If ever the state of American politics becomes too depressing to handle, you can always take a look across the Atlantic and remember that all is sweetness and light in the old country, either. Well, just this week the Telegraph revealed that lazy British officials had used taxpayers’ money to gamble grand theft car online!
Pearls squeezed audibly, describes the Telegraph GTA online as “a violent video game that involves shooting, driving fast cars, and evading the police.” The story continues along these lines, stating that “officials joined the game players over the Internet and talked to them about their experience while participating in GTA ‘missions’. Examples of missions include robbing a jewelry store, detonating a bomb to kill the CEO of a large company, and bringing prostitutes to their clients within a specific time limit.”
The shame of all this! How did the Telegraph manage to get such a scoop? Well, the newspaper claims to have “discovered” the blog post that serves as its source, although it doesn’t bother to link to the post in question, perhaps because it turns out that Policy Lab, the UK government experimental unit responsible for the GTA project, has had a publicly available website throughout his decade-long life. It also turns out, curiously, that despite existing as innovative pioneers, “people-centered“, the body is not even a product of the kind of naïve liberalism that the Telegraph tends to vilify. It was configuration under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition in 2014, as a result of a civil service reform plan published two years ago.
Most likely, the offending blog post itself was This, published in December 2024. The timing means this would be less a case of the Telegraph’s intrepid journalists doggedly “uncovering” information and more of them “realizing something that had been on the internet for 18 months”. And reading the post, it turns out (surprisingly!) that the story is not exactly what the Telegraph is up to.
First, the researchers were inspired by a project called Grand Theft Villagewhere two actors tried to develop a complete production of Village inside GTA online. Although the reader has been clearly led to understand that public officials were involved in robberies, murders and major pimping, a careful word-for-word examination of the copy provides an alternative meaning, which is that these are actually generic examples of missions with which GTA online participants could be presented. #journalism, friends.
And look, whatever you think about the merits and methodology of the current GTA project, it’s hard to fault the philosophy behind it. There has long been a fundamental disconnect between the world of new technologies and the world of politics, largely because the most enthusiastic adopters of the former tend to be young, and the inhabitants of the latter tend to be relatively older. This results in a situation where lawmakers are tasked with regulating technology they neither use nor understand.
With this in mind, governments should be encouraged to try to better understand how people use technology and figure out how to reach them wherever they are. This seems to have been the objective behind the GTA project. The 2024 Policy Lab blog post explains that its goal was to explore how interacting with people within the “metaverse” could “deepen our understanding of political issues and engage communities that traditional methods may struggle to access.” (To be clear, the authors interpret the term “metaverse” rather loosely; they use it as a general term for “any virtual world where people connect socially, usually within a 3D digital space,” a definition that encompasses games like fortnite and GTA online plus Mark Zuckerberg’s legless horror show).
The Telegraph story mentions none of this. Instead, he throws in some attempts at other Policy Lab projects and then moves on to the real business at hand: a professionally indignant quote from Mike Wood, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, who bleats: “Working families won’t believe their taxes are funding this nonsense.” (You can tell Wood is still learning his craft by not including a “thinking of the children” angle in his quote, but he’ll get there.)
In short, then, history is lazy bait for outrage. Their wording and framing of the actual event is disingenuous at best and misleading at worst. You don’t provide any context for your topic: how big is Policy Lab’s budget, for example? How much did the GTA project cost? And how many suitcases of Boris Johnson’s wine does that equate to?
Perhaps most depressingly, it also contains the obligatory quote from a browbeaten Labor spokesperson: “Ministers didn’t approve these projects and don’t want taxpayers’ money wasted on video games when there are bigger issues of concern to the public.” In other words, this whole sorry affair is a prime example of how conservative media sausage is made. Outrage, heartstrings, I repeat.
