Gamers' Intersection

"There's so much you can do in 'San Andreas.' So much ," says Brendan, sitting on the edge of the twin bed, hands on a controller, eyes fixed on the TV screen. "It's got like 200 hours of game play. It kinda never ends."

His friend Cyrus Movaghari (everyone calls him Cy) lounges on the computer chair, snacking on Chips Ahoy, looking a little bored. They're chilling out in Brendan's bedroom, a pad with no fewer than seven posters of the rock band Motley Crue, inside a three-story, three-bedroom house so big it goes up a hill in McLean. (Mom works in investments, Dad's a lawyer. He's an only child.) Brendan works part time at the Safeway and saved up for most everything in his room: PlayStation 2, Xbox, iPod. His desktop computer, a Mac, is playing "Church," by the New Orleans jam band Galactic.

Brendan's cell phone rings. It's their friend Hon, asking for a ride.

"Hon lives, like, five seconds from your house," Cy sighs.

"You know Hon," Brendan sighs back. "He doesn't like to walk."

They're too busy playing to pick him up.

Brendan, who describes himself as a "white mutt," and Cy, who is Persian American, are 16-year-old juniors at Langley High, the kind of high-achieving sanctuary that features not only a robotics club but a philosophy club. Cy, who's vice president of the Class of 2007, is quick to describe Langley High as being not "too far off from that high school in 'The O.C.,' but not with that many hot chicks." Suddenly, while Brendan explores Las Colinas driving a Hermes, a sign pops into view. "There's a girl nearby. Go pick her up." So Brendan tries. But he can't seem to locate her. "Where's the chick they're talking about?" he asks.

She's on the TV screen, in the video game, nowhere near McLean.

In Control

Rockstar Games, the publisher of "GTA," repeatedly refuses to comment on "San Andreas," saying only that "the game speaks for itself."

So if "San Andreas" does indeed speak for itself, what is it saying?

"See, playing 'San Andreas' is not like listening to a rap album by the Game or watching the movie 'Boyz N the Hood,' " says Kurt Squire of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is researching how African American boys between the ages of 10 and 14 play "San Andreas."

"When you play 'San Andreas,' you are in control of the symbols all around you, all of those symbols that we think of when we think of the ghetto -- the guns, the violence, the drugs, the gangs, the women. See, you're not only listening to what's going on, you're not just watching what's going on, you're in control of what's going on. That is a big, big difference."

"To become. To become. To become. That's the key here," says David J. Leonard of Washington State University. A game such as "San Andreas," he says, can be linked to the history of minstrels, "of whites impersonating, trying on and becoming the other ," and to era of the 1920s and '30s when New York whites went slumming uptown to Harlem to hear jazz.

"Video games, like no other medium, provide that sort of experience where one transports oneself from his home and goes to this other world constructed by game designers. In 'San Andreas,' the ghetto is a playground. But you and I both know that ghettos across the country are clearly not playgrounds."

To Brendan, "San Andreas" is a fantastical virtual playground, his way out of the suburbs, a form of escapism. But "San Andreas" is like a fun house mirror to Tito, an exaggerated yet still realistic version -- the dueling gangs, the racial tension -- of his everyday life.

"San Andreas" confounds their expectations of reality.

Tito is certain that "San Andreas" was designed by "gringos." "Don't we gotta be some sort of gang-bangin', PCP-sellin' Mexicans who like to shoot? Isn't that what people think?" he asks.

Brendan thinks that "a diverse group of guys, blacks and whites and Latinos" ("and some girls"), came up with "San Andreas." "It's gotta be made by people who know what they're talking about, right?"

With the help of a tattoo artist, a screenwriter and a rap photographer from Los Angeles, "San Andreas" was actually developed in Scotland.