Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV significantly ups the ante on the virtual space it creates and the drama it realises within it. It’s another instalment in the sly and hilarious satire on American culture and its love affair with criminal antiheroes. It also exploits next-generation console hardware so well that it creates a brilliant virtual world. The level of detail and care in its parody of New York, “Liberty City”, has reached a tipping point which pushes the game experience towards something like Second Life.

Pure-play virtual worlds like Second Life have a sort of in-your-face craziness that turns many people off, but they’re fascinating to study as environments at the extreme end of virtual possibility, digital playgrounds in which people build virtual identities. Because they’re on the extreme end, they’re easy to dismiss, but it’s hard to dismiss a game launch like GTA IV. This is a mainstream entertainment product.

It may be mainstream, but it affords many of the pleasures of less popular virtual spaces. People who get into World of Warcraft or Eve Online or Second Life are spending a lot of time in a meticulously created virtual space with a powerful atmosphere – a new kind of a reality. It’s a pretty common observation that after a while you get so into the sensation of the virtual space that you enter the game simply to be in it, to savour it, rather than to do anything particular.

The affection people feel for these spaces creates so called ‘emergent’ behaviours in virtual spaces, that is, people using the game in ways its designers had never initially anticipated, such as conducting weddings or memorial services in World of Warcraft rather than racking up experience points or amassing virtual wealth.

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  Michael Parsons

GTA IV offers loads of fun things to do, from missions and mini-games to playing tag with the unbelievably violent and well-armed Liberty City Police Department, but it also offers the pleasures and consolations of a brilliantly realised virtual space. Many reviewers confess they simply find themselves wanting to drive around, listening to the great music on their stolen car, and enjoying the city. At one point quite early on in the game I found myself taking a breather between missions. I was walking down by the water, admiring the skyscrapers of a distant virtual Manhattan, watching scraps of paper blowing in the air, listening to a busker playing a saxophone, and feeling like Woody Allen enjoying the held moment of twilight in New York.

This won’t be news to anyone who’s ever really got into a massive online virtual world, but I was surprised to have this sort of experience in a huge mass-market console game. It’s an experience that separates the people who’ve got into virtual space and the people who haven’t. If you know what I’m talking about, you’ve probably got into a game enough that you’ve started to dream in it, that you feel a powerful urge to go back into it – that you feel the call of the virtual. If you haven’t, you’ll think I’m bonkers and wonder what on earth I’m talking about.

Rockstar games, the people who brought us GTA IV, know exactly what I’m talking about. They don’t need to explain it. The company’s employees rarely speak to the press – they don’t need to, as they’re quite happy to speak to people through their games. If you listen to the hilarious, pitch-perfect parodies of modern radio programming in the GTA games, it’s pretty clear they understand exactly how the media works – and GTA IV brings their satire to virtual TV stations and web pages (check out the brutal Republican Space Rangers video). However, check out this much repeated quote from an interview with Leslie Benzies, producer on GTA IV, when asked why his games seem to invoke such crazy moral panic: “There is a big fear factor here. It's the coming of the railways. It's Elvis shaking his hips. It's cars going over 25 miles an hour and making people explode.”

Too right. That sense that people are doing some crazy stuff that you don’t get has driven all the great daft moral panics of the modern age, whether around rock and roll, reefer madness or the Twist. Much of the hilariously bad and tetchy panic coverage of gaming is I suspect driven by the discomfort of non-gamer commentators who sense their own powerlessness in the face of desires they simply can’t fathom. It’s particularly embarrassing for aging hipsters who pride themselves on their great taste in modern music and their witty feel for popular culture.

People tend to get very hot under the collar when they feel the distant, curious heat of a desire that they don’t share – whether it involves drugs, sex, or joysticks. There are certain boring dinner rants about gaming (I won’t repeat them as we’ve all heard them so many times) which I think derive their red-faced, pop-eyed hysteria from a sense of powerlessness around inexplicably foreign desires. Why are the kids bunking off school to go see Elvis Presley?

There’s a great Gillian Welch song about Elvis called Elvis Presley Blues, which in her typical quiet American roots way brilliantly captures the sexual deviance, gender confusion and sheer sexual bravado that freaked out mainstream America when Elvis showed up:

I was thinking that night about Elvis,
Day that he died, day that he died.
I was thinking that night about Elvis,
Day that he died, day that he died.
Just a country boy that combed his hair
And put on a shirt his mother made and went on the air,
And he shook it like a chorus girl,
And he shook it like a Harlem queen.
He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby,
Like you never seen.

GTA IV, with its shockingly seductive and meticulously recreated virtual New York is as desirable, as intoxicating, as wicked as Elvis was to the people who first heard him. No wonder it freaks out parents. No wonder it’s condemned by law-enforcement agencies around the world. That’s sort of the point. Yet like Elvis, I’m sure it’s going to be around for a long, long time. Get a friendly gamer to show it to you. This thing’s got legs.

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Michael Parsons, now Editorial Director, Consumer Media, for CNET Networks UK, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com