still in "the stone age of gaming technology". Jones's own most recent project,
APBReloaded, is like a networked GTA: the other people in the city are not scripted, artificial characters, but human beings playing over the internet. His vision for the future is like this, only more so: "I want to be playing in an even more realistic GTA-style environment," Jones says, "with 1,000 other real players in the city." And so the impish simulation of antisocial behaviour promises to become ever more sociable.
You may not have experienced a Grand Theft Auto game yourself, but you can hardly pass the day in a modern city without seeing someone playing a video game on their laptop or smartphone. And Rockstar have had a crucial role in gaining mass cultural acceptance for the medium ever since they inspired other game-makers, according to Ste Curran, to emulate GTA's "potent, lucrative blend of mainstream cool and commercial success". Now video games have indeed become as mainstream as music and the movies. We live in an age of ambient play. And perhaps it is not just a coincidence that the recent video-game trend of repurposing cities as zones of anarchic fun has coincided with developments in the wealthy real world such as
urban riots and
the Occupy movement. If so, roll on Grand Theft Auto V: we can still reclaim the virtual streets, if not the real ones.
• Steven Poole is the author of
Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (Fourth Estate, ?7.99 .
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