Modding in computer games involves altering or customizing a game’s content, features, mechanics, or functionality. Players or other programmers tinker with the game’s code and use modding to enhance or change the game experience beyond its original design – making it more replayable, introducing creative elements, or even fixing issues. However, modding can also serve as a form of artistic activism, critiquing a game or the broader gaming industry by hijacking and recontextualizing its content. In such disruptive cases, modding aligns with culture jamming, exposing and challenging questionable practices within the video game industry.

This site features several examples of video essays resulting from subversive modding. There’s the gender-swapped version of the bestselling game Batman: Arkham Knight which highlights the objectification of its female characters. The curious case of why cops won’t fight each other in Grand Theft Auto V. And of course, there’s the work of the collective Total Refusal on NPC’s and on dysfunctional playgrounds in video games, to name a few.

Another excellent example is the work of Marco De Mutiis and Alexandra Pfammatter, the founders of 2girls1comp. Over the past few years, they have released several fascinating mods for Grand Theft Auto V. Some of their creations are purely entertaining – such as Dancing Plague or The GTA V Piano of the Dead – but their most compelling work delivers a poetic critique of the behemoth game. A standout example is Meanwhile in Los Santos (Dissociation Nation), a mod that shifts the focus to NPCs (non-player characters, the “extras” of the gaming industry). The mod pauses gameplay at random moments, pulling back to a God’s-eye view of the scene before zooming in on an arbitrary NPC. That character is standing around passively, but their inner thoughts are revealed to the viewer.

The musings of these NPCs range from the mundane (“Mmm. Ice cream.”) to more philosophical reflections (“Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.”). Yet, these inner dialogues consistently grant the NPCs a sense of consciousness absent in the regular game. The viewer (or player) is invited to interpret their self-aware thoughts as a critique of GTA‘s design – highlighting its lack of empathy, its reliance on violence as a narrative backbone, and the contradiction between its vast world and its focus on the fortunes of a very limited number of playable characters.

The best way to experience this alternative version of GTA V is likely by playing it, but 2girls1comp has also released several trailers that provide a glimpse of its gameplay. These trailers function as miniature video essays: short video vignettes that offer a fascinating mind-reading of NPCs. They leave viewers hoping for a healthier dose of humanity in GTA VI.