My wife plays GTA Online a couple of times a week. It’s not hard to see why she’s stuck with it. Rockstar’s endlessly unspooling criminal playground is weird and sometimes creaky, but it’s still beautiful – no other company has captured the rosy opioid bloom of LA light like this – and it’s still fun. More than anything, it’s unpredictable: whenever you go into GTA Online, you always come out with some kind of story.
Last night Sarah was busy, so I fired it up alone. I wanted to check out the new GTA Online Criminal Enterprises update. But this is important for what follows: I don’t regularly play the game myself. I watch it from the sofa a lot, but I almost never pick up the controller.
Criminal Enterprises brings quite a lot to GTA Online as far as I can tell. New weapons and new vehicles are just the start of it. There’s also a suite of story missions, though, and this is what I was interested in.
The missions form a short narrative called Operation Paper Trail. The idea is that a heatwave has struck San Andreas and oil prices have gone through the roof at the same time. Climate change and the cost of living crisis! In GTA’s world, as a government agent informs me, the oil hike is because of good old price gouging, and we’re quickly dispatched to do something about it. Not stop it, by any means, I gather. We’re off to wet our beaks.
At first when I took all this in, I felt a little pompous sympathy for Rockstar, which is surely in the awkward position of parodying a world that can seem to be so far beyond parody by this point. Imagine, I thought, what it’s been like running GTA for the last few years, having to react – to elevate and ironise – the things that have come to pass since 2013. I wondered, rather snootily: isn’t it almost quaint that GTA designers put rising oil prices down to something as easy to grasp as price gouging? Because the road they are not taking maybe leads to the idea that our zombie global economy is feral by this point – that what once made sense no longer makes sense to anyone. The global complexity of getting goods from here to there, with climate change thrown in too, means that the economy has engaged a spirit of its own – not alive, exactly, but not dead either: undead.