Meet the Obsessive Role-Players Who Live Inside the World of Grand Theft Auto

Renegade developers co-opted this controversial video game’s source code to build a complex alternate universe where breaking character is the cardinal sin. Millions tune in to watch.

Story edited by Brendan Spiegel

Need a break from your family right about now and itching to be transported to a very different place? We’ve got you with this Narratively Classic. Dive into the weird and wonderful world of video game role players that writer Meghan Gunn reports on so exquisitely.

—Narratively

---

Before joining the police force, Sergeant Ziggy Buggs was an exotic dancer. He still performs a striptease now and then for the troopers at his precinct, resurrecting the moves that paid his way through law school. But there were no lap dances at the San Andreas courthouse on July 30, 2019. Buggs’ police force walked in, straight-backed and somber, all dressed in suits, to give trial testimonies regarding a shooting that had taken place a few weeks earlier.

A senior deputy named Kurt Leonard had shot an unarmed civilian, Curtis Swoleroid, three times in the back during a foot chase through the San Andreas Valley. Leonard was accused of using excessive force. After being sworn in, Swoleroid’s attorney approached the bench for opening statements. He stood firmly before Judge Dennis Lebarre, who presided donning a sheriff’s hat, and declared that the state’s police officers “are explicitly trained on how to uphold the law, how to conduct themselves professionally, how to execute their authority gracefully, with distinction, and with respect to the civil rights of the citizens of the United States that they are sworn to protect. We are gathered here today to hear a violation of these civil rights.”

He described the attack, how his client had fallen down and pleaded for his life, how Deputy Leonard had shot anyway. While his lawyer recounted those shots, the way they’d entered his back and exited his torso, rendering him unconscious and near death, Swoleroid, now largely recovered, stood in the back of the room, shifting on his feet. He wore sunglasses and red pants with his suit jacket. Swoleroid is a man with a commanding presence, a brawny build with broad shoulders. He has a clean-cut fade haircut and a neck tattoo peeking out from his button-down collar. His father had died in prison, and, as a well-established narcotics dealer, Swoleroid was no stranger to law enforcement himself. But although known for being tough and swaggering, while reliving the shooting in court Swoleroid looked restrained, uncomfortable even. His hands clenched tensely below the counsel table, and he shifted restlessly from foot to foot.

Opposite Swoleroid, Deputy Leonard bristled multiple times during the prosecution, a certain defensiveness seeping into his responses. He hadn’t heard his partner’s call for a ceasefire, he protested. The tension was palpable, even through a screen, to the thousands of interested onlookers who’d tuned in from behind their computers. The trial showcased a story that has played out in other courtrooms across the United States, indicative of a systemic issue that, the year after this trial, in the summer of 2020, would bring about a national reckoning. But the Swoleroid v. Leonard case had one major difference than others that have captivated the nation: It took place in an online world, between avatar people. Swoleroid and Leonard are role players in an extremely complex, volunteer-run, hyperrealistic video game.