Feature: Comments on GTA V (Part II) - Climate Change

Why don't more GTA V citizens ride bikes?

At first I couldn't put my finger on why littering in GTA V sparked in me a mixture of irritation, a high level of anger, and sadness. At first I thought it might be due to the casualness of the littering. Michael finishes coffee with an FIB agent, and Michael leaves his coffee cup on the patio table, the agent throws his on the ground. I switched to Franklin at one point as he finished off a can of Sprunk. He then tossed it to the sidewalk.

In real life, littering does irritate me, especially when the item being tossed is recyclable. Is your life so damn busy you can't hold on to that empty can for bit to drop it into a recycling bin? Or hand it over to a can collector? After some deep thinking, I think the reason it grates on me so much because Los Santos/Blaine County is a closed system. For all we know, it could be a biodome on Mars or trapped in a snow globe on the desk of Tobias Funke. Either way, the boundaries of the world in GTA V are clearly defined and there's a definite "Here be Dragons!" hard edges to the map. (Other countries and nationalities are name-checked but we never see those places.) So the fact that all the characters in GTA V seem to treat littering like it's no big deal is incongruous with what daily life should entail, which is a lot of the three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.