I disagree that games need to have the same level of writing as a film, they're too different mediums. Films need better writing since for the most part, dialogue and story is what keeps the audience engaged for the whole show. Action scenes and jokes help, but a film without good dialogue and a poor story generally doesn't do too well.
Games on the other hand are interactive. There's so much more that they can do to keeo the audience engaged that their writing doesn't need to be as good. Not to mention games are generally at least 5 times longer than a film and contain much much more dialogue. It's near impossible to keep up a Godfather level of story and character interaction for that length of time.
The more I read you posts the more I think that your issue isn't with bad writing (because there really aren't many games that have better writing than GTA), it's that you seemingly don't like that they write stories about character that really don't have any redeeming qualities. They're just terrible people living in an already terrible society. In the OP you asked why are you playing as a character that would kidnap someone and rob a bank, and it's because the game clearly establishes that Trevor is the type of person that would do that. The game establishes that from the very moment that show you him. He's a different breed of GTA character in that he basically doesn't give a shit about anything and he does pretty much every horrible crime that you can think of. He tortures, rapes, kills, kidnaps etc. But again, the game establishes that he's the type of character that would do that. It's not out of character nor does any of it come as a surprise. Because that's Trevor. If it makes you uncomfortable to play as him or question why he was even created, then they probably accomplished their job of showing just how horrible he is.
I'm glad I can address both these post at once since it demonstrates why the writing in GTAV comes off as insipid and disparate.
Movies are written to carefully follow a two hour story, and they're scripted to characterize and build a tangible world with a tone that these characters inhabit. In mob/gangster flicks the characters will usually be the personified form of some basic human flaw, a study into what a person behaves like and how they affect their surroundings with whatever vice consumes them, and that is inherently interesting by itself depending on your tolerance (again, the morality side of the GTA debate is separate from the quality writing debate). In GTA, the writing is sprawled out over hours and hours of both scripted and player controlled sequences, but that's not solely why it falls apart. The problem is that these characters are so loosely written and defined that their violent nature just comes off obnoxiously implausible, which some people defer to call "satire", but it's really just subpar characterization. It would be fine if the game was aimed and written to appeal to fully unsympathetic sociopaths, but that's insulting your audience (I'm assuming we're all civil people [civil people able to suspend our morals for the sake of fantasy and art]).
So the other question is; is that the only facilitating mode of writing for a game like GTA that derives its fun from the mayhem? The subpar characters, made explicitly unpalatable to thematically justify the havoc the game's core elements are built to handle? That's when I say, no. It's shouldn't be necessary (or even critically admissible) to have a
game in which its cynical social commentary during gameplay becomes pervasive for their character writing as well. And this is the reason why ludonarrative dissonance is not necessarily a knock in a GTA game. There's simply too much freedom to be an asshole (regardless of how the games systemic response systems challenge or "reprimand" the player) to craft characters and storyline that fall in line with those gameplay possibilities.
Now, this is the part where people cite extreme examples to demonstrate why ludonarrative dissonance would be a poor choice. "Oh you can't go murdering people and then have a warm family moment in cutscene ten seconds later". Truth be told, you very well could. Many of those film characters had family values in spite of the atrocities they committed to suit their ends. It's part of the juxtaposition that made them palatable within the films' overall theme and purpose. That's not the only option, either, though. You don't have to go from cold murder to warm family nurturing. It's very possible to write characters with more nuanced contradictions and motives that don't fall apart the second you gain control of them again. Walter White, Nico Bellic, Michael Corleone (to a different extent). These are characters aware that what they were doing was wrong but they were in too deep (for various reasons) to reform and start anew, and there are plausible (if a bit trope-y) stories to be told within those constraints.
Either way, It's not a matter of criticizing the morality factor in GTAV, it's a matter of criticizing the quality of writing that went into that game. And understanding that any opposing opinions on this matter fall under the realm of personal, critical taste, not personal moral compass.
I believe that characters and story in certain videogames don't need to be strictly beholden to the game mechanics they reside within to avoid dissonance. Not to the extent Rockstar wrote Trevor, and to a lesser extent, Michael and Franklin.
