Grand Theft Auto V is the third best-selling video game of all time with an estimated 110million sales across all platforms.
But could its iconic global status be concealing a series of environmental messages, charting the advance of global warming and the accumulation of plastic waste on land and in our oceans?
That is among the theories behind Plastic Scoop, an innovative new film created by artist Andy Hughes and Dr Mandy Bloomfield, Lecturer in English at the University of Plymouth.
Combining in-game footage and public service information films from the past 100 years, it shares new perspectives and approaches around plastic pollution, the Anthropocene and sustainability.
It also encourages the viewer to suspend the game’s known themes around gang violence, car theft and racial stereotypes by instead bringing relationships between climate change, landscape and environmental discourses to the fore.
The result is an irreverent and often somewhat satirical look at how issues of increasing global significance might be seen in a wider cultural context.
Andy is an award-winning photographer and artist who has worked extensively with plastic over past three decades, including making photographic works with various items of litter and other waste materials.
He was originally inspired after noticing that the landscapes in newer versions of the game were increasingly populated with rubbish, and set about capturing characters wandering through trash-filled streets and car parks, swimming in the deep sea, and falling through polluted skies. He said:
