The nature reserve of phantasy: why GTA 6 copies even the smell

Psychoanalytic countdown to GTA 6 · text 10 · 8 days to go
Today the blog starts a series of special daily pieces for the upcoming launch: one text a day, counting down from 10 to 1, from today, November 11, to November 20, the day after the game comes out on November 19. Each text reads, through psychoanalysis, a topic people are discussing about GTA 6.

In a demo for the British magazine Edge, Aaron Garbut, one of the heads of Rockstar North, took Jason into an empty house. On the wall, photos of the family dog. In the next room, the dog had wrecked the place, and there was mess in a corner, smeared around. Jason recoils. According to Garbut, the game has a smell system that provokes "varying degrees of disgust" in Jason and Lucia at different places on the map.

It is a small detail, and it says a lot. A game about crime, chases and easy money spent development time making its character feel disgust at a dirty room. Why would a fantasy need that?

What Rockstar has shown so far

Smell is just the oddest example. GTA 6 has been sold as the most detailed world Rockstar has ever made, and the company knows where that can go wrong. In an interview with Love magazine, Rob Nelson, who co-heads the studio, said that "realism can help greatly with immersion, but too much can feel tedious", and that "it's better to ignore or omit certain aspects of reality." Rockstar considered a grocery system to restock Jason and Lucia's fridge and dropped it because it would have complicated the game. Refuelling stayed, but it takes seconds.

In other words, the most expensive fantasy in video game history is built by copying reality with obsessive care while handpicking what to leave out. Freud has an image that helps make sense of that.

Phantasy as a nature reserve

In the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916 to 1917), Freud compares the mental realm of phantasy to a nature reserve. Such reserves, he notes, are set up precisely where the demands of agriculture, traffic and industry threaten to change the face of the earth beyond recognition. There an old state of things is preserved that everywhere else has been sacrificed to necessity, and "everything may grow and spread as it pleases, including what is useless and even what is harmful."

Phantasy, he says, is such a reserve: "The mental realm of phantasy is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroaches of the reality-principle." Growing up means giving up many pleasures for the sake of what is possible. Phantasy is where those abandoned pleasures stay alive without having to answer to the world.

Anyone who has spent a whole weekend in Los Santos gets the image right away. It is a place where the useless and the harmful grow freely, and nobody sends the bill.

The paradox: a reserve that copies the city

But there is something odd about this particular reserve. In Freud's image, the park protects against traffic and industry. In Leonida, the park reproduces traffic, industry, heat, the line at the gas station and even the smell of a dirty room. The phantasy doesn't move away from the city; it copies it with the fidelity of a scale model.

This is not the reality principle invading the reserve. It is the opposite. Realism works as a set: the more real the world looks, the more weight what we do inside it carries. A transgression on a cardboard set isn't worth much. In a place that smells, that has traffic and neighbors who complain, it feels as if it really happens, while still having no consequences at all. The player gets both at once: the feeling of reality and the exemption only phantasy grants.

That is where disgust comes in. It is a bodily reaction, and the body is usually the first thing phantasy erases. By giving disgust back to Jason, Rockstar brings into the reserve a piece of reality that doesn't threaten the pleasure; it only makes it more believable.

Where realism turns into work

Nelson's remark marks the limit precisely. Too much realism gets tedious, and that is exactly the point at which the reserve would stop being one. Grocery shopping, restocking the fridge, waiting for the tank to fill: all of that is reality, but it is the part of reality that is work. If it all comes in, the park turns back into farmland.

That is why the choice of what stays out matters as much as what goes in. The reserve can have smells, traffic and dirt, because that is scenery. What it cannot have is obligation. The smell passes; the shopping list doesn't.

Outside Leonida

Everyone keeps small reserves like this: the hobby that doesn't have to pay off, the show watched without guilt, the game that never becomes a goal. They tend to be useless in the most respectable sense of the word, and sometimes they are exactly what makes the rest of the week bearable. The trouble starts when we demand productivity from them, or when they grow so large that they take over the farmland.

In eight days, a lot of people will walk into the most detailed reserve ever built. The question it leaves works outside the game too: where is your reserve, and what do you need to leave outside so that it stays one?

Tomorrow, in text 9 of the countdown: a robber who is never satisfied with the last job.