It's hard to remember the first time I noticed a camera filming me in public. There was no genesis point, no camera zero that commenced the age of being conscious of having an unseen audience. They just appeared and quietly multiplied, tolerable when used in ATMs and intersections, slightly unnerving when placed overhead in offices and casinos. Today, we have implicitly accepted the fact that everything has some capacity to monitor us, from hackable baby monitors and laptop webcams to the stores of personal data tracked by Google, Facebook, and the National Security Agency.

While it's easy to identify the growth of state and corporate surveillance, it’s clear that trying to reverse it is uniquely difficult. The NSA, despite clearly overstepping its authority in recent years, still has the right court on its side, and then there's the massive data-harvesting operations run by banks, search engines, social networks, shopping sites and local governments. We can fight particular aspects, but surveillance has become so pervasive it’s hard to see how any progress could be made against the whole. Most Americans are resigned to living under surveillance of one kind or another.

But today's mainstream video games offer a different narrative, one that's both more comforting and exciting. (Resignation, after all, doesn't make for a very exciting game.) From The Sims 3 to Grand Theft Auto V, which was released last week, mainstream games have turned voyeuristic surveillance into an active part of play, a mechanism through which players infer plot details, distinguish good guys from bad guys, and make assumptions about the emotional lives of the characters they're controlling. These games create a fictional pretext that allows the player, who would otherwise be subject to these incursions in the real world, to act them out against others in a virtual world—a sort of salve for, or at least temporary respite from, the everyday hum of modern surveillance.

Grand Theft Auto V, for instance, is peppered with subtle intrusions into the private lives of its three controllable characters, offering a kind of Platonic ideal for surveillance as a form of play—neither inherently good or bad. Switching between the three characters is mostly tactical during story missions—say, switching to a character in a rooftop sniper position while another character is pinned down in a shootout on the streets below. But when the player is not in a mission, the mechanics reward voyeuristic curiosity with a variety of short vignettes to remind the player that the three characters are autonomous individuals leading peculiar lives within the game world. You may switch to Franklin, an idealistic young man stuck living with his aunt in the game's fictional Compton, and see him trying to keep his hotheaded best friend out of a street fight; to Michael, an ageing bank robber forced into witness protection, as he gazes longingly at the sunset from the Hollywood Hills; or to Trevor, the game's amphetamine-addicted psychopath, just as he’s waking up from a blackout wearing only underwear and surrounded by dead bodies.

These stolen moments last only a few seconds before players gain control, but they reinforce the sense that the player is not living through each character, but instead watching them from above, omnisciently. Here, prying into another person's private being doesn’t come with any implicit agenda other than a curiosity to know them better, to not just know the details of life but to get as close to feeling another person’s subjectivity. One watches not to judge, condemn, or steal, but to feel more intimately connected to these characters, and they in turn are surrounded by implicit and explicit signs of surveillance, from extended sequences of surveying banks, jewelry stores, and government buildings in anticipation of heists to the regular discovery of a particular radio station playing in a car that you’ve just commanded them to steal.