A Hitchhiker's Guide To GTA Online

GTA Online, besides being universally praised for its solid gameplay, extreme amount of content and great visuals, has become infamous for its community. Of course, pretty much every online community is pretty toxic simply because it's online, but that toxicity is only as apparent as the mechanics of the medium allow for. By its nature, GTA Online is the perfect trolling and griefing platform for the scum of the internet.

We've covered some ways of dealing with the griefers of the game, but handling the hackers — even worse — is a lot more difficult. Dealing with these scripts kiddies isn't something any player wants to endure, but GTA Online's hacking problem has been prevalent for quite some time. Unfortunately, fixing it is considerably difficult by virtue of the game's peer-to-peer server architecture.

As such, social experiments are nothing new in GTA Online. Some time ago a YouTuber decided to go around and say "hi" to 100 players in the game and record the result. Barely a handful of players didn't kill him on first sight. It seems that the only time the community of Online outgrew their violent ways was when the snow fell over Los Santos during the Christmas DLC events.

Now it was PC Gamer's turn to conduct a little experiment in the game. PC Gamer is one of the most well known and prestigious gaming publications globally, with both a print edition and a popular website relaying all the most important news in PC games and hardware.

One of the staff writers for the site decided to ditch his cars in the game and start hitchhiking — beckoning other players to pick him up and give him a ride to the beach.

The little experiment highlights the severely psychotic behavior of the typical GTA Online player, as well as some of the odd game mechanics. For example, when PEDs are killed, an NPC ambulance comes out to the scene, the medics examine the corpse — and promptly leave it there and leave.

It seems that there isn't really a scale of "decent to asshole" in GTA Online when it comes to players, only a scale which measures how much of an asshole the player in question is. When asking for a ride and having the player simply pass you by is the best possible reaction, you know this is GTA.

The game is also home to a pretty colorful range of psychos. In one instance, the journalist was targeted and purposefully mowed down by someone whose character was wearing smiley-face contacts, attire fit for a university lecturer and an expressionless gaze.

Of course, it was inevitable to bump into someone on the higher end of the spectrum. The Christopher Livingston managed to encounter one particular player whose only method of communication was slightly varied versions of the sentence "kill yourself". Oh, wonders of the internet.

If you're interested in the whole saga, involving jazz hands, cautious non-violent players and drivers who are faster than their cars, you can experience it here.

Have you ever tried hitchhiking in GTA Online?