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Violence, shooting and driving fast cars are not usually the first things that spring to mind when Whitehall talks about the ‘lived experience’ of the British public. Yet Policy Lab, an ‘experimental’ cross-government unit based at the Department for Education, appears to think otherwise. It has been very busy encouraging our esteemed civil servants to spend time at work playing Grand Theft Auto (GTA), an 18-rated video game, to learn about the public’s ‘hopes and dreams’.
Expectations of Whitehall’s pen-pushers are rarely high. But the so-called Policy Lab takes civil service grifting to a new level. The unit actually pays officials to ‘spend time with participants in videogames they played regularly’ to ‘experience the world’.
GTA, made by the American company Rockstar, allows players to commit a variety of fictional crimes as part of its missions. These include robbery and burglary, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, murder, kidnapping and extortion. The game was introduced to Whitehall as part of an attempt to learn about the ‘lived experience’ of the public – because nothing says understanding the British people quite like mowing down pedestrians in a fictional city at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.
