This city is our playground: A drive-by of Grand Theft Auto machinima

The moving image – what a fraught, fraught phrase. As animation is continually slighted and short films are seen as merely proof of concept for longer works, the hierarchisation of the moving image becomes apparent, often as institutionalised by cinemas, festivals, museums, and centres for the public consumption of art. One of these slighted sub-areas are films made partly or entirely in computer graphics engines, most often video games, known as machinima: an off-kilter portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema”, and, as some also interject, “animation”. These works have found homes at dedicated video art fora like the Milan Machinima Festival or niched-down speciality sidebars such as Oberhausen’s 2023 machinima focus. Curators might also have a preference to showcase them in galleries, but machinima is often seen as neither experimental enough for avant-garde showcases nor mainstream enough for the cinema  –  perhaps until now.

In 2023, Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ Grand Theft Hamlet strolled onto the scene in the pandemic’s lingering shadow, picking up praise for its innovative form, SXSW’s Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, and, in turn, distribution via MUBI in the US and UK. This new film seemingly brought machinima to the masses as a witty, heartfelt, and pseudo-autoethnographic examination of the filmmakers, self-declared out-of-work actors, setting out to cast and produce the titular Shakespearean work set entirely within the multiplayer world of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) Online. But with the success of this film, we become caught up in its playful exhilaration and, in turn, symbolically forget what it has taken for video game-set films to even find an audience in the realm of the “moving image”.

Grand Theft Hamlet is but one in a storied history of films set in different instalments of Rockstar Games’ infamously violent and delightful GTA franchise. The film represents a new and highly publicised step in what is an extensive history of and multi-decadal transmedia fixation on filmmaking specifically in GTA. Machinima works combine a wide variety of approaches to interacting with the GTA game engine, many of which can be likened to modes in documentary filmmaking. Here I propose four broad modes: meditative, investigative, poetic, and narrative, none of which are mutually exclusive.

A “meditative” mode for GTA filmmaking could be seen as most like that of documentary’s expository mode, where a narrator speaks over visuals; in this approach, the visuals can be seen as almost the basis of an essay for a reflection presented sonically. An “investigative” mode is similar to that of reflexive documentaries, where the filmmaker seeks to interrogate the rules of the game world, appropriate its mechanics and environment, and combine it with a metatextual critique of society. (Often but not always, this involves some sort of hacking or external intervention, known as “modding”.) Like in documentary filmmaking, machinima films can also lie more on the “poetic” side of the spectrum, relying on the ambience of the game environment rather than strict narrative linearity to create an affective experience for the viewer. Finally, machinima films can also be created primarily using a game engine as an animation tool, leading to what can be seen as a “narrative” mode, either fiction or documentary.

Recently, critical and audience reception has been particularly positive toward works that seek to use the mechanics of the game engine to draw parallels to contemporary society, as in the proposed investigative mode. This was recently made popular by the success of Austrian guerrilla media collective Total Refusal’s Hardly Working (2022), which scooped up armfuls of awards and took multiple victory laps around the festival space for its examination of non-player characters (NPCs) in Red Dead Redemption 2 as a commentary on marginalised communities and those rendered invisible in a capitalist system. One of the collective’s newer works, 11-minute short Kinderfilm (2023), interrogates the absence of children in GTA V (2013), the franchise’s most recent main-series instalment. Viewers navigate the world through the lens of Edgar, a man driving around in vain for something that feels missing from his environment. The filmmakers point to what this is by passing empty school buses and soulless playgrounds, all while the protagonist embarks on an increasingly absurd journey where he goes to great lengths in his search, plunging him into the ocean and placing him atop buildings, staring up into space.

Humble beginnings, however, must be rightfully heeded. In the 2000s, late acclaimed experimental US filmmaker Phil Solomon shifted away from analogue work, particularly in the distortion of celluloid emulsion, to appropriate the physics of a new space: the digital realm of the GTA franchise. Set in the fictional Liberty City – based on New York City –  GTA III (2001) allowed for a new virtual camera navigation of the open-world game environment, as the franchise’s first 3D instalment. With these games, he created some of the earliest machinima films within hacked versions of the game, which allowed him to manipulate and add new in-game objects. (Solomon also made Empire (2012), an astonishing abridged remake of Andy Warhol’s 1964 Empire as created in GTA IV’s version of Liberty City, while Dublin-based media artist Alan Butler made the more self-explanatory shot-for-shot KoyaanisGTAV (2017).)

The ethereal, drone-like sound design heard in Kinderfilm immediately calls back to Solomon’s haunting three-part threnody “In Memoriam”, shot entirely in GTA and dedicated to filmmaker and friend Mark LaPore, with whom he first began exploring the games. The experimental ambient segments, which most reflect the proposed “poetic” mode of machinima, include Rehearsals for Retirement (2007) and the black-and-white Last Days in a Lonely Place (2007), which use the setting of GTA: San Andreas – a state based off of an amalgamation of San Francisco (San Fierro), Las Vegas (La Venturas), and Los Angeles (Los Santos) – while Still Raining, Still Dreaming (2008), shot in GTA IV, is set also in Liberty City. Outside of retrospective sections at festivals, these films can all be discovered on cult-archival YouTube channels. There is an audience, but perhaps they all live online.

Shot in GTA V, Jonathan Vinel’s Martin Cries (2017) conveys a world in which the blue-eyed, freckled, titular in-game character feels a distinct absence of something from the GTA world, not unlike Kinderfilm – only this time, it’s our protagonist’s friends who are missing. However, the 16-minute short, which played in the 2017 Berlinale Shorts competition, takes a different approach by extracting the feeling of loss beyond the virtual world. By bestowing Martin with a voice that wails with anguish, Vinel uses the game to evoke the immense emotion of loss as experienced in the physical world  –  an example of the proposed “meditative” mode. To the viewer, it thus is unclear whether Martin is an NPC endowed with a human voice or a playable character as he beats up passersby, brawls with police as an emotional outlet, and runs down empty streets at night.

As GTA instalments grew more graphically complex and detailed, filmmakers have also sought to awe viewers with the beauty of the game worlds, as if asking them to reflect on the awe of a natural wonder or the feeling of sublime urban solitude. Vinel seeks to capture the otherworldly, vaguely uncanny beauty of the GTA world – notably, the graphics of the sparkling ocean waters and the artificial, but still beautifully rendered, dusky sunsets. Martin desperately leaves voice messages for his missing friends: “Without you, the city’s not the same,” he mourns. The filmmaker thus juxtaposes anguished voices and real emotions with the “artificiality” of the GTA graphics, as exemplified by Martin’s expressionless visage (akin to that of Kinderfilm’s Edgar) like all in-game characters.

Sara Sadik’s Khtobtogone (2021), most commonly exhibited as a single-channel work in smaller festivals and museum installations, takes a similar meditative approach, beginning with a shot of a young man looking out on the water from atop of a mountain. We are introduced to this character as Zine, a struggling young man who feels like he has something to live for and live up to after he meets a woman named Bulma. Like in Martin Cries, the man narrates his journey in voiceover while he navigates the game world –  Sadik wrote his monologue from stories of her friends of Maghrebi descent from Marseille: “Sometimes I feel like I’m nothing but a body, and that’s it – an empty, dehumanised body”.

Khtobtogone distances the audio from the visuals one step further by using the visuals as a blank state for meditation, illustrating our protagonist’s plight; Zine is not literally the in-game character. At one point, he is making an UberEats delivery and he says, “When I’m working, I disconnect. I feel like I’m in GTA – I’m on a mission. Each delivery’s a mission. And I gotta unlock it as fast as I can.” But, as he explains, a disdainful or condescending look from a customer can throw him back to reality and out of the “game”: “It brings you back to your place in society”. With this moment, Sadik metatextually showcases the power of the franchise’s world, where GTA levels the playing field by making everyone an average citizen with the same capabilities and privileges; an actual meritocracy.

Unlike “meditative” pieces, so-called “narrative” machinima works do not seem to meet the expectations for exhibition in a cinema or video art forum. Instead, they join thousands of other films waiting to be discovered for free online. In 2011, Mathieu Weschler spent three years using conventional live-action cinematographic techniques applied to GTA IV to create The Trashmaster, an 88-minute feature film about the eponymous garbage collector who goes vigilante to track down a serial killer who murdered the exotic dancers at his favourite club — a fitting-for-GTA, if not delightfully lurid, premise. With smooth and controlled virtual camera movement combined with staging of the in-game world, including side characters and moving vehicles, Weschler attempts to divorce the game world from games or animations altogether. He refuses to toy with any of its technical quirks, such as moving the camera through characters or environments as is possible in GTA or including glitchy moments. And, like other filmmakers captivated by the game world, his work begins with a wide shot of Liberty City’s towering skyscrapers, allowing the viewer to absorb the enormity of the detail embedded into the in-game world – its vastness and urban allure, accompanied by romantic orchestral music.

A wide variety of other films combine different techniques of machinima filmmaking, including Jacky Connolly’s 33-minute Descent into Hell, originally a four-channel installation that premiered at the Whitney Biennale, which takes on the intersecting themes of modern loneliness and isolation, violence, and natural disaster as set in GTA V to emulate an apocalyptic Los Angeles (Los Santos in-game). Part-poetic and part-investigative, Connolly is focused on in-game aspects that are often taken for granted, like NPCs of unhoused residents or dilapidated motels that simply make up the cityscape. With this, the filmmaker responds to a dismissive neoliberal ennui towards human suffering as it manifests under-acknowledged in contemporary Western societies — and secondarily, a collective depressive mood as stimulated by the pandemic. Connolly uses the natural elements of the game environment to draw connections to how society treats the marginalised, a perspective partially already embedded into GTA’s code.

Alan Butler’s other works include Le Moment Fabriqué (The Constructed Moment, as inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s l’instant décisif), again documenting the impoverished and ostracised within GTA V, or Mondo Cane!, refiguring the programming of an NPC that looks like US artist Sturtevant to create a larger commentary on commercialised, consumptive society. Grayson Earle’s Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? uses a modded GTA V environment to examine the eponymous phenomenon while players navigate the in-game world as criminals, also combining with it an analysis of the game’s source code. Also shot within GTA V, Marlowe Drive by Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin L’Helgouac’h (who later together directed exploratory game community documentary Knit’s Island) emerged as a self-produced student film without a festival run, layering levels of metafictional reality centred around the character Adam Kesher from Mulholland Drive, as recreated in the game.

Other earlier works include those by Sebastian Blank, who created a 2009 trilogy of films entitled Kunst und Gesellschaft im Dialog (Art and Society in Dialogue) in GTA: San Andreas. While released around the same time as Solomon’s works, Blank’s films are developed from an entirely different perspective, with different objectives both stylistically and formally. Solomon’s approach is highly meditative and atmospheric, while Blank leaves the flat, low-colour-contrast game graphics as they first came to be, more explicit about where his interventions and modding have occurred.

Parts I and II epitomise an approach that is the investigative mode at its most stripped down. The first is divided into three instances that explore the mechanics of the world, which all begin when an automobile – an “ordinary” car, a police vehicle and later, a multi-car pileup – hits a large black block on the highway, which is inscribed with speech bubbles that read “Art” and “Watch Out!”. The driver seemingly has no control, slamming repeatedly into the block until it catches fire and explodes. After the pileup results in apparent fatal damage, voices shout in the background until a chain reaction of explosions concludes the film.

Unlike more recent machinima, Blank is fundamentally concerned with the game world’s mechanics: in Parts I and II, we hardly see faces, and the cars themselves become the primary characters rather than the people – or even performance artists as Blank lets them respond as they would in-game. Part II zooms out and observes the environment; Blank has inserted billboards with the phrase “Art Beyond This Point” into the world on a proxy of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. He then reveals he has severed away a portion of the bridge, leaving every car to plummet to its demise in the pixelated waters below in an eerie moment of dark simulacra.

These aforementioned are merely some of the many works that have reached a large enough audience to be noticed. As we witness a feature-length film set entirely in the GTA universe come to a cinema near us, we must acknowledge this tiny cut of the undoubtedly thousands of machinima films made from the GTA universe, most of which live merely in the virtual realm and never reach festivals or exhibition spaces. Those that do are often expected to justify why they are made in a computer graphics engine, such as through an investigative exploration or maximising its poetic potential through style. But just like Crane and Grylls rack up and emotionally connect a motley gang across pandemic-era isolation, filmmakers have always used the formal elements of GTA’s increasingly detailed and visually stunning game environment to scrutinise real life. Regardless of approach, they deserve to be taken seriously, as this intoxicating and deliriously violent game is, ironically, where we continue to find our humanity.