By day I was exhausted from making small talk at baby groups, but at night I could escape to a life of violent crime and irresponsibility

It’s 3am and I feel like a human vending machine. My daughter’s constant night feeds are keeping me awake, but not awake enough to do anything useful. So I pass the time in my preferred way. I steal aircraft. I take a sleek black jet, fly it over a sleeping city and land it smoothly on a desert strip, narrowly avoiding a wild dog.



GTA V hit the UK in September 2013, a month after my daughter was born. I have intermittently enjoyed the escapism of video games since my teenage years, starting when I completed Mario Kart on my brother’s N64 instead of revising for my GCSEs. But it was GTA V that utterly consumed me.

The main campaign mode features three horrendous men – Trevor, Michael and Franklin – as they carry out a series of violent heists in and around the sprawling city of Los Santos. I completed all that during my maternity leave. One minute I was changing nappies and preparing little bowls of blueberries, and the next I was parachuting into a military base to steal a Cargobob tactical transport helicopter.

Suddenly faced with a new and overwhelming responsibility that came with a seemingly endless list of dos and don’ts, GTA V allowed me to break the rules, mess about and act in a wildly dangerous manner.

During the day I was an exhausted new mother making small talk at Brighton baby groups, but at night I escaped to San Andreas, where I lived a life of violent crime and irresponsibility.

My double life

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grand Theft Auto V provides a vast landscape to explore and subvert. Photograph: Rockstar

GTA V is a game about shooting and driving in an expansive and densely observed caricature of southern California.

It’s an open-world game, which means you aren’t shepherded from one story mission to the next. Instead, you can take time out, explore and get involved in any of the dozens of side-quests that litter the streets like really violent tourist attractions. It was the beauty of exploring this living and breathing virtual world I fell in love with.

Flying was the most fun way to get to know the landscape, so I quickly memorised the route to Los Santos international airport and which gate would get me in the fastest, and also learned how to steal a plane without getting busted by the cops.

I loved experimenting with the controls, from practising landing small jets and jumbos on the tiny desert runways to eventually flying smoothly upside down above the rush-hour traffic jams of Los Santos.

There are three characters in GTA V to choose from, but I found myself most comfortably exploring this new world as Trevor Philips – a sociopathic weapons smuggler based in Sandy Shores, a remote desert town north of the Vinewood hills.

He has no complexity in his violence, killing without hesitation, which gave me the leeway to delve into criminality as a character so distant and detached from my real life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The game’s most interesting – and violent – character, Trevor Philips. Photograph: Rockstar

As Trevor, I could start fights with desert rednecks, hunt mountain lions, steal a jetski and take it through the sewer system, crashing it in the Los Santos river. I could buy a helicopter with rockets and target the city blimp. I could be completely reckless without remorse. Slowly, gently, the GTA world sucked me into its vast moral vacuum and the characters I controlled there gave me permission to do unconscionable things. My misbehaviour was escalating.

Freedom, permission and power

On completing the campaign I realised I could purchase an airport hangar and with it freedom, permission and power in a world of knockabout cartoon destruction entirely without consequence. This is how I found myself, months into motherhood, planning a way to shoot a jumbo jet out of the San Andreas sky.

You can blow up pretty much any vehicle in GTA – cars, luxury yachts, mountain bikes. Just buy a rocket launcher from one of the many gun stores and you’re away.

After a while, I found I could easily shoot down the airport helicopter, but this just wasn’t the challenge I craved. I’m not proud: what I really desired was a gigantic Die Hard-style explosion and multiple wanted stars. I wanted a jumbo.

The problem was no matter where I stood, day or night, from the roof of a skyscraper to the top of Mount Chiliad, I couldn’t get close enough to the flying metal birds with my rocket launcher.

There was only one thing for it. I would have to steal a jumbo from the airport and create my own opportunity. I would have to be proactive. Make my own Die Hard moment.

I broke into a craft and lugged the heavy weight of the jet into the air. Gaining height , I parachuted out landing back on the runway and standing in the huge shadow of the rapidly descending craft. Quickly, using all the deft precision I’d learned ripping off gas stations between parenthood groups, I whipped my rocket launcher out and shot a missile before the plane hit the ground.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I gleefully grabbed a screenshot, and the resulting image provided the perfect memento of the ridiculous identity I’d created in the early hours of the morning.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee Donlan/Sarah Lea Donlan

The explosion blew the wings clean off while the main body gracefully crashed, nose-first, into the airport boundary. Amid the chaos, I knew what to do: I gleefully grabbed a screenshot, and the resulting image provided the perfect memento of the ridiculous identity I’d created in the early hours of the morning. I looked down guiltily at my child, but she was, thankfully, fast asleep at my breast.

The amazing thing is, all of this adventure exists outside the plot. To me, GTA V is at its absolute best once the campaign is done. San Andreas is filled with detail, most of which is barely touched upon in the main story.

It has luscious scenery and diverse wildlife. I have been eaten by a shark, swum with orcas and even found a humpback whale singing gently off toward the upper limits of the ocean. I also have my favourite places to find peace: a sea cave on the bottom right of the map and the quiet mountain stream just north of the city. GTA doesn’t just give you permission to be irresponsible, it gives you permission to rest.

These days, I have done everything in the game, all the missions are complete, the map is entirely revealed, my jumbo is a disintegrated wreck. I have mastered all the weapons, I own every business, every vehicle I could ever want and I’m still a multi-millionaire. I’ve seen ghosts, fought aliens and skydived over mountains. But I honestly don’t think I will ever stop exploring this permissive and anarchic virtual world.

Like a lot of parents, I wonder about the role this medium will play in my child’s life. So far, she’s been uninterested apart from a few iPad titles and Abzu, a gentle arty ocean exploration sim she calls “the mermaid game”. But Grand Theft Auto is mine.

So when my baby is asleep, my daytime duties complete, the house is settling around me in the darkness, I often load it up. And there’s Trevor sitting astride the hot pink motorbike I designed for him. And I think, where do we want to go tonight?

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