A new year treat: Snowfall in Los Santos

Somewhere along the line my family got into the habit of a New Year's Day wander. Generally we'd set off along the coast, which is only a short walk away in itself. We wouldn't head far, and there'd be no objective in mind. It was just the perfect way - chill, airy, bright - to begin another twelve months of whatever the world had in store for us.

This year, we awoke to a storm: rain falling, fences buckling. A wander was out of the question. But then faced with the prospect of a grey day indoors, my wife fired up GTA Online.

And behold! Los Santos was covered in snow. Flakes were falling through the night sky, the palm trees were casting strange wintery shadows, and the whole world around Pillbox Hill was covered in white. Los Santos felt clean and weird and it had that theatrical calm that real snow can bring to busy places.

Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1

Ultimately, this was as good as a wander. Instead of rambling along the coast, we spent the afternoon bombing around in a series of cars my wife called in from Johnny on the Spot. And eventually we scored a moped and settled into delivering pizzas. What a weird game this has become: thirty minutes spent knocking back and forth along familiar streets, stopping in doorways we'd never noticed before and earning $43k for our time. In Los Santos, delivering pizzas involves some serious bank.

But that thought: what a weird game this has become. Over the years, GTA Online has moved from being something terrifying and intimidating into something that feels a bit like Animal Crossing. If you time it right and if you end up with the right people, you're not getting headshotted or blown out of the sky. Instead, you're going for a cheery wander in a landscape you've come to know well, come to feel like you have some kind of stake or ownership in it. We drop into GTA Online these days not to do anything specific - generally not to do anything at all. We head in for the same reason I sometimes wander into the garden. Just to hover in a middle-aged way and look around.

This turned out to be the perfect way to prepare for the new year: the place was familiar, but the snow made everything fresh and unexpected again. You don't get much more January 1st than that. And later on that day when I checked into Animal Crossing, which has also been white with snow for the last few weeks, I thought: these places aren't that different really. Or at least, they don't have to be that different.

But there's something more. Something about the way that games have changed as they've moved online. I remember years back my friend got an Xbox 360 before Christmas, the year it came out. I headed over for an evening to see what the new machine was like, and he had Kameo running, but all the pixies and fairies and whatnot were wearing Santa hats. He explained that they'd done a patch just for Christmas: this was a game that had come out earlier in the year, and yet here it was acknowledging that we had reached a certain point in time when Santa hats were suddenly appropriate.

I felt that same shiver of newness when we loaded up GTA Online and found snow everywhere. Here was a place, but a place moving through time in its own way. I've known LA all my life, but I've never seen it in the snow. What an odd privilege. Happy new year, all.