When I’m surfing the sea of YouTube video essays, one genre is pretty much guaranteed to get my attention: painstaking, granular analyses of video game details that don’t actually matter.
Few people will ever notice these details, and most that do won’t find that they affect their gameplay experience at all, but throwing them under the microscope still makes for a darn good watch. Video game geologist, historian, cartographer, and potamologist Any Austin has made a career out of this stuff, and his latest deep dive is an exhaustive look into the traffic signs of GTA 5 and how they stack up with the real laws of California, the state where the game’s city of Los Santos is set.
I don’t want to spoil or summarize the entire 23-minute video – which you can watch here – but I do want to hit on some of the most interesting findings and oddities. In brief, you’ll be shocked to learn, Rockstar’s open-world criminal action game does not follow California traffic law very much at all, but there are a few instances where it’s remarkably close or even dead-on.
As Any Austin points out, obvious staples like stop signs are often misused in combination with other signs, like a wrong way sign, or with road fixtures like street lights. Some signs are consistently in the wrong place, like yield signs on the wrong side of the street, or plopped down in the middle of nowhere. The sign for “pass either side” is “never used correctly in the entire game,” as it’s meant to indicate split-then-rejoining roads but, in GTA 5, just means a road is splitting somehow.
Speed limit signs get a pass because they’re kind of hard to screw up, even if they are occasionally placed on the wrong side of the road. Construction worker signs also clear the bar because they’re generally positioned near breaks in roads or side walls. This is where we start to get into law as game design, because where construction work signs would usually signify caution, as Any Austin notes, in GTA 5 they’re generally used to mark places where the player can pull off a sick jump.
Rockstar is one of relatively few game studios pursuing enormous, extremely realistic game worlds based on real places and spaces, and there are a lot of curious oxymorons baked into that kind of design. For example, it’s easy to assume that there’s no traditional art direction in games with photorealistic graphics because, surely, the direction is whatever the real thing looks like and calls for, but that’s simply not true. In some ways, the closer a game gets to realism, the more it has to stipulate on, whereas more fictionalized and out-there games can play by rules they define on their own.
It’s at this intersection of true and simulated realities that GTA 5 street signs become genuinely fascinating artifacts. Rockstar’s devotion to crafting realistic cities has fueled a magnifying glass culture that drives people to find and investigate the aforementioned stipulations, like the way GTA 6 hopefuls noticed a one-frame lighting mistake in a previous trailer and joked the game was now “literally unplayable.”
Similarly, a top comment on Any Austin’s video reads: “This dude’s gonna single-handedly delay GTA 6 for several years.” This sentiment doesn’t come from nowhere, and I’d argue it follows Rockstar like a good-natured ghost precisely because finding something out of place in an otherwise extremely realistic game is uniquely amusing, in part because it lets everyone be an informed critic.
You might not be a game programmer or artist, but you will know a thing or two about reality and how things look, so with weird little discrepancies like this, you get to point out mistakes that make sense to you. And because this stuff doesn’t actually hurt or impact how these games play, we’re all free to enjoy these things – in this case, incorrect street signs – as harmless little goofs that can even add a little extra character to games, like with GTA 5’s construction signs.
And if you do truly care about details like this, you can now correct many of GTA 5’s street signs using a mod that Any Austin commissioned from Timon of Diodes Delight, downloadable via a pinned comment on the video.
