There’s a joke that’s been going around the internet for years, imagining a British remake of Grand Theft Auto. According to the meme, this cliché-heavy installment of the GTA series would be an adventure of mischievous misdeeds, where roguish geezers attempt to outrun the gentlemanly constabulary. It would be called Stealy Wheely Automobiley.
British gamers will quickly tell you the joke is on the jokers – for a start, GTA is British, originally developed in Dundee by DMA Design (the studio later renamed Rockstar North). But for some players, the genteel British stereotype is not far off.
The UK is home to a subculture of gamers who are re-building Grand Theft Auto V – the critically-acclaimed epic of mob mayhem and the most expensive game ever developed – into something much more mild-mannered, transforming the game from chaotic crime sandbox into what is effectively a law enforcement simulator, where players play as law-abiding police instead of gun-toting criminals.
This idea to flip the gameplay originated in the US, where a community of modders have created a version of GTA V they call ‘Los Santos Police Department: First Response’ (Los Santos is the game’s fictional Californian setting). British modders have taken things a step further, relocating the action across the Atlantic by painstakingly recreating accurate UK police forces’ uniforms and kit. British LSDPFRers assume the position of a uniformed copper on the beat, and are armed with little more than a nightstick and taser – if they’re lucky.
“I started off as only wanting to do the high-speed chases and gunfights,” says Albo1125, a British university student and keen modder. “After having done about ten of both they quickly got boring.”
Albo estimates he has spent 4,000 hours making emergency service mods. He also runs a YouTube channel that specialises in recreating real-life policing scenarios in the game and has 27,000 subscribers.
Anyone can download LSPDFR mods and play on basic single player missions, which involve driving around the city, pulling over speeding drivers and deploying tools such as custom two-way radios, breathalysers and speed-guns. But Albo says that it is playing online, in multiplayer scenarios, that gamers have taken modded roleplay to the next level. “When playing in a multiplayer environment, you can scale up the realism as you're interacting with other real people,” he says.
In these situations, some gamers play as police while others role-play criminals and victims. Albo and his friends aim to replicate real-world policing procedures as closely as possible when they play, for example following the real-world “GOWISELY” codes to carry out stop-and-search procedures and the College of Policing’s pursuits policy for responsible car chases.
This means there is no wild, high-speed ramming in their car chases – instead, multiple drivers may pull off a boxing manoeuvre to slow the suspect down. When he makes an arrest, Albo expertly reels off the “You do not have to say anything…” caution.
His YouTube clips often show highlights of low-adrenaline action, including officers pulling people over for texting while driving and breaking up a scuffle between Just Eat delivery drivers. “Not many other YouTubers bother to post these more routine calls, so it's somewhat of a niche that people seem to quite enjoy,” he says.
British modders in the community are faced with a tougher challenge than their American counterparts because of the need to change the look of the game as well as the gameplay. Modders such as the ambitious “Project London” team work to eradicate the palm trees and Pacific coast sparkle of the original game map to create something closer to the British capital.
Using 3D software like ZModeler, they need to build everything from the British police uniforms to the Volvo XC90 Patrol four-by-fours (complete with Met Police markings and British license plates). Other local additions include M&S delivery vans, Costa Coffee shopfronts, and a multitude of triangular British traffic signs.
These trimmings are popular: Albo says the mods he’s produced have been downloaded more than 4 million times, with other modders specialising in different cars and pieces of kit, down to the realistic audio tones for police radios.
Much still needs to be fixed to transform Los Santos into a passable vision of Leytonstone – not least the traffic, which, despite countless hours of frustrated hacking, remains stuck to the wrong side of the road. But thanks to a growing effort that began in summer 2015, the community is slowly bashing the game into a colder, wetter, slower shape.
Watching one of Albo’s videos, a multiplayer patrol titled “Careless Cyclist Tries Getting Out Of Ticket”, you get a sense of the modders’ vision: the two-wheeled transgression is painstakingly realised in a snowy, post-industrial lot that could be Leicester or Luton, as the cyclist tries every trick to get off without charge.
Asked to describe the appeal of the roleplay community, Albo says it’s a way to positively engage with the emergency services, who he feels get unfairly subjected to public criticism on the internet. Modding is a way to re-build empathy and understanding with the women and men in uniform.
Fellow modder Matthew, a South Londoner who plays as ObsidianGames, says that the roleplaying community is roughly divided into three types of people: real-life members of the emergency services, people who aspire to jobs in uniform, and others who just have “massive respect” for them.
Away from his keyboard, Matthew is part of the expansive British emergency service vehicles “spotters” community, who enjoy observing and photographing emergency vehicles (like trainspotters with trains). He says his hobby of photographing vehicles progressed naturally into 3D modelling them for games.
“The level of detail people get into in communities is quite unbelievable,” says a player who gave his name as Barker and plays in the Westminster Roleplay Community as BluePlodder. In real life, Barker is a response officer for the Metropolitan Police and has taken over as a sort of informal advisor to modders, hearing out their questions about the Met’s kit and processes. He says some of the details they learned early on from YouTube videos are a little dated, but it is otherwise “not a million miles away”.
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He describes a past in-depth roleplay scenario, where uniformed police arriving at the scene of a crime handed over to other gamers taking on the role of detectives from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). Lines of investigation were followed by the book, and gamers set up arrest enquiries so that other units could go and nick the offender, before he was booked, interviewed and a charging decision made.
Barker says gamers from across the world, including the US, are often surprised by the restraint required in the British roleplaying communities, especially given the lack of guns.
Both Albo and Matthew say they’re considering careers in policing, and Barker believes that playing games like the modded GTA could even be useful experience. The Metropolitan Police already use virtual systems to train new recruits on how to deal with certain incidents. “Doing this in a realer environment would not only save on costs but make it more realistic,” he says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
