Grand Theft Auto V, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Playlist

The American suburban teenager is an unwitting lab rat in a sadistic social experiment: what happens when food, friends, education, and entertainment are accessible only via two-ton moving metal cages?

The answer is that they die. Car crashes killed over two thousand 13-19 year olds in 2022. Accidents continue to be the number one cause of preventable death for American teens, followed by murder and suicide. Compared to adults, teens are less likely to drink and drive, but when they do they’re at much higher risk of crashing.

In high school I was in Students Against Drunk Driving (which has since broadened its purview to oppose “Destructive Decisions” in general), not because I particularly cared about driving under the influence, but because all my friends were in it. The main event was the annual “SADD Walk”: we’d meet at our high school, get bussed to a different high school five miles down the road, and then walk back to where we started, all of us wearing matching black SADD shirts.

The point of this exercise continues to elude me. Maybe as drivers whizzed past us they’d see the word SADD out of their peripheral vision, be confused, and google it (ideally not while driving). Like I said: my friends were in it, and they were cooler than me. They had Xbox 360s and custom-built gaming PCs that they used to play Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, while I only had a Wii; they already had licenses and even their own cars, while I still relied on my dad to shuttle me around.