i. Finding Area

Often the most confusing part of the project for many players, areas in GTA V are often and with good reason misattributed or mixed-up with Neighborhoods. Areas are not neighborhoods and the following section of the instrument is a brief summary of how areas are enumerated and were used to bound this project. For a more comprehensive systems level look, and clarification on edge cases, there is a later section which details these to the best of my knowledge under: Further Exploration of Area and City.

ii. Where is Area?

The GTA V "areas" are authored, defined, enumerable, version-stable, surfaced and finite. They exist persistently as the primary semantic description to name a place for a player. The text you see at the bottom right of your UI screen in-game. 

The term "area" is used by Rockstar’s THE MANUAL APP (available from September 12, 2013, last updated March 2021, on the App Store, Play Store, Windows Phone Store, PC and Mac), to define the string surfaced to the player by all runtime Location UI systems. Area names have not been found to have been added to the main map since release, even if the content within the City has changed over the last decade of Update cycles. This can be most easily demonstrated through comparing protagonist voice acting barks, storymode, online and older game versions on different platforms, which will resolve in the same way.

For a player, area is most commonly recognised at the bottom right (Location UI), pause map (Location UI), Snapmatic location (Location Readout), and as the Snapmatic default title. A player is never left without a resolved area label regardless of whether they are instanced or in-world. This is self-verifiable in any game copy from 2013-2026, in any gamemode. Area is also further used in storymode by all three protagonists as VO parameterised location barks. As these were recorded before the release of the game, they indicate strongly that no areas in Los Santos have been added since release.

iii. Where is City?

City areas are defined, and can be understood jurisdictionally through the places where LSPD — marked out with the City of Los Santos seal — respond jurisdictionally to dispatch calls made on roads in that area. Players can test this out in-game. Meanwhile, country areas are where LSSD (Los Santos Sheriff Department) responds to an emergency call.  

iv. Why not Rockstar's Areas?

This work importantly rejects the substitution of interpretive spatial frameworks that replace the game’s surfaced location language with secondary or impressionistic boundaries of space, that create an extra-diegetic replacement of Rockstar's authored work. 

As GTA V is a singular authored, published work, Rockstar’s areas are areas without qualifier. Doing otherwise should be compared to substituting: 

a "Van-Gogh-Based” brushstroke for The Starry Night, 

a "George Lucas-Official” line for “No, I am your father”, 

or a “Martin-defined” Kingdom for A Song of Ice and Fire 

It is also important to note that this project performs a serious novelty by using an important player-facing, narratively embedded, reactive and embodied runtime system to define the subset of areas. The filtering of areas through NPC-type spawned is a significant creative element of the project as there is no operational benefit to the use of the semantic area grouping compared to the atomic and affective Zone unit.

v. Further Exploration of Area and City

At a deeper level, why this subset is technically possible and grounded is that areas are defined by having a shared surface-aggregated "Zone Description". Zones are the atomic spatial unit of the gameplay system. Zones are not areas, but areas are comprised of a Zone's contained metadata. This is because each Zone contains a Zone Description. Zone Descriptions, not to be confused with Zone Name, when aggregated surface to a player deduplicated as a single label, describe the names of an 'area'. This label string is used for mission prompts, location naming and map data tagging or surfaced through the native function: GET_NAME_OF_ZONE.

These Zone Descriptions can be seen in the popzone.ipl of the game's files. This file is available with all copies of the game, and also freely accessible through Rockstar's Native Reference files as hosted by cfx.re. We can further use this to verify Zone Description changes against older game versions, or data dumps, available also as pasted copies on GTAforums or pastebin, to check for additions over time. 

Based on this type of analysis and comparative scanning via the pause map, no new Zone Description strings have been added to the main playable surface map of GTA V (Los Santos and Blaine County) since 2013; the only post-launch addition to the Zone Description set is Cayo Perico. This is the only area that does not have an SFX protagonist location bark.

These parameterised location barks also substitute into dialogue lines by the three main protagonists, being dynamically added with the engine’s area-name string. This demonstrates that area labels are a core addressable data type across audio, UI, and metadata systems. Rockstar made sure at the time of recording all protagonists said every possible area name in the launch game map. For example, even Franklin has a ‘North Yankton’ bark despite never featuring in the two storymode missions there, ‘Prologue’ and ‘Bury the Hatchet’, and whose character cannot natively visit this instanced area.

vi. How to Build a City in Zones?

Concurrently, what makes this project possible is that the city's bounds are also defined jurisdictionally through Zones and their clear allocation. This provides a substantive predictable overlap and elemental consistency.

Zones which are ZoneType = null in the dispatch.meta, correlate to jurisdiction and resolution via LSPD (Los Santos Police Department). These can be understood as being jurisdictionally parts of the city. This is reinforced by their in-game City Seal stating "CITY OF LOS SANTOS" on LSPD buildings and civic infrastructure. This is further corroborated by mission narratives and Newswire releases.

While "areas" are not constitutive of the jurisdictional boundary for the City of Los Santos, unlike Zones, any area that contains a resolvable ZoneType = null (resolving to LSPD) must be considered the most area native way to determine the jurisdictional extent of the City of Los Santos. As such transitional areas, containing dispatch.meta defined Zones where the ZoneType = null, and dispatch.meta Zones where the ZoneType = "VEHICLE_RESPONSE_COUNTRYSIDE" or LSSD (Los Santos Sheriff Department), must be included as city areas. These will be explained in detail later on.

vii. What are the City's Boundaries?

There are two clear boundaries which reinforce the strong relationship where zones exclusively resolve to either ZoneType. El Burro Heights (East) is fully ZoneType = null, resolving to the city.  Pacific Ocean (South) which is not the city as it fully resolves to ZoneType = COUNTYSIDE. Both examples are road resolvable with clear in-game player testable examples. 

There are also two transitional areas as defined earlier being: Pacific Bluffs (West), Vinewood Hills (North). They should be considered in the City, as they contain at least one Zone (in both cases major sections) which has dispatch resolved to the LSPD. In fact for both areas they resolve mostly to the LSPD. Their inclusion as city areas are narratively supported as well, with the in-game Vinewood Star Tours, explicitly described in the Newswire as a tour of the City of Los Santos.

In contrast to transitional areas, instanced interiors are excluded as they resolve to the underneath area of the map and are non-contiguous with the session and are game-world surface detached. For example all Bunkers resolve to the area Terminal, Cargo Warehouses resolve to Vinewood Hills as their interiors exist underneath that part of the map. This is regardless of where the Bunker or Warehouse is externally, a Warehouse can be in Strawberry but its inside area is Vinewood Hills. Think of an instanced interior like a pocket dimension teleported to, which is not part of the world. As these interiors do not support dispatch logic it would also make it difficult to ascribe a jurisdictional category. 

Another important reason to not include instanced interiors is that they can exist inside vehicles and as such all instanced places must be excluded to prevent area-place-movement paradox. Instanced Vehicles like the Kosatka which are allowed to move independently of the player (while containing the player) on the map, contained instanced interiors, in the Kosatka’s case the area Mt Chillead. This creates a logical paradox where a user is in two places at once, an exterior location viewable and navigable and an inhabited interior place embodied and navigable. Therefore in an interior a player is permitted to move in two opposing coordinate directions simultaneously. 

Therefore instanced interiors must be excluded from capture to maintain logical and spatial coherence; even though all instanced interiors point to a resolved area label. This exclusion does not apply to non-instanced surface interiors, which on the other hand are logically permissible but not privileged photographically. 

The city therefore excludes any area which does not contain a road resolvable in area to the LSPD, which is surfaced in the main game map instance. This is confirmed through runtime alignment of the dispatch.meta and areas, with confirmation taking place in-game.

viii. Why areas over say Neighborhoods?

Finally we come to one of the most pressing questions a player might ask, why not Neighborhoods. Here is the problem:

While often similar or identical in name to Neighborhoods, a Rockstar’s defined cartographic map term “Neighborhoods” are not the primary first-class indicator of location. Neighborhoods are official, distinguished but second-class location names, which primarily surface outside the runtime environment in the Newswire and THE MANUAL APP map. In Snapmatic and in the runtime environment however, the location provided is always an area, sometimes with the addition of a street name. 

For a depiction of the difference through official Rockstar documentation, here is an example:

Zone ID: Z_LP1, Z_LP2

Zone Name: LOSPUER (Los Puerta)

Zone Description: La Puerta

ZoneType: null

THE MANUAL APP Neighborhood: La Puerta

Narrative Region: Los Santos 

ZPDSO1, ZPDSO2, ZPDSO3, ZPDSO4

Zone Name: DELSOL (Puerta Del Sol) 

Zone Decription: La Puerta

ZoneType: null

THE MANUAL APP Neighborhood: Vespucci 

Narrative Region: Los Santos 

To a player in either area, or a Snapmatic capture in either area, their location is the area: La Puerta. It is also notable that in-game GTA Online purchasable properties like the ‘Vespucci Canals Agency’ take place-location names from area and not Neighborhood. If we were to take the Neighborhood locality the Vespucci Canals Agency is in the Little Seoul Neighborhood, but it is in the Vespucci Canals area. This indicates a preferential runtime and player experience order in favour of area.

For the project’s logical consistency and faithful representation of the Snapmatic default titles and location metadata, a Snapmatic-native approach to place then must be defined by an area-level jurisdictional set.