Vice City (in English)

I always arrive a hundred and fifty years after everyone else, and marvel at things that have become commonplace, but so, yes, GTA Vice City is a shock – in fact, I discovered San Andreas before, but I like it a lot less, despite its much larger map – although misleading, since it seems to me that there are fewer indoor scenes, that there's a lot of free, unexplored space in reality, and that the action is more repetitive, the game less fun, quite simply...

Everything's already been said about GTA's gameplay, so I won't add anything, except to say that I once again find virtual universes to be much more real than we think; they're immaterial universes, and that's all there is to it – because they exist as a spatio-temporal, aesthetic framework, because we act in them and are acted upon, they leave memories in the same way as an event in the material world, a landscape, a real person.

In a way, there's a part of me that actually lives in Vice City – like in the little village where Black Sect takes place, or in the Arab town in the game Omeyad – since I have memories there, think about it often, go back to it, and even have a future there – obviously, it's a part of my life that's extremely limited, restricted to the few possibilities offered by the game.

But come to think of it, what's more limited than the part of me that goes shopping at Simply Market after work? These utilitarian, limited moments are, however, reputedly real.

The range of things I can do in Vice City is certainly even wider and more varied than what I can do when I'm shopping – in the absolute, of course, I could sing at the top of my lungs in the cheese department, make love on the fish stalls or provoke a general brawl, or organize a poetry festival between the rows of wine bottles, but I don't, and nobody else does, to avoid the Matrix bug of a security guard politely and firmly kicking you out.

The sum of the moments in our lives when we don't do all these things, because it's not part of the program, is gigantic.

It's worth a few schizophrenic escapes to Florida.

And of course, those who don't understand the wonder that can be felt when discovering a new street in Little Haiti, even after several weeks of playing, and who don't understand that this wonder is training for wonder in the real world, have no soul.