At some point my family got into the habit of taking walks on New Year's Day. We generally went out along the coast, which itself is a short walk away. We wouldn't go very far and we wouldn't have any goal in mind. It was just the perfect way – cool, airy and bright – to start another twelve months of what the world had in store for us.
This year we woke up to a storm: rain falling, fences bending. A walk was out of the question. But then, faced with the prospect of a gray day indoors, my wife turned on GTA Online.
And lo! Los Santos was covered in snow. Flakes fell across the night sky, palm trees cast strange winter shadows, and the entire world around Pillbox Hill was covered in white. Los Santos felt clean and strange and had that theatrical calm that real snow can bring to busy places.
In the end, this was as good as a ride. Instead of cruising along the coast, we spent the afternoon driving around in a series of cars my wife named from Johnny on the Spot. And finally we got a moped and we started delivering pizzas. What a strange game this has become: We spend thirty minutes going up and down familiar streets, stopping at doors we'd never noticed before, and earning $43k for our time. In Los Santos, delivering pizzas involves serious banking.
But that thought: what a strange game this has become. Over the years, GTA Online has gone from something scary and intimidating to something that feels a bit like Animal Crossing. If you time it right and end up with the right people, you won't get shot in the head or blown out of the sky. Instead, you go for a joyful stroll through a landscape that you have come to know well and that you have come to feel like you have some kind of stake or ownership in it. These days we enter GTA Online to do nothing specific; generally, to do nothing at all. We went in for the same reason I sometimes go out to the garden. Just to float around like a middle-aged person and look around.
This turned out to be the perfect way to prepare for the new year: the place looked familiar, but the snow made everything fresh and unexpected again. You don't get much more on January 1st than that. And later that day, when I checked into Animal Crossing, which has also been white with snow for the past few weeks, I thought: These places aren't really that different. Or at least they don't have to be so different.
But there is something else. Something about the way games have changed as they've moved online. I remember years ago my friend bought an Xbox 360 before Christmas, the year it came out. I went over one afternoon to see what the new machine was like, and he had Kameo running, but all the elves and fairies and stuff were wearing Santa hats. He explained that they had made a patch just for Christmas: this was a game that had come out earlier in the year, and yet here it was acknowledging that we had reached a certain point in time where Santa hats were suddenly appropriate.
I felt the same thrill of newness when we loaded GTA Online and found snow everywhere. Here was a place, but a place that moved through time in its own way. I have known Los Angeles all my life, but I had never seen it in the snow. What a strange privilege! Happy new year everyone.