The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel has a nice review of GTA‘s new downloadable expansion, the evocatively named biker scenario The Lost and the Damned.

Schiesel gets it right, I think, when he observes that

All sorts of games are about visions of power, often accompanied by violence. But most titles are set far away from what most people would consider the real world….

Most designers fear… questions [about social responsibility]. Rockstar Games, maker of Grand Theft Auto, does not. The company appears to recognize that it is not necessarily irresponsible to portray the real world’s underbelly. After all, Americans love gangsters and criminals in their entertainment. Americans even like to see the bad guys win once in a while.

I’d go a bit further. Beyond “not necessarily irresponsible,” I see GTA as a reasonably sophisticated meditation on cruelty and contemporary America’s lack of empathy. The horror of the “real world’s underbelly” is hardly the point of GTA: It’s the inhumanity of its glossy surface.