Guilt in GTA, a real or false question?

By examining the gaming habits of video game players, and more specifically players of GTA and GTA-like games, we will seek to raise several questions related to the feeling of guilt and moral constraint in video game universes. First, we will ask whether it is possible to feel guilty when virtually committing reprehensible acts, which will then lead us to question the existence of limits to what is "morally and psychologically[^1]" acceptable in these virtual worlds. Indeed, if the goal of so-called violent games is to provoke strong feelings in their players, does the feeling of guilt belong to them? To what extent can this feeling appear or disappear and be manipulated? We will question the player's share of control in their decision-making and the consequences that this responsibility implies, as well as the game mechanics that frame the freedom granted to them in exploring an open world.

How to Approach the Question of Player Responsibility Within the Game?

We consider GTA-like games as a play area in which the narrative, movement, driving, and interaction mechanics are as many tools that offer a sufficiently wide range of actions for the player to have the illusion of making their own gaming experience. It is precisely this aspect that, with each release of a new GTA, revives alarmist controversies about video games and their propensity to make their players violent, since these too-open mechanics would incite players to commit the worst atrocities. To which the defenders of the franchise generally respond that if the player commits a mass massacre with a firearm, it is their own responsibility.[^2]

As explained by Nicolas Bailleul in this excerpt from his article "From GTA-LIKE to GTA LIFE. Towards a Videogame Social Network," taking GTA V as a privileged experimental ground to address the issue of violence in video games, this thesis seems to confirm the definition of "ludespace[^3]" theorized by McKenzie Wark in his book Theorie du Gamer[^4]. The game then acts as a mirror of this space: actions are reduced to algorithms (completing a mission, earning money, increasing statistics), which tends to empty the question of moral guilt of its substance.

For where theorists like Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois[^5] describe a space-time separate from reality, within which ordinary rules cease to apply and where the game unfolds, GTA V pushes this separation to the extreme: acts that we qualify as immoral are accompanied by a process of delegation and disidentification that tends to neutralize their moral significance. The avatars Michael, Franklin, or Trevor act on behalf of the player, who can always hide behind this distance. It is in this sense that Mathieu Triclot, in Philosophy of Video Games[^6], mobilizes the concept of "responsibility delegation." The player acts, certainly, but always through an intermediary character: it is never "me" who kills, but Trevor. Can we therefore deduce that, in the ultra-realistic world of GTA V, this separation functions as a device for deresponsibilization, even though these acts are no longer than the result of algorithmic operations?

It is then interesting to see how this reflection echoes the world structured by the logic of scores and rules of McKenzie Wark's "ludespace," which further broadens the perspective. According to the researcher, we live in a world where everything is a game, where the logic of competition and scoring extends to the entire social life. She notably observes that: "[...] The forms of video games are an integral part of a world increasingly constituted by these same forms[^7]". Thus, we could argue that GTA V deresponsibilizes as much as it responsabilizes: on the one hand, it frees itself from the ethical constraints of reality; on the other hand, it submits the player to an internal logic of rules that frame their choices, a logic itself transposable to reality.

Players Facing the Violence of GTA V: Between Empathy and Distancing

Concretely, faced with the violence in GTA V, players' reactions oscillate between empathy and distancing. In his work Video Games Don't Make You Stupid[^8], Yann Leroux insists on players' ability to distinguish fiction from reality. The author thus recalls that "players know they are playing" and that playing with the violence of GTA V does not necessarily imply endorsing it, as suggested by the process of delegating an act reduced to mechanics and devoid of its ethical significance, in a world where the very goal is to escape the rules and forms of surveillance of the real world. Leroux notably highlights the lack of evidence and the revocation of the link that has been made repeatedly between mass killings and video games. In his article "Discomfort in Video Games[^9]," Angelo Careri also opposes the hypothesis of this link and attempts to show the opposite by questioning the cathartic function of violence in the game. He relies on the current interest of psychoanalysis in its therapeutic potential to "treat addictions and uninhibit the patient" to show that "the representations that unfold through video games serve as a privileged pathway to the unconscious." Explicitly referring to the essay Civilization and Its Discontents[^10], which Sigmund Freud published in 1930 and in which he affirms that culture strives to channel human violence seen as an irreducible given of man, an original drive, he recalls the eternal struggle between the two opposing forces carried by Eros and Thanatos. It is precisely why, according to the thesis put forward by Freud, "the development of culture must be qualified without further ado as the vital struggle of the human species[^11]".

If we can see the use of this reference as a way to explore this eternal struggle between the life drive and the death drive (this struggle where Eros seeks to overcome Thanatos), Careri also reminds us that this detachment is never complete. For him, playful pleasure is also linked to transgression: the player knows they are crossing forbidden lines, and it is precisely this suspension of guilt that gives the game its flavor.

This point of view deserves to be deepened: is it only a matter of liberating drives, as suggested by the notion of discomfort mentioned by Careri, or rather of experimenting with behaviors without fearing real sanctions, not to reproduce them in real life, but to experience their effects in a secure framework? If we adopt this interpretation, we can say that the game shifts guilt by transforming it into an experimentation tool, which in turn becomes a ludification issue. This is the reasoning we find in the philosopher Aurélien Fouillet, who tells us in his essay Playtime. How Video Games Transform the World, that "the game is a social laboratory, a space where rules can be suspended, modified, or even overturned[^12]".

Careri thus observes that some players express a feeling of discomfort after virtually running over a pedestrian, while others see it as a simple game mechanic devoid of moral significance:

For example, we think of players who refuse to play the torture sequence in GTA V, or the "No Russian" level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which requires the player to carry out a mass attack in an airport. These gameplay phases are problematic for many players, to the point that Call of Duty, for example, warns the player and offers the possibility to skip this sequence.[^13]

We are faced with a form of manipulation of the feeling of guilt that does not disappear but changes status. It becomes a component of the experience, an emotion that one can seek to provoke as much as to avoid. Finally, as McKenzie Wark notes, whose analysis joins the Freudian thesis through his recognition of the game as a device for analyzing drives, "games are not representations of this world. They are rather allegorical translations of this world become ludespace[^14]". In other words, guilt in GTA V is not a moral question: it is mediated by the logic of the algorithm and does not refer to the moral sense to which we refer in real life.

We can therefore say that the GTA V player does not escape guilt, of which they experience a diverted form. Transgression is both allowed and framed; violence becomes a playful mechanic among others and deliberately keeps the player in a zone of ambiguity between reality and fiction, the limits of which they must themselves set. Following this logic, the feeling of guilt should only be exercised when it is intentional in the gameplay.

Creating Your Own Rules, or How to Reappropriate GTA V

McKenzie Wark emphasizes that there is always the possibility of "trifling" with the game, that is, playing not to win but to subvert the rules: If GTA V seems to stifle questions of morality and the sense of responsibility among players, we can see that outside of GTA V in its original version, there is also GTA Life, an unofficial mode of this opus.

Unlike the original game, GTA Life allows players to roleplay and interact with thousands of other people online. In his previously cited article[^15], Nicolas Bailleul explains that respecting the rules requires constant supervision and control, ensured in particular by volunteer player-moderators. They oversee the city, guide newcomers, and sanction those who do not respect the rules. They do not play a fictional role but have special privileges, such as teleporting from one place to another or teleporting and banning other players. Thus, when players doubt the credibility of their RP actions, moderators remind them to "act as in real life".

Players have thus created another world of GTA, closer to real life: they play a role as in real life, with its social constraints, and by following rules that are more akin to moral codes. This can be achieved through the use of mods or creative practices that shape the experience. The player then gives meaning to their actions by imposing their own limits.

While in GTA violence is a game mechanic fully part of the gameplay manipulating the players' feeling of guilt, in GTA Life, we see that players question the rules, free themselves from them, and invent new ones, more in line with the role they embody. It is thus that a form of responsibility appears that does not rest on obedience to imposed rules but on the creation of new rules whose consequences they must assume. This new responsibility of the players based on their agency[^16] would become the source of a potential feeling of guilt in the face of possible decisions and their possible consequences in this new framework.

In Philosophy of Video Games[^17], Mathieu Triclot reminds us that we do not only play with representations of rule systems or models but also with the possibility of "putting the world into numbers" and acting on it through indicators, which makes video games an ideal playground for experiments.

Conclusion

Our work leads us to conclude that GTA V offers a singular experience of guilt by providing a space where everyone can feel this emotion, seek it, avoid it, or even reconfigure it. Guilt is not erased; it becomes a playful material: sometimes suspended by the game's framework, sometimes reactivated by transgression, sometimes reinvented through new rules created by the players themselves. In this sense, we can say that GTA V shifts our feeling of guilt: it is no longer governed by moral considerations but becomes a modifiable affect, integrated into the very logic of the game. It is also in this sense that GTA V illustrates the ludespace: a world where the logic of the game extends to reality, blurring the boundaries between morality and strategy, freedom and algorithm. Playing GTA V is not just "doing anything without consequences"; it is experimenting with our relationships to responsibility and ethics in a simulation space.

[^1]: We reuse here the terms of Angelo Careri in his article "Discomfort in Video Games", Immersion n°1, February 219, [online], https://immersion-revue.fr/angelo-careri-malaise-jeu-video/ [^2]: Bailleul, Nicolas, "From GTA-like to GTA life. Towards a Videogame Social Network", Marges n°36, 2023, p. 105. | published online on January 1, 2026, consulted on October 15, 2025, [online], http://journals.openedition.org/marges/3226; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/marges.3226 [^3]: Concept coined by McKenzie Wark in his work Theorie du Gamer to refer to a spatial approach to video games as a system, in order to analyze interactions at different scales between the space in video games, the player's space, and the space around video games. [^4]: Wark, McKenzie, Theorie du Gamer, Paris, Les prairies ordinaires, 2019. [^5]: Respectively in Homo Ludens (1995) and in Les jeux et les hommes (1992). For these authors, the separation (the "magic circle" in Huizinga) acts as a protective framework: what happens in the game stays in the game. [^6]: Triclot, Mathieu, Philosophy of Video Games, Paris, Zones, 2011. [^7]: Wark, McKenzie, Theorie du gamer, op. cit. [^8]: Leroux, Yann, Video Games Don't Make You Stupid, Limoges, FYP éditions, 2012. [^9]: Careri, Angelo, "Discomfort in Video Games", art. cit. [^10]: Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, Paris, Flammarion, 2019. [^11]: ibid. [^12]: Fouillet, Aurélien, Playtime, Paris, Édition les Pérégrines, 2014. [^13]: Careri, Angelo, "Discomfort in Video Games", art. cit. [^14]: Wark, McKenzie, Theorie du gamer, op. cit. [^15]: Bailleul, Nicolas, "From GTA-like to GTA life. Towards a Videogame Social Network", art. cit. [^16]: An "agent" is called "any autonomous person capable of defining their own choices and carrying them out consciously and rationally by effectively assigning means to a purpose (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005)". [^17]: Triclot, Mathieu, Philosophy of Video Games, op. cit., p. 215.

Bibliography

Books Caillois, Roger, Les jeux et les hommes, Paris, Gallimard, 1992.

Fouillet, Aurélien, Playtime. How the Game Transforms Our Societies, Paris, Éditions Les Pérégrines, 2014.

Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens, Paris, Gallimard, 1988.

Leroux, Yann, Video Games Don't Make You Stupid, Limoges, FYP éditions, 2012.

Triclot, Mathieu, Philosophy of Video Games, Paris, Zones, 2011.

Wark, McKenzie, Theorie du Gamer, Paris, Les prairies ordinaires, 2019.

Articles Bailleul, Nicolas, "From GTA-like to GTA life. Towards a Videogame Social Network", Marges n°36, 2023.

Careri, Angelo, "Discomfort in Video Games", Immersion n°1, February 219.

Translated by AI from the French version.