On November 19, millions of gamers will step into the lives of Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos in GTA VI. It is reportedly the most expensive video game ever made, and it is expected to break sales records. Such is its pull that other studios have planned their release schedules around it. Like every GTA before it, it offers a fantasy: a world where you can take what you want, go where you want, and answer to no one. But what is it about this world that draws so many people in? Why would the lives of Jason and Lucia appeal to perhaps the largest audience a video game has ever had? Surprisingly, the answers say more about us than about the game.
On a technical level, GTA VI is shaping up as a landmark. It looks closer to a film than a game: sunlight on the water, crowds that move like real crowds. Skin, sweat and wrinkles in fabric are rendered in startling detail. The world is enormous. According to Rockstar, the map of Leonida is about twice the size of GTA V’s, itself one of the largest and most detailed worlds ever built. Yet some of its most striking detail is found indoors. Hundreds of buildings can be entered, and they are not empty shells. Rockstar’s own demonstrations suggest interiors detailed enough that you notice the clutter on the counter before you notice the exits. It is a staggering achievement: an entire state, rendered down to the last palm tree and the last corner store.
But graphics are not why we remember Rockstar’s games. Rockstar has a rare gift: it makes us care about people we would never want to be. Red Dead Redemption 2 is remembered less for its stunning open world than for Arthur Morgan, a hardened outlaw whose slow reckoning with his past moved millions of players. This time, the story belongs to Jason and Lucia, a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde. Lucia has done time in prison; Jason left the Army and now scrapes by in the Keys, working on boats at a veteran drug runner’s marina and helping with his shakedowns. Few of us will relate to their lives, yet by the end of the game most players will likely be deeply attached to them both. They are lovers as well as partners in crime, and in a world full of hustlers and schemers, their bond is the thing they cannot afford to lose. It is the oldest outlaw romance there is: two people against the world.
Yet GTA has always offered something beyond graphics and story: a kind of freedom, a world where you can do almost anything and walk away. This isn’t the fantasy of a far-off world full of dragons; it’s the fantasy of a life close to our own. Vice City has sunshine, beaches, fast cars, and money waiting for anyone bold enough to take it. For a few hours a night, you get to be someone else, somewhere better, and have a good time doing it. Then, at the end of the evening, you switch off the console and go to sleep. No consequences.
The dream of doing whatever you like without consequences is as old as philosophy. In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon tells the story of Gyges, a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia. He finds a ring that makes him invisible, and with his new power, he seduces the queen, kills the king with her help, and takes the throne. Glaucon’s point is this: give anyone the power to act without consequences, even a just person, and they will break the rules just as Gyges did. His brother Adeimantus presses the point further: any young man listening to all this would conclude that the unjust person who keeps a reputation for justice “lives the life of a god” (365b, trans. Grube and Reeve).
In a sense, GTA VI hands the Ring of Gyges to millions of players and lets them live the life of a god. In Leonida, the secret to getting ahead is not following the rules like everyone else, but breaking them and not getting caught. Brian, the drug runner Jason works for in the Keys, is living proof: he has been in the game long enough to let others do his dirty work.
By the rules, Jason and Lucia cannot hope for much. Jason joined the Army hoping for a fresh start, but he left under a cloud and drifted into a life of odd jobs and shakedowns. Lucia’s father taught her to fight, and fighting for her family landed her in prison. The world has already decided who they are: an ex-soldier with nowhere to go and an ex-con. Every honest door seems closed, and the jobs that remain will never pay enough to change anything. As Jason puts it in the launch trailer, “They don’t give loans, anything, to people like me.” Crime offers what ordinary life will not: not just money, but the chance to stop being looked down upon. One big score, and they could command respect.
In their union, Jason and Lucia believe they have found the Ring of Gyges. Alone, each of them has been knocked down by life. Together, they feel unstoppable. Rockstar set the launch trailer to a new song by Justice called “Flower in a Hurricane”, and the title captures the fantasy well: something tender, holding together in the middle of the storm. Their love becomes a kind of invisibility, a private world where the rules of the outside world no longer apply, and where each will cover for the other. It also becomes their justification. They are not trying to become different people; in each other, they see a chance to finally do things right and take back what is theirs. After everything the world has taken from them, they feel owed. Even Gyges did not take the throne alone; he needed the queen. So, too, Jason and Lucia need each other to pull off the life they want. Their bond is what makes the gamble feel possible: if they stick together, they cannot lose. And once they have tasted the good life, there is no going back.
The pull of GTA VI is not just good graphics and a clever story; it is the pull of a life we secretly find appealing: the urge for more, and the wish to have it without consequences. That urge is not foreign to any of us. We would never rob a bank or steal a car, but can we honestly say we would never be tempted by the Ring of Gyges? Would we be so pure of heart as to throw the ring away? We are closer to Jason and Lucia than we think. Most of us would not call it greed; we would call it justice: a way of evening the score for the wrongs done to us, and then, quietly, of getting ahead.
The truth is that the pull of that ring is stronger than any strength of our own. We cannot simply turn away from our false gods, the things we look to for the life we want. Punishment will not do it. As Lucia walks out of prison and straight back into a life of crime, we see the limits of punishment. Prison can hold a person, and the threat of it can hold them back, but neither can remake them. Argument and reason will not do it either. We cannot think our way into being different people. Plato saw something of this. In his allegory of the cave, the prisoner cannot free himself; someone else must release him. And when he sees the light, he wants to turn back to the shadows, and he has to be dragged up the steep path into the sun. For Plato, the great question was how a soul is turned around. But as Jesus said of the rich man who could not let go of his wealth (Mark 10:17–27), what is impossible for us is possible with God.
The greatest impossibility of all is that a holy God should dwell with sinners without consuming them. Faced with God’s holiness, Isaiah cried, “Woe is me! For I am lost” (Isaiah 6:5). Yet he was not consumed. A seraph touched his lips with a coal “from the altar”, the place of sacrifice, and said, “Your guilt is taken away” (Isaiah 6:6–7). And Moses stood before a bush that burned but was not consumed (Exodus 3:2). Both point to Jesus Christ. In him, God himself took on human flesh and came to live among us: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Those who came near him were not consumed, not even a prostitute weeping at his feet (Luke 7:37–38). And on the cross, God himself bore the fire of judgment that should have fallen on us. As Paul puts it, “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).
Only God breaking into our world can set us on a different path from Jason and Lucia, not because we are better than them, but because we have been met by the fire that does not consume. And when God breaks in, our idols fall, as Pharaoh’s did. God judged every one of Pharaoh’s gods (Exodus 12:12): the Nile turned to blood, and the sun went dark over his kingdom. Yet Pharaoh still could not let go. Confronted with the living God through Moses, he hardened his heart (Exodus 8:15), clinging to who he was: a man who believed he lived as one of the gods.
Sin is ultimately not a thinking problem; it is an identity problem. We cannot even know what sin is apart from the revelation of the only one who is truly just, Jesus Christ. Unless we are remade, and our whole understanding of what is good is remade with us, we cannot resist the pull of wanting more. Like Tolkien’s One Ring, the Ring of Gyges always seems to want to be found.
When Lucia walks out of prison and finds Jason, she catches a vision of a new life: a fresh start, a way to redeem the past and finally take back what is hers. But it is a shortcut, an illusion. Their union promises a new beginning, yet neither of them is changed. They carry their old selves into the new life, and so they slide back into the very life of crime they hoped to leave behind. The ring has not set them free; it has only bound them more tightly.
Until we are remade, we will always be at war with ourselves, and our best intentions will be no match for our false gods. The Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers made the same point in a famous sermon, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” (1819). He argued that you cannot rid people of their love for the world by showing them how empty it is. The only way to expel one love is with a greater one. And that greater love is not something we can summon; it has to come to us.
It is only by union with Christ that we can be transformed and set free from the slavery of sin. “Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin,” Jesus said; and “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:34, 36). The Israelites did not walk out of Egypt by their own strength; God brought them out. So too, we are not freed by a big score, a clean slate, or a love that excuses everything, but by being joined to the One who has already broken the power of sin and death.
On November 19, millions will put on the ring for an evening. The invitation of the gospel is to lay it down for good, and to walk out of Egypt into a new life, free and confident in what Christ has done.
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This article is part of the lead-up to my book, The New You: Living Free and Confident Through the Exodus, which explores how the story of the Exodus becomes our own journey out of slavery and into freedom in Christ. If it spoke to you, you can read the Introduction free by signing up below.