Clocking into work and being told you're going to play GTA Online all day can't be too bad of a gig. It might sound like a dream to many civil service workers, but people at the Department for Education in the UK were given the task of joining GTA Online lobbies within their working day, as part of an experimental new way of devising policy.
In the game, the civil servants conducted online focus groups to "create an emotionally safe space" for participants, where they could learn about their "lived experience" in the game, according to The Telegraph. The experiment was set up by Policy Lab, a unit at Whitehall tasked with providing "an experimental environment for testing and evaluating new ways to make policy."
The taxpayer-funded project took place in December 2024, and it was noted that the experience revealed "impactful insights about people's lived experience." It was also found that "meeting people virtually is especially useful for people in remote locations," and that people found in-game experiences to be incredibly rewarding, especially when they could not achieve them in the real world.
Policy Lab was founded under the Tory government, and has been criticised for not delivering value for money. "This sort of nonsense is exactly the kind of Tory hangover this Government wants to root out. Ministers did not sign off these projects and don't want to see taxpayers' money wasted on video games when there are bigger problems the public care about," said a source at Whitehall.
A government source added: "This is a decades old Tory initiative that we are now looking into." While it is interesting to look at Grand Theft Auto Online as a shared space and see the kind of experience it delivers to the public, considering the findings seem to be rudimentary at best from this experiment, it becomes tricky to see what value we can gain from civil servants becoming virtual gangsters.