(This essay is at least partially in dialogue with Cameron Kunzelman's piece on Grand Theft Auto's Conservatism, which I largely agree with.)

Grand Theft Auto is a videogame series about cities. As someone who has played innumerable games that take place in cities and who has extensively read literature in urban studies and design for my dissertation research in the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech, I can say this with confidence. The city serves as a platform for everything that takes place within its boundaries. The essence of each game is not its characters, or its story, or its jabs at popular culture, but rather its urban structure. Everything extends from the premise established by the city.

Grand Theft Auto works because cars are brought into close proximity in a dense environment. A GTA is at its most broken when suddenly you are left without a vehicle, whether because none are spawning in the streets in the middle of the night or you rolled your pickup in the San Andreas countryside and must choose whether it's better to walk or load a recent save.

Despite its cinematic trappings, Grand Theft Auto III is actually quite similar to its top-down perspective progenitors. Keeping with its namesake, it's very much a game about cars. Unless you absolutely have to, it's usually a bad strategy to exit a car. Cars serve as weapons, smashing into other vehicles or enemies on foot. Cars act as body armor, protecting the player harm. Cars aid in traversal, collapsing the expanse of space. And the city, with its wide streets and narrow blocks, reflects this.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a game about using the city to evoke a sense of time and place. It relies heavily on media references, its soundtrack is firmly grounded in its era, and its visual aesthetic oozes an imaginary moment in Miami's history. Significantly, the game's opening portion is set along the backdrop of South Beach, which proves far more recognizable than downtown Miami. The long roads of Ocean Beach and Vice Point lend themselves to the facades of real estate and opulence. Little Havana and Little Haiti, on the other hand, provide the contrasting reality. As the player follows Tommy Vercetti's narrative trajectory, it's revealed that much more so than GTA III this is a game about managing space.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is about scale. Its three cities and connective countryside are an ode to mastering the PlayStation 2's hard- and software. It doesn't have abrupt loads like Vice City and its draw distance is usually impressive. The expanse of space focuses the narrative on mobility. First, CJ must escape (and is ultimately forced out) of the tangled web of his neighborhood and Los Santos. The countryside is then put into stark contrast with Los Santos, followed by a city that could not be any more different than L.A. San Fierro feels more like Liberty City ( fitting, then, that the trip to the East Coast is inserted here fact check'd: you go to LC in Las Venturas). The game's missions escalate in ridiculousness as it moves into Las Venturas, a reflection of the absurdity of this hyperreal dessert oasis. And yet this all leads to a return home, the result of which is lacks the denouement of a nicely packaged story impossible to tell because of the large expanse of space.

Returning to Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto IV, shifts in technology allowed for a city with greater verisimilitude that could tell that classic American story: the insignificance of the self-made man. The more realistic scale of the buildings lends a weight that compliments the heavy story told of Niko Bellic's attempt at making it in America. But unlike San Andreas, whose scale supported preposterous scenarios, the density of Liberty City acted like a collapsing star, drawing the world in on itself with narrative gravity. Constrained by greater realism, the design patterns that worked in the PlayStation 2 era games proved untenable. Of course, because the name remained the same players expecting chaos and destruction had to seek their open-world freedom in Saints Row 2, The Saboteur, and later in Just Cause 2.

So it should be no surprise, then, that the new Los Santos speaks for itself. It touts its size, a fact of which was part of a marketing reveal. Its parody of modern society is a vestigial appendage. But this itself speaks to our current moment. If you can't be Louis C.K., you might as well be Jeff Dunham. Being a good comic takes work. Being a great comic takes work and skill and luck. Los Santos isn't about work and skill and luck, though. It's about work. It's no surprise that the game is conservative, it's already too exhausted by its own existence to be progressive.

The game opens with Franklin doing his job as a repo man. Michael is effectively a retiree who is forced back into the scummy offices of tech startup culture. Franklin has to operate a tow-truck. Michael has to get the right pair of shoes to begin a mission for Lester. I played an exhausting game of tennis and then took my dog for a walk. Los Santos details an urban space unlike any other to date (with perhaps one exception). Its impressive detail demonstrates just how much cityness the game hopes to exude. It has turns lanes. It has parking spaces! Buildings are distinct from one another and its texture is evocative.

We've spent centuries detailing the adventures of the cities in novels, photographs, and films. But we've also spent centuries writing of its drudgery, mundanity, and oppression. When the game opens, Los Santos is already too big. Similarly to how I felt about Liberty City in GTA IV, I don't imagine conquering this environment: I imagine hoping to survive it. Knowing that its complex machinery could chew me up and spit me out. It's no wonder it seems illogical to purposely gain warning stars and cause mayhem—I have to help my wife and friends out of a jam. I have to navigate the tangled mess of freeways to track down a shipment of grenades that always seems to be headed in the opposite direction. In this Los Santos, all I can hope is for Franklin, Michael, and Trevor to emerge with whatever it was they want from life. And if I can steward them into something moderately positive, I will call it a job well done.