Do gamers dream of electric pin-ups?

"What has always been missing in video games is the human dimension. That is, all those characters that you feel connected to, that you feel something for, that you hate or that you fall in love with."

Brendan McNamara, director of L.A Noire.

Yes, that's awfully true. Often in games we get attached to particular locations, an atmosphere, a "world"; but rarely, if ever, to non-player characters. And yet, it would be so nice to be able to fall in love with an NPC.

Not some poor little bundle of code as primitive as Denise Robinson in GTA, no, real NPCs worthy of the name, characters, with character, with autonomy, with unpredictability, with room to maneuver and a catalog of actions and reactions, initiatives, sufficient to make us believe in them – believe in them just enough to remember that this is fiction, while allowing ourselves to become attached to them. And to project our fantasies on them.

The phenomenon of identification, which allows catharsis, or the crystallization of a certain spirit of the times, of certain discourses, in characters raised to the rank of myths, in short, everything that in literature contaminates intimate and collective reality – although I don't necessarily like this verb contaminate, which sounds a bit PsyOps, let's say rather, because it's even more accurate, everything that in literature informs reality and becomes a domain of reality, all that the video game must appropriate too.

Yes, video games must offer us stories, or at least narrative frameworks – places, characters, problems, atmosphere, aesthetics, catalog of possible actions and situations – where stories must be able to emerge. Because there is no life without stories.

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There is no existence either, by the way, without daily life – which is not, in itself, outside of the narrative (it is one in its own way, a low-intensity narrative) but is inscribed in it, as hollow moments, necessary, and as a framework itself. And isn't it precisely Rockstar, the publisher of L.A. Noire, who with the GTA series, introduced the notion of everyday life in video games?

A simple tour on YouTube shows it: the fans of Grand Theft Auto, to develop on this precise example, beyond the proposed missions and the storyline of the game itself, build their private life, daily, in the space (geographical and action) which is proposed to them. Visiting the city in all its corners, challenging the police, doing the most beautiful stunts, taking pictures of the scenes you witness – traffic accidents, shootings between rival gangs, conversations between passers-by – each one can, according to his temperament and his whims, find something to occupy himself in the vast Sandbox that is – not only, but also – the game.

Personally, I more often than not, rather than completing missions as fast as possible, launch San Andreas to go for a peaceful jog at dusk, in the streets of Los Santos, in order to improve my stamina and my musculature day after day – and then, walk around, take some pictures, dance at the Alhambra, or play the excellent arcade terminals that can be found everywhere in the game.

A repetitive, slow, simple daily life; the kind that leaves memories, real and personal memories, to the player. Minecraft, in another genre, doesn't offer anything else.

And I think that's the main charm of GTA: you come home from work in your real life, you go about your business, and at some point in your evening, you spend an hour jogging in a copy of Los Angeles, or driving a Porsche on the beach in Vice City, at dusk, with Tears for Fears on the radio. With, from time to time, chosen or imposed, trials that mark the evolution of the character's destiny – in society, as in the screen. The video game as an extension and a domain of daily life, and of life itself.