If the state of U.S. politics ever gets too depressing to handle, you can always cast a glance across the Atlantic and remind yourself that it’s not exactly all sweetness and light in the old country, either. Why, just this week the Telegraph revealed that lazy British civil servants had used taxpayer money to play Grand Theft Auto online!
Pearls audibly clutched, the Telegraph describes GTA Online as “a violent video game involving shooting, driving fast cars and evading the police.” The story continues in this vein, gasping that “civil servants joined the game’s players through the internet, and spoke to them about their experience while taking part in GTA ‘missions’. Examples of the missions include stealing from a jewellery shop, detonating a bomb to kill the chief executive of a major company, and driving prostitutes to their clients within a specific time limit.”
The shame of it all! How did the Telegraph manage to get a hold of such a scoop?? Er, well, the paper claims to have “uncovered” the blog post that serves as its source, although it doesn’t bother to link to the post in question—perhaps because it transpires that Policy Lab, the experimental U.K. government unit responsible for the GTA project, has had a publicly available website throughout its decade-long lifetime. It also turns out, amusingly, that despite existing to pioneer outside-the-box, “people-centered” policies, the body isn’t even the product of the kind of naive liberalism the Telegraph tends to vilify. It was set up under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition in 2014, as a result of a civil service reform plan published two years earlier.
The offending blog post itself was most likely this one, published in December 2024. The timing means that this would be less a case of the Telegraph’s fearless journalists doggedly “uncovering” information and more of them “noticing something that had been sitting on the internet for 18 months.” And on actually reading the post, it turns out—shockingly!—that the story isn’t quite what the Telegraph is making out.
First, the researchers were actually inspired by a project called Grand Theft Hamlet, wherein two actors tried to develop a full production of Hamlet within GTA Online. Despite the reader clearly being led to understand that civil servants were involved in virtual thefts, murders and big pimpin’, a careful word-by-word examination of the copy provides an alternative meaning, which is that these are in fact generic examples of missions with which GTA Online participants might be presented. #journalism, folks.
And look, whatever you think of the merits and methodology of the actual GTA project, it’s hard to fault the philosophy behind it. There’s long been a fundamental disconnect between the world of new technology and the world of politics, largely because the most eager adopters of the former tend to be young, and the denizens of the latter tend to be relatively old. This results in a situation where legislators are tasked with regulating technology that they neither use nor understand.
With that in mind, governments should be encouraged in attempts to better understand how people use technology and to figure out how to meet people where they are. This appears to have been the goal behind the GTA project. The 2024 Policy Lab blog post explains that its aim was to explore how engaging with people within “the metaverse” could “deepen our understanding of policy issues and engage communities who traditional methods may struggle to access.” (Just to be clear, the authors interpret the term “metaverse” in a fairly loose sense—they use it a as blanket term for “any virtual worlds where people connect socially, usually within a 3D digital space,” a definition that encompasses games like Fortnite and GTA Online in addition to Mark Zuckerberg’s legless horrorshow.)
The Telegraph’s story mentions none of this. Instead, it throws in a few shots at other Policy Lab projects and then moves onto the real business at hand: a professionally outraged quote from Mike Wood, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, who bleats, “Hard-working families will be in disbelief that their taxes are bankrolling this nonsense.” (You can tell Wood is still learning his craft by his failure to crowbar a “think of the children” angle into his quote, but he’ll get there.)
In summary, then, the story is a lazy piece of outrage bait. Its wording and framing of the actual event is disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst. It provides no context for its subject—how large is Policy Lab’s budget, for example? How much did the GTA project cost? And how many Boris Johnson wine suitcases does that cost equate to?
Perhaps most depressingly, it also contains the obligatory quote from a browbeaten Labour spokesperson: “Ministers did not sign off these projects and don’t want to see taxpayers’ money wasted on video games when there are bigger problems the public care about.” In other words, the whole sorry business is a prime example of how the conservative media sausage is made. Outrage, heartstrings, repeat.
