Los Santos Life… An Examination (Part 1) – Car Ownership

For some of you, that gif above may have brought back some memories. I hope so, because today I’m going to talk a little about gaming…but not in a boring way…hopefully!

I love reading. I love seeing how an author shapes the environment around their characters. When done right, it can be spellbinding to immerse yourself into. Take the work of JK Rowling and the wizarding world of Harry Potter. She gives you enough information in those books for you to flesh out a world just enough to make you imagine more. To ask questions. 

As a writer, I love thinking about how my characters would behave in the world in which they inhabit. While it’s close enough to the world in which we currently live, ‘Songbird‘ is an alternate reality of my creation, and operates broadly on my rules. Yet I’ve tried to give the reader just enough information to give them a flavor, and to encourage them to ask questions about the place I’ve created. 

So, bearing in mind that you now know the way I think, you can now follow the logic to video games. 

Sometimes I’ll play a video game that takes place in a created universe and ask myself questions. And I don’t mean the weird magical places like the places Mario or Sonic come from. No, I’m talking about those games that are set closer to real life. To how we are now.

I starting thinking…

What if YOU were an NPC in a computer game?
Specifically, what if you lived in Los Santos?

For those of you wondering what I’m talking about, let me explain…

Los Santos is the fictional island/city from the game Grand Theft Auto 5. Specifically for this blog post, we’re talking about the online version of the game.  It’s an amalgamation of places from real life. The city itself is based on Los Angeles, while the outlying Blaine County area is more rural with forests and deserts.

The graphics are pretty spectacular in the game, and if you’re familiar with Los Angeles, especially then you’ll recognize some of the landmarks. For instance…  Del Perro Pier is a dead ringer for Santa Monica Pier…

So, given that it’s a pretty place to wander around, I wanted to ask…

Los Santos is a nice place to visit…but would YOU want to live there?

Considering how close this game bears to reality, what would it be like to live in Los Santos?

I do enjoy a romp around the world of GTA…but sometimes I’m struck by the absurdity of life in that city if it were real. Think about the movie ‘Wreck It Ralph‘, where every game character is a real person in a digital world that we just view. It makes you think about what it would be like to live in this digital world as an NPC. Hence, I thought it might make for a funny blog-post.  

So, bear with me…you don’t need to be a gamer to enjoy this one. 🙂

I promise!

I’ve played A LOT of games in my *cough* years.

Now, when it comes to gaming, there are certain games which I’ve always played in some capacity. I tend to find most hardcore gamers are loyal to a particular series.

There’s your Final Fantasy crowd, your Animal Crossing fans, World of Warcraft massive, Lara Croft devotees… 

For me, one of the games I ALWAYS gravitated towards was Grand Theft Auto. 

It had somewhat humble beginnings in 1997 as a little top down crime spree game on the Playstation.

These days it is FAR more sophisticated.

Okay, so maybe at it’s base level, not so much… But there’s your set up.  Now let’s dive into the world itself and the difficulties you’d have as an NPC.

Disclaimer: I KNOW that this is a video game, so the concept of dying in weird ways and coming back to life is a given. I’m not talking game logic here…I’m talking real world stuff!

I thought I’d do these as a little series of blog posts as a change from the normal book related stuff. So, for this first humorous look into the life of an NPC, I’m going to look at…

Crime is rampant in Los Santos. If you live in Los Santos, you have to expect to have your car either stolen, wrecked, or completely destroyed at any given time. The threats to your car ownership aspirations are many. A passing player at any moment could:

• Crash into it with their car
• Run over it with a truck (exploding it!)
• Shoot it up with a machine gun
• Shoot it up with a grenade launcher (exploding it!) 
• Steal it and drive it into the sea
• Steal it and drive it up a mountain and crash it (probably exploding it!)
• Crash a plane/helicopter into it
• Steal it to trade it in for cash
• Steal it to escape the police, and then the police destroy it (likely by exploding it!)

And that’s just a few!

Let’s do a little experiment, to see what your likely bill in the case of destroying a car would be…

So, I bought a cheap mode of transport. The one I chose for the experiment is called a Karin Intruder. It’s the GTA equivalent of an early 2000s Toyota Camry. A mere $16,000. Probably not to dissimilar to the cost of the car in real life.

I gave it a quick respray to a lovely red, and then I was off on an adventure!
I drove my little car to the top of the tallest mountain in the game. Mount Chiliad. It was really pretty up there…

And then I threw my self down it…

When I reached the bottom and drove myself to the local garage, my new-car smelling pride and joy looked like this…

Now, most real life insurance companies would probably have written the car off at this point, despite the fact it was till drive-able. I mean, look at it. There’s no glass, no doors, no trunk lid, no hood, no front wings, the chassis is buckled, the front wheels are bent inward and the paintwork is scratched to buggery.

Take this to a real world auto shop and they would laugh in your face. Your insurance company would kindly write the car off (if they accepted that you throwing yourself off a mountain was an unavoidable accident that wasn’t your fault!) and pay out a proportion of the cost of the car. 

Not in Los Santos. 

No, siree!  In Los Santos, the car mechanics are… wizards!!!!

They really CAN repair ANYTHING!

So, I drove it into the auto shop to get a quote on the repairs from my friendly ‘Beeker’s Garage Parts’ mechanic. He, shook his head, sucked in his breath through his teeth and whistled…

Then charged me $690 for the lot.

SIX HUNDRED AND NINETY DOLLARS!

With a bish and a bosh and a lickety split, my car was perfect once more…

Now, things do get a little trickier if your car is completely exploded, and this happens more times that you’d probably be happy with in real life. (Especially when you often play with a friend who has a penchant for using sticky-bombs all the time – looking at you Cyrosphere!)

Los Santos has only one insurance company. It’s called ‘Mors Mutual‘. All the insurance claims for all the accidents on all the cars (and planes and boats and helicopters and tanks and… you get the gist!) go through here. They have an absolute monopoly on the industry, so as a car owner there is no shopping around to get the lowest quotes for your renewal!

On a more positive note, when you do have to claim for your inevitably destroyed car, typically your ‘excess‘ is 1% of the vehicle cost from new. Very often they even give you your new car for free!  

Better yet, if your vehicle IS destroyed by another player, then THEY get to pay the cost of your new vehicle. Which amuses me no end when a griefer (the term for an annoying player who just enjoys killing people who are generally minding their own business!) decides to blow my car up. It invariably ends up with them running away giggling, while I just shake my head and laugh that their actions just cost THEM $10,000 of game money.

Final point. If you do have your car exploded by a player, how much will it cost you to replace it? Well, the good news is that no matter how rare or expensive the car you own (or indeed how extensively you have customized it!), Mors Mutual can source an INSTANT identical replacement for just 1% of the cost of the original car!  

So, let’s say you lose your $3M Truffade Nero (the equivalent of a Bugatti Veyron) in a proximity mine incident (trust me, it happens more often than you’d think!), then you’ll only pay around $30,000 for the replacement!

Which is good news for the fabulously rich and famous of Los Santos!

So…where does all this leave us?

The ‘would YOU want to live here’ Verdict – CARS

So, where does that leave us on the original question for this aspect of life in this virtual world?

Well, let’s sum it up…

• Cost of buying a car – Reasonable
• Cost of insuring a car – Cheap
• Chances of having car stolen – Higher than average
• Recovering a stolen car – Instant and free!
• Chance of having your car exploded – Very High
• Chance of having your car exploded if Cyrosphere is in-game – Certainty
• Recovering an exploded car – 1% of purchase price
• Respraying and customizing a car at Los Santos Customs – Expensive
• Respraying and customizing a car Benny’s- Expensive as fuck!
• Sturdiness of car – Built like tanks!
• Repair bill – Crazy cheap!

So, on reflection, there’s more green there than orange or red. So I’m giving Los Santos a big…

Well done, Los Santos.

You’ve passed the first test.  Next up (coming soon!)… running a business in Los Santos!

Love and Books