From GTA to GTA-like: Transformation of perspective, distortion of transgression

As part of the 2025 school year and research month, our Art and Design Research Program (PAD) is launching a new project and focusing on machinima and modding based on the game Grand Theft Auto (GTA). It is in this context that we are interested in the emergence of a new genre of game born from the possibilities offered by GTA and its links with online community practices of modding and roleplay (RP). For this analysis, we primarily based ourselves on our reading of Nicolas Bailleul's article "From GTA-like to GTA life. Towards a Videogame Social Network"[1].

According to the lexicon of the École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques (ESMA) website[2], the technical term GTA-like, which defines its video game category, is FRAAG (for Free Roaming Action Adventure Game, i.e., "free-roaming action-adventure game"). It is a genre of game that places itself as a sub-genre of the action-adventure game. However, the best definition we could give it is that these are games similar to, or even imitating, the GTA formula. What characterizes the GTA-like, in fact, is the immediate reference to GTA, through which it has been possible to lay the foundations for all games of the genre. When we talk about GTA-like, we are referring to a certain type of open-world shooter, often mistakenly associated with simple open-world games ("Open World" in English), when in fact it more precisely designates a sub-category of this genre.

To begin with, we would like to focus on the history of GTA V and its influence on the contemporary world of video games, then broaden our perspective to GTA-like in general, regardless of a specific period. First, we will ask why GTA V, released more than ten years ago (September 2013), still marks the imaginations of video games and continues to inspire the creation of more GTA-like games. We will also study what brings GTA-like games closer to the GTA license, beyond gameplay issues.

We can initially identify the main cause of GTA's longevity: GTA Online. The arrival of the latter in 2013 opens up a field of possibilities and allows the formation of a tight-knit community. Modding also allows for breaking away from the pre-established conventions of GTA: the community itself becomes a creator of forms of GTA-like. It is interesting to note that in the case of mods, some main gameplay ideas come from communities of modders who have evolved the game, to the point of making new ones emerge. In fact, before the official arrival of the online mode with GTA IV (2008), the community had already created mods like Multi Theft Auto (MTA) or SA-MP (San Andreas Multiplayer), which allowed hundreds of players to gather in the same map, with improvised game modes (races, roleplay, deathmatch, etc.). Faced with the immense success of these mods attesting to the very strong demand for a free multiplayer experience lasting in the GTA universe, Rockstar introduced the official multiplayer in GTA IV and perfected it with GTA Online in GTA V. We can observe the same dynamic for other elements (vehicle tuning, character skin customization, and even servers dedicated to roleplay that initially appeared as mods of GTA III and Vice City, then later integrated directly into the following installments of the franchise. In GTA V, anyone can host a server, modify the game, and create their own sub-stories and sub-games. But one of the most transformative phenomena stemming from GTA Online is the appearance of RP servers.

By taking over these servers, the RP communities in turn deeply transformed the GTA experience by evolving it from scripted criminal universes to real lasting social spaces, as demonstrated by Bailleul regarding the machinima Self-Made Men[3] created by Charlotte Cherici and Lucas Azémard. While originally, the GTA franchise (and GTA-like games) is characterized by open worlds centered on action-oriented missions where the player embodies a criminal evolving in a fictional city, with the rise of roleplay practices, this universe has been reinvested by communities that have chosen to appropriate it through détournement. It is now a matter of not intensifying criminal activities there, but rather simulating daily life. On full RP servers like GTA Life, players embody characters with a past, a job, an identity, and interact according to the rule "act as in real life".

This dynamic has shifted the center of gravity of GTA. From a sandbox format dedicated to criminal activities, full RP servers have become social laboratories where the goal is no longer individual success in a scenario, but the collective construction of a credible society. The community establishes its own rules, institutions, and charters, organized via Discord, wikis, and moderators, and primarily punishes off-roleplay rather than fictional crime. Thus, the universe of GTA, conceived as a violent satire of American society, is reoriented by its players towards an alternative social experience, made up of weddings, trials, concerts, or charitable events. It is precisely this process that Nicolas Bailleul refers to when he talks about (re)making community[4].

This appropriation has durably influenced the design of GTA-like games. On the one hand, the sociability mechanics integrated by Rockstar (phone, parodic social networks, then GTA Online) have prepared the ground for these community uses. On the other hand, the massive success of GTA RP, relayed by Twitch, YouTube, and events like GTA RPZ (2020), has shown that these games can become platforms for sociability as important as traditional social networks. The RP communities have therefore redefined the very identity of GTA by transforming it into a form of GTA-like: no longer just a game centered on crime and exploration, but a hybrid space between videogame fiction, improvised theater, and alternative social network.

If with RP the transformation may seem less significant than that of Mods, which allow for anything from walking on the moon to meeting SpongeBob, it is nevertheless much stronger symbolically: we almost have the base game, but with players performing roles usually assigned to NPCs, removing what constitutes the substance of games like FRAAG: a space organized around infringement and transgression. Suddenly, life is organized, and players reduce or even eliminate the transgressive possibilities related to the criminal activities of the initial world of GTA to move towards other narratives. The city has been stretched, transformed, reinterpreted, allowing as much diversity in parody, criticism, or opening up even more gameplay possibilities.

How can we talk about GTA-like without mentioning Saints Row (Volition, 2006)? Where GTA is a violent and crude world, intended as a satire of American social realities, Saints Row defines itself as a parody of GTA, which avoids these elements of realism in favor of an amplification of chaos. Thus, in Saints Row, we jump off entire buildings, do somersaults, never run out of ammunition, and sometimes even fight against aliens. Saints Row does not parody our world but pulls our reality towards total absurdity, very Hollywood-style and devoid of consequences, even more so than in a GTA. Many GTA-like games allow themselves this detour towards less realism and a less "simulation" aspect: the Just Cause license (Avalanche Studios, 2006) places us as a fighter against a dictatorship, a pretext to fight "bad guys" immediately identifiable and deploy large gameplay possibilities. We are in the context of an established order shown as objectively bad: we are the white knight, they are the black knights. This bias has allowed authors to develop large possibilities of transgressive and violent gameplay, while legitimizing this violence. From then on, blowing everything up or tying someone to the back of a car (whether an opponent or an ally) no longer seems to be an act of cruelty but an act of liberation.

If in Just Cause the political aspect is diminished, or stereotyped to lead to freedom of action without shocking, other GTA-like games more directly assert an ideology of contestation. An entire part of this type of game transports the urban universe into science fiction, and in a way into another form of criticism inherent to it: Watch Dogs (Ubisoft, 2014), one of the best known of the genre, places us in law infringement not quite as a criminal but more directly as an activist. We challenge technological and authoritarian excesses through an almost contemporary anticipation universe, here thirty years away. More futuristic works criticize, in their own way, excesses of the contemporary world: our relationship with technology for Cyber Punk 2077 (CD Projekt, 2022), one of the major references of the genre, depicting a world turned towards technological progress at any cost and authoritarianism, dominated by all-powerful megacorporations accentuating poverty and social inequalities, or Red Faction: Guerrilla (Volition, 2009), which makes us participate in a revolution against mining companies present on Mars.

Some forms of critical engagement that can be highlighted by a GTA-like sometimes come from other works of fiction, adapted into video games: this is how the series of The Simpsons[5] wants to be transgressive and subversive in its way of depicting American society and its excesses while fitting into the animation register whose codes it detourns. It is for this reason that the latter will be adapted into a GTA-like in the game The Simpsons: Hit and Run (Radical Entertainment, 2003), taking up essentially all the elements of the series in an open-world universe, with Homer as the main character, defying the law in a parodic framework of contemporary United States taken to its paroxysm. If here the universe comes from a series, it is interesting to note that cinema is, very often, a recurring influence for the Grand Theft Auto license. The latter indeed draws part of its inspiration and aesthetics from film noir, gangster and mafia films, and has numerous cinematic scenes with polished cinematography, allowing immersion in the universe. Thus, as mentioned earlier regarding Saints Row or Just Cause and their link with the B-movie series, some GTA-like games explicitly pay homage to this genre by directly taking up its style. This can be seen with the Mafia saga (Illusion Softworks, 2002), and its references to the Godfather trilogy by Francis Ford Coppola for the first opus and the film Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese for the second, and there was even a GTA-like directly derived from the series The Sopranos (1999).

It will also be interesting to note that if GTA considerably influences the world of video games, it is itself strongly inspired in return by the cinema of its time: the GTA license indeed began in the mid-1990s, a period when American cinema saw the "office movie" genre emerge. Fight Club (1999), Office Space (1999), Being John Malkovich (1999)... These films openly criticize the American system by confronting a polished Open Space aesthetic with that of raw violence. One can note the striking resemblance between the gaming experience of a GTA and the film Falling Down (1993), a notable production of the anti-bureaucracy movement in American cinema, which depicts the story of a man in his fifties, hating his daily life. The plot leads him to come into possession of weapons that have been placed in his car, this event will be the trigger for an outburst of violence legitimized as an act of revenge against a system, a posture characteristic of the characters of GTA. This observation leads us to consider GTA and its GTA-like games as a process of transfuge fiction, in which the spectator becomes an actor.

Thus, from GTA-like to GTA life, we witness on the one hand a profound shift in the role of the game in social space. Where the FRAAG genre is defined above all by the freedom of action in a criminal and transgressive framework, the development of modding and especially roleplay has contributed to reorienting GTA and its successors towards unprecedented uses, close to collective theater or even alternative social networks. As shown by Nicolas Bailleul, the appropriation of GTA by RP communities is not limited to detouring its mechanics: it transforms the game into a "social sandbox", persistent and overflowing into the out-of-game through Discord, wikis, or platforms derived from LifeInvader.

From then on, the boundary between video game, social network, and community experience becomes increasingly porous. RP servers like GTA life have brought a new definition of GTA-like: no longer just a videogame variation of GTA centered on crime, but an expanded genre that integrates social performativity and the collective construction of a credible world. This evolution raises an open question: how far can this videogame sociabilization go? Are today's GTA-like games still just open-world criminal role-playing games, or are they hybrid platforms, halfway between fiction, social network, and community experimentation laboratory?

[1]: Nicolas Bailleul, "From GTA-like to GTA life. Towards a Videogame Social Network", Marges N° 36/2023, [online], http://journals.openedition.org/marges/3226/ [2]: https://www.esma-artistique.com/lexique/gta-like/ [3]: Nicolas Bailleul was led to work as an editor on the machinima Self-Made Men created by Charlotte Cherici and Lucas Azémar in 2023. As he explains in his article, this documentary feature film indeed attaches itself to describing the activities of an RP community evolving on a GTA Online server. The researcher reports to us the shift he observed in the practice of these players, going beyond the usual framework of open-world shooters to move closer to the simulation of an alternative social life, op. cit. [4]: ibid., p. 95. [5]: Series developed by Matt Groening, whose first episodes were broadcast in December 1989 on Fox.

Translated by AI from the French version.