The Grand Theft Auto videogame series puts the player in large, semi-realistic urban environments. Despite their apparent credibility, these environments are not re-creations of real urban locales, but rather remixed, hybridized cities fashioned from popular culture’s notions of real American cities. Locality, the sense of being in a specific city, is especially predominant in Rockstar’s recreation of Miami and Los Angeles, those familiar yet fictional streets of Vice City and Los Santos. By focusing on popular culture’s mediation of contemporary American cities instead of directly mapping physical terrain, the GTA series embodies a highly playable (though geographically incorrect) translation of real places. In this context, translation refers not only to the physical treatment of each city’s local architecture and atmosphere, but also to a rendition of the spirit of these cities as they exist in popular culture. Vice City is more representative of the 1980s television cop drama Miami Vice than of the city of Miami, and San Andreas is more representative of the 1990s film Boyz in the Hood than of the city of Los Angeles. By leveraging these popular notions with existing spatial conventions, Rockstar creates an amalgam of real and mediated places resulting in hybrid virtual cities whose cultural rules prove more salient than their physical geography.

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Read the rest of this article in print in The Culture and Meaning of Grand Theft Auto