Eventually I touched down in a Times Square that was appropriately cluttered with hypnotic neon advertisements for things I could not really buy, and populated, sparsely, with pedestrians who carried on cellphone conversations, sketched portraits of passers-by and played the saxophone in return for loose change. When I walked into a greasy all-night burger joint, a cashier greeted me with an appropriately indifferent “What?” But when I crossed the street against the light upon exiting, cars actually stopped for me (though they honked their horns).

Image PIXILATED PLAYGROUND Liberty City, a terrain both recognizable and jumbled in the new video game Grand Theft Auto IV. Credit... Images by Rockstar Games

Having been lulled into believing that I really was in New York, I made the mistake of trying to find my own Alphabet City apartment within the game. I walked down to Chinatown  that took only a few seconds  found what I thought was Houston Street, and made my way to where Avenue A (and my apartment) should have been. But after traversing only a block or two of bodegas and backward-hatted hipsters bobbing their heads to the beats of miniature iPods, I somehow found myself at the southern entrance to Grand Central Terminal.

It was as if some unknown natural disaster had recently touched down and attacked only the portions of New York that I cared for most deeply. My city  at least, the parts of it that I thought of as my city  no longer existed.

So I regrouped and tried to find the high-rise apartment building on East 40th Street where I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. I started at the United Nations, made my way west through a perfect simulacrum of Tudor City (with another saxophone player performing in the park) and within a few short steps had gone all the way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Foiled again!

It seemed a perfectly logical and human impulse, to prove to myself that I was somewhere recognizable by finding the one place in it that was most recognizable to me. Yet there was no way that the game could satisfy this impulse: like a comic-book superhero drawn by the legendary artist Jack Kirby, whose characters’ fists grew larger and feet grew smaller as they flew up out of their panels, the proportions of this version of Manhattan were an optical illusion. The parts that everybody would notice were blown up larger than life; the parts that virtually no one would care about were shrunk to nothingness.

Faced with this catastrophic revelation, I turned to a life of crime. I hijacked cars and crashed them into traffic poles; I raced a motorcycle through Central Park and dismounted just before the bike plunged into the lake (my way of letting the boathouse know I won’t be holding my wedding reception there). I jumped off the observation deck of the Empire State Building, just because I could, though I took no pleasure from the sickening scream my character let out, nor the sound of his jacket flapping in the wind, 86 stories to the ground.

At the urging of my human confederates, I even attempted one of Grand Theft Auto’s missions  tasks I was supposed to be completing to progress through the game properly  that required me to shoot my way through a gang of drug smugglers and steal their truckload of contraband. I did as I was instructed, but my heart just wasn’t in it. If I truly believed in Liberty City as a functioning community, how could I open fire on my fellow simulated citizens (even if they shot at me first)? How could I tread all over the social contract in a ripped-off truck full of bootleg prescription medication?