Grand Theft
Bicycle puts
Cyclists in Control

Steve Carey, The Martlet (University of Victoria)

VICTORIA -- (CUP) The projector
flickers, eighties music blares through
the speakers, and the audience in the
Open Space art gallery watches as he
begins riding his bicycle around the
virtual world of Grand Theft Auto: San
Andreas.

Within a few seconds he gets
smoked by an Oldsmobile and thrown
through the air. When he straightens
out his bike and resumes riding, the
Olds is met with a burst of gunfire.

The catch is that Gibson is
actually riding a bicycle, hooked up
to a computer through a USB cable.
Dressed in a red, white and blue
cycling shirt, the fit and lean artist and
game designer is an associate professor
in digital media at the University of
Victoria.

Grand Theft Bicycle, he said, is the
result of repeated near-misses while
riding to work. “Take out the cars,”
he thought to himself a little more than
two years ago.

Joining him in making the project
a reality was computer scientist and
visual artist Justin Love and graphic
designer and visual artist Jimmy Olson.

Riding the bike is as intuitive as,
well, riding a bike. Steering is done by
turning the handlebars left and right,
speed is measured through the speed of
the pedals, buttons are mounted on the
handlebars for brake, fire and jump.
“The biking controller can play any
game with a joystick,” said Gibson,
“and that’s what’s interesting from a
development point of view —having a
bike controller to get people physically
active while playing a game.”

According to Gibson, the USB
hardware controller costs around $200.
But this is an artist at work, not just a
demonstration of new technology. It
isn’t long before Gibson demonstrates
the political side of his creation.

As he continues to pedal through the
city, a woman in an orange dress and
a pillbox hat appears in front of him,
produces a .45, and starts shooting.
“Margaret Thatcher,” he shouts, before
his gun-toting avatar rolls over her on
its BMX.

He does a quick turn in real life,
pulling on the bike handlebars, and is
soon surrounded by a group of balding
men dressed in Hawaiian shirts. He
yelps, “Dick Cheney!” before he sprays
the group with his machine gun. Hillary
Clinton is next, and a little later a
Baghdad ambulance catches fire before
he blows it up.

The gangs are made up of political
figures: Stephen Harper, George Bush

Sr. and Jr., Brian Mulroney, Osama
bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Tony
Blair, Arnold Schwarzenegger and
others also appear as gun-toting gang
members.

“Video games don’t really have artists
using them to comment on society,”
said Olson, while Gibson rides around
a virtual Las Vegas.

Olson was in charge of modeling the
political figures.

“One of the ways we can strike
back is by taking existing games and
bending them to our will. I’m happy to
be one of the first generation of artists
that is able to subvert a video game like
that.”

The bystanders that walk the streets
of the original Grand Theft Auto
have been removed, leaving only the
political gang members. The cyclist
is invulnerable and the ammunition is
unlimited. There are no quests, no win
conditions and no story. The gangs
don’t shoot at you until you shoot at
them, so there’s not really any reason
to fight.

“I’ve had people play who didn’t
engage in the game violence. I had a
hippie . . . at [the Emily Carr Institute
of Art and Design] when we set up
there. She just rode off into the woods
and had a little woodland adventure,”
said Gibson. “You actually don’t have
to fight . . . but with those characters
there it’s pretty overwhelming.”

The project was funded by a grant
from the Canada Foundation for
Innovation and the B.C. Knowledge
Development Fund. They’re interested
in the emerging technologies —
specifically, the bike as a game
controller.

“The idea is to have physical
exercise and not realize you’re doing
it,” said Gibson. “Video games are
normally so sedentary.”

Gibson said the beauty of Grand
Theft Bicycle is that people accept
it as a first-person shooter, not as a
difficult or educational task. He said
that during the beta tests, people would
ride for around 45 minutes, then get off
dripping with sweat and realize they
just had a solid workout.

“The trick was to go with a common
model —the first-person shooter—and
not try to make it educational. Kids
would smell that a mile away,” said
Gibson.

From the streets of Victoria, Grand
Theft Bicycle designers are taking
the project to Mexico as part of the
University’s partnership with the
Universidad Veracruzana.