These stolen moments last only a few seconds before players gain control, but they reinforce the sense that the player is not living through each character, but instead watching them from above, omnisciently. Here, prying into another person's private being doesn’t come with any implicit agenda other than a curiosity to know them better, to not just know the details of life but to get as close to feeling another person’s subjectivity. One watches not to judge, condemn, or steal, but to feel more intimately connected to these characters, and they in turn are surrounded by implicit and explicit signs of surveillance, from extended sequences of surveying banks, jewelry stores, and government buildings in anticipation of heists to the regular discovery of a particular radio station playing in a car that you’ve just commanded them to steal.

The game uses voyeurism and surveillance to heighten the entertainment, of course: to advance a storyline about a FBI-CIA rivalry, to make fun of a fictional Facebook called Lifehacker, and for plenty of slapstick prurience, as when sneaking backstage to unmask a popular but lecherous game show host who's attempting to sleep with Michael's daughter, a contestant on the show. This scene prompts a long interactive car chase to catch and beat up the host—punishment not for being a creep, but for creeping on the wrong woman. More broadly, and problematically, Grand Theft Auto V portrays all of the benefits of peeping and spying but none of the dangers: A player's curiosity about others' private lives is rewarded with humor and drama and intimate detail, engendering sympathy even for those as overtly dislikable as the game's three main characters.

Other games use surveillance as a tool for enforcing morality. The forthcoming Watch Dogs is set in Chicago's near-future and organized around a massive, state-run network called the Central Operating System. The hero of the game is a hacker who has gained access to the network, and can use it to pry into the lives of everyone around him, but with the noble goal of protecting the innocent from the city's lurking evildoers. In one scenario, he aims his smartphone at a woman on the street and instantly pulls up the network's data about her, learning that she's recently broken up with a violent boyfriend who has a criminal record. You can then follow her and protect her from an eventual attack by her ex-boyfriend. Last year's Sleeping Dogs, an open world detective game set in Hong Kong, had a similar mechanic, in which players hack into CCTVs around the city to pick out drug dealers for the local police to arrest.

In these cases, the moral breach of surveillance is acceptable because the game worlds necessitate it, introducing villains that can only be stopped through surveillance—a mirror of the argument made in defense of current surveillance programs: that while the NSA and FBI have access to huge stores of private information, they promise only to pursue likely or suspect terrorists and traitors. When President Barack Obama claims that Americans “can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he’s calling for tolerance of the general idea of surveillance as a necessary compromise for safety from terrorism. Yet, in the fantasy of the game world, we can accept these logical extremes because the game builds a space where there are imminent threats behind every closed door—sex traffickers, drug dealers, gunrunners, terrorists. But the threats in real life are less imminent, and certainly more opaque, which is what makes these games so seductive: There are no unknowns—known or otherwise.

Video games don't reflect our world so much as simplify it. They euphemize subjects, sometimes troubling ones, and allow us total control in situations that, in real life, are often beyond our control. In so doing, they can pacify our discomfort with the messy state of affairs. We see this with today's surveillance-driven games, and we saw it last decade with the rise in popularity of the military shooter, concomitant with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For instance, the enemy of 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a nuclear-armed despot in an unnamed Arabian country, against whom a group of American and English special forces fight to prevent a terrorist attack on America. The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel described the game's “Death From Above” level, in which players direct a camera-controlled gun on a Lockheed AC-130 gunship and kill small human figures on a black and white videofeed, as “at once the most realistic scene and the mission that feels most like a video game, but only because for some modern soldiers, war really has come to resemble a video game.” And while this mission looked and sounded real, an eerie precursor to WikiLeak’s infamous “Collateral Murder” video, it came with built-in safeguards that immediately failed players who shot at civilians.