What Jason and Lucia do on their days off: every GTA 6 activity Rockstar has shown, read as a relationship

Fair warning: this one is outside my usual lane. I write about people, about Lucia and Jason and the women around them, and the "every activity in the game" pages normally belong to Six. But I kept reading the activity list next to Edge's report on the relationship scale, and the two stopped looking like separate subjects. Where Rockstar has shown something, it is under What Rockstar says. Where a preview reported it, I name the preview. Everything under My read is mine.

What Rockstar says

The Extended Look and the official screenshots show a long list of things to do in Leonida that are not crime. As the wiki's activities page sorts them:

• Ball and table games: basketball, pool, mini-golf.
• On water: scuba, fishing, jet skis, kayaks, airboats.
• On wheels: track and street racing, car meets, dirt bikes.
• In the air: base jumping.
• Nightlife: clubbing, in Vice City.
• Everything else: a zoo, a gym, petting dogs, a timed gun range, and a backyard wrestling ring, which Six placed in Port Gellhorn.

Then, on October 29, Edge reported the part that changed how I read that list. Jason and Lucia's closeness is measured on a four-point scale, and you raise it by spending ordinary time together: walking, cycling, working out, driving around. Working out together needs a gym membership. Rob Nelson, who played the game for Edge, would neither confirm nor deny whether the two can marry.

My read

Most games that let you romance someone do it through conversation choices and gifts. You pick the kind thing to say, you hand over the rare flower, a meter fills. Courtship as a vending machine.

What Edge describes is something else. Nobody is wooed. The scale moves when two people walk somewhere together, ride bikes, go to the gym, drive around. Those are the things couples actually do when nothing is happening, which is most of the time. Rockstar has built a romance out of errands, and I think it may be the most grown-up decision in the game.

It also says something about these two. Lucia, by Rockstar's own account, has only just got out of prison. Jason left the Army wanting, in Rockstar's words, an easy life, and has been running product for other people in the Keys ever since. Neither of them has had much ordinary time. A game that rewards them for a Tuesday walk is a game that understands what they have been missing.

So let's go through the list as dates.

The list, read as dates

Basketball and pool. Competitive, a little flirtatious, and somebody always cheats. These are the activities where you find out whether your partner is a bad loser. I would bet Lucia is, and I mean it as a compliment.

Mini-golf. The most romantic activity on the list, and I will not be taking questions. Mini-golf is what people do when they want to be bad at something together.

The gym. Edge says it needs a membership and raises the scale. The activities list also mentions San Andreas-style body changes, though that is a report, not something Rockstar has stated. Either way, a shared gym membership is the most domestic thing two criminals could own. It is a direct debit with a future.

Scuba, kayaks and fishing. The quiet ones. The Keys reef and the Mount Kalaga rivers are where the game slows down, and Edge says days now run longer, so there is time to. These are the dates where nobody talks, which in a good relationship is a sign of comfort, not distance.

Jet skis, dirt bikes, racing and car meets. Showing off. One of you drives and the other films, and in a Leonida where everyone is filming, that is its own kind of courtship.

Clubbing. The public date. Being seen together in Vice City is a statement. It is also, as Rolo points out in his piece on outfits, the date that makes the two of you easiest to describe, because the police track whether you are together. Romance has always been a risk. In Leonida it is a lead.

The zoo and petting dogs. Softness. A zoo is where people go on a third date to prove they still have an inner child. Petting a dog in a game about crime is a small, unnecessary decency, and I would like Jason to do it often.

The gun range and backyard wrestling. Not dates. I know some of you will make them dates. I am not your mother.

Base jumping. Trust. You jump first, or you jump together. Whatever the scale says, this is the one that tells you where they really are.

What is not known

Rockstar has not said whether the scale can fall, what reaching the top changes, or whether it touches the ending. I already have six questions about Lucia that Rockstar has not answered, and this is now the seventh: what does she want to do on a day off, when nobody is asking her to rob anything?

I suspect mini-golf. So let's find out.

The relationship scale in the wiki