Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Los Angeles, Urbanism, Videogames, Grand Theft Auto, Cities

One common complaint about the game is the small and indistinct on-screen map, though I have to say that the only real way to play GTA is to drive around endlessly, building your own mental map of the city. To me, this is just as in reality. Only tourists navigate using a map every few minutes. Games obviously shouldn’t replicate all of life’s travails — part of a game is to escape from all that — but this one aspect of forcing ‘imageability’, as Kevin Lynch described it, seems fundamental to imagining a city. Building a coherent image of the city is fundamental to GTA, and that only comes from slowly recognising all the landmarks, paths, networks, edges, longitudinal streets, cross streets, and so on. Here’s Lynch describing how one builds up images of different districts of late-50s Boston:

(T)he relative width of the streets, the block lengths, the building frontages, the naming system, the relative length and number of the two kinds of streets, their functional importance, all tend to reinforce this differentiation. Thus a regular pattern is given form and character. [From Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City [Amazon UK|US]

The same experiential approach is required in GTA, and the fictional city feels all the more real for relying on you to conjure it into existence, form and character inferred from seeing the fabric of the city, rather than being pinned down by an abstraction, a map. In this, there are echoes of Lynch’s theories in Sight and Sound’s review of Collateral, navigating the city via landmarks and distinct neighbourhoods:

In Mann’s portrait of the megalopolis, the beaches, bikinis and eternal sunshine of celluloid California are replaced by a tenuously interconnected set of zones containing black neighbourhoods, Korean nightclubs and Latino gangsters. Our journey back and forth across the city is so well mapped — with the glass spires of downtown providing a point of orientation — that no matter how incredible the plotting, one’s sense of location is always spot on. [“It Happened One Night”, Sight & Sound]

This detailed sense of location is common to Grand Theft Auto too, generated from painstaking research. According to an article in Blueprint, game creators Rockstar start with a “long, 80-person research trip, and carries on throughout the project with more trips, as the team refines new locations needed within the maps, such as nightclubs, garages and restaurants.”

Despite lifting this aspect of imaging real cities, creating detailed districts from street furniture to typography to sound design, GTA’s cities are deliberately not real, relying on a form of ‘closure’ (cf. Scott McCloud) to construct the city. Rockstar’s Dan Hauser says:

We could a real city in the game, but we chose not to. We create an approximation, an abbreviation of a real city, carefully designed to support all the visual and typographical variety we want. It’s more like a 3D set than an actual city. This games is about creating a reinterpretation of the US, a socially and visually distorted prism of the real thing … Experience has taught everybody that it’s better to make something that looks good, seems real, and carries a punchline in what it says. We try to make a world that, at first glance, seems completely normal, and then reveals its absurdity as you play it. It looks better, and works better within the medium. [“Game of Life”, Blueprint, December 2004]

This call-and-response, shuttling back and forth between fiction and reality is immensely powerful, creating enjoyably unsettling experiences. For example, GTA’s fictional LA recently pranged my recent memories of real LA in an almighty high-speed mental pile-up.

I was exploring a bit of beachfront in the game, named Santa Maria, idly driving around (in between missions, I could take my time). And I had this sudden, vivid sense of deja vu. I realised they’d recreated the Santa Monica beach almost exactly, which I’d briefly visited a couple of months earlier. I wandered around, in character, retracing my steps. Up on to the pier, on to the beach, along the curious mixture of expensive postmodernist homes and tatty old huts facing the beach. It was a very odd feeling indeed. It wasn’t exact — the pedestrian bridge spanning the freeway wasn’t there, disappointingly given its claustrophobic feel, nor were the cafes on the pier present. The lifeguard’s huts were a bit abstracted, nor were the beachfront houses exact analogues. But they were accurate gestures towards the houses that are actually there. And given the experiential nature of this imagined city, the gestural approach, requiring a certain amount of closure from the player, generated a far more powerful feeling of being in two places at once and yet in neither.

Take a look at these photos of me in the game, in ‘Santa Maria’, hastily snapped from off the telly — apologies for the quality — and compare with photos I took of the real Santa Monica, a couple of months earlier. Admittedly, without the similar construction of memories and experiences around these still images, you may not feel the same spooky resonances I did.