Vice City, city of vanity: being seen to exist in GTA 6

Among the official images of Vice City on the GTA 6 website, one sums up the city better than the map does. It is night, a police officer is handcuffing two women, and in front of them a third woman stretches out her arm and takes a selfie. A fourth poses on top of the squad car.

It's a joke, but it is no accident. Jillian Carr, a stylist who has worked with Rockstar since 2023 on the game's fashion ecosystem, put it plainly to Dazed: "Vice City is built around vanity. Between social media, celebrity culture and a constant flow of tourists, appearances carry significant weight, and trend cycles turn over quickly."

The easy question would be why so many people want to be noticed. The one that interests me is different: what happens to someone who only feels they exist when they are being seen?

An economy of looks

The official character profiles, released in May 2025, show who works in this economy. Bae-Luxe and Roxy, aka Real Dimez, have been friends since high school, "girls with the savvy to turn their time shaking down local dealers into cold, hard cash via spicy rap tracks and a relentless social media presence." The official page sums up the duo in two taglines: "Viral videos. Viral hooks." and "One hit away from fame." Inside the game, Dazed reports, you can follow their rise through viral posts.

The man who signed them is Dre'Quan Priest, who "was always more of a hustler than a gangster," according to his profile. In his section of the site, the featured line is "Dancers are like my A&Rs. If the record's a hit, DJs gonna be spinnin' it." A&R people are the talent scouts record labels rely on. In other words, the value of a song is decided by the people on the dance floor.

The first mirror is a face

For the opening question, the best guide I know is a short 1967 paper by the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, later collected in Playing and Reality (1971): "Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development." The thesis is in the first sentence: "In individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother's face." Winnicott acknowledges the influence of Lacan's paper on the mirror stage, but points out that Lacan "does not think of the mirror in terms of the mother's face."

What does the baby see when looking at the mother's face? Ordinarily, Winnicott suggests, the baby sees himself or herself: the mother is looking at the baby, and "what she looks like is related to what she sees there." He condenses this process, which depends on being seen, into short first-person lines: "When I look I am seen, so I exist." Only then can the one who has been seen afford to look and see, and eventually to look creatively. Being seen is where the sequence begins, not where it ends.

The title also mentions the family. When a family holds together over time, Winnicott writes, each child benefits from seeing himself or herself in the attitudes of its members and of the family as a whole. From here on, the reading is mine: if a family can be a mirror, so can a city.

When the face becomes a forecast

Winnicott also describes the mirror that fails: a mother whose face reflects her own mood or, worse, the rigidity of her own defenses. He is careful to add that "nothing can be said about the single occasions on which a mother could not respond"; what counts is a long experience of not getting back what one gives. Babies in that situation, as he puts it, "look and they do not see themselves." Their creativity starts to wither, and they go looking elsewhere in their surroundings for some piece of themselves.

Some of them, he writes, study the shifting maternal face to predict the mother's mood, "just exactly as we all study the weather." They learn to forecast: right now it is safe to forget her mood and be spontaneous, but at any moment her face may harden, and then their own needs will have to be withdrawn.

Vanity as doubt

One passage reads as if it were written for Vice City. An ordinary girl checking her face in the mirror, Winnicott says, is making sure that her mother's image is still there and that her mother can see her. Then he adds: "When girls and boys in their secondary narcissism look in order to see beauty and to fall in love, there is already evidence that doubt has crept in about their mother's continued love and care."

Winnicott doesn't use the word, but I will: vanity, read this way, is not an excess of self-love. It is doubt. And a feed is also a face that looks back, which is perfectly fine. What matters is what it reflects: a like gives back how well a post performed, not who you are, and its mood changes without warning. Faced with that, we do what Winnicott's babies did and study the weather: what time to post, what topic, which version of ourselves will land today.

In that sense, Real Dimez and Dre'Quan are professional meteorologists, and the satire only works because we recognize the climate. Which leads to my answer to the opening question: someone who only feels they exist when seen is stuck on the first line of Winnicott's sequence. They look in order to be seen, and there is little looking left over for seeing.

The two who can't post

According to IGN, which saw the game at Rockstar North, Snapmatic, the series' Instagram parody, returns in GTA 6, but you can't post your own photos: Jason and Lucia are a couple on the run and don't want to leave a digital footprint. You can lurk, follow accounts and scroll the feed. In the city of vanity, the protagonists' rule is to stay out of sight.

That puts the player in an unusual spot: in the Vice City feed, you only look. You are the face. Outside the game, we hold both places at once. We post to be seen, and we are the face in which others look for themselves, the child holding up a drawing, the friend with an idea. So here is the question, and it reaches well beyond Leonida: when someone shows you something, does your face give back what they brought, or do they first have to forecast your weather?