GTA 5's weird endgame

[Administrator]

As is so often the case with the super-rich, my wife has started to exhibit some strange behaviour. A savvy blend of bank robbery and scattershot investing has left her with more money than she can ever hope to spend, and so she's increasingly only interested in the things that money cannot buy. Aliens, ghosts, zombies: this is the bizarre end-game to GTA 5. Once the missions are finished, once the last Achievements have been mopped up, unless you're willing to venture online you're going to be left right here: in a vast, beautiful map that you must shock back to life in any way you can think of. A map that tells you there is nothing left to find and nothing left to do. But that can't be true, can it?
I have not played much of GTA 5, but it feels like I've seen most of it via an unusual kind of time-lapse, as I walk through the living room and pass by the TV where my wife has been playing. At first when I walked by, she'd be hunkered down in a gunfight or cursing the controls for aiming. After a while, though, a strange kind of cumulative energy took hold. For many players, GTA 5 is like a vehicular Katamari: a game about expansion - always, to quote the great Ryan Serhant, and in all ways. So now I'd walk past and my wife would be sat in a beat-up Dodge, idling in her driveway, trying to decide what to do with her day. Ten minutes later she'd be in a firetruck. Then a Learjet. Then a passenger jumbo. This is the trajectory of the modern criminal.
Ghosts and UFOs came in once even these pleasures had been exhausted, and once the campaign was a long, long way behind her. Is it a spoiler to say that, by the end of GTA 5, you're enormously wealthy? More importantly, by the end of the game you're free: you have all the freedom that money can buy, and more besides. You have a huge map, and an empty schedule. It's how GTA 5 reacts to the empty schedule that has made me realise it's a much better game than I had initially imagined. So many open world adventures dry up as the icons on the radar slowly vanish, but there is clearly an easy joy to just navigating this nutty facsimile of Southern California that means you can linger here pretty much aimlessly and still have a good time.
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