One of my favourite elements in big-budget video games is something you might choose to term Johnny on the Spot Syndrome. This syndrome, which I have just invented, takes its name from a minor character in GTA Online.
Here’s the scenario. You’re playing GTA Online. You need a new vehicle delivered. You should just be able to go to a menu and dial one in. But this is GTA Online, remember. It’s lavish stuff. So instead you call up an in-game character called Johnny on the Spot who says something chirpy like, “What can I getcha?” And you order your vehicle from Johnny and he drives it to you in the world.
A couple of things here. Firstly: all of this is past tense. Johnny was patched out several years back, in part because people kept shooting him, and in part because he didn’t work perfectly so he’d often deliver your car and then change his mind and steal it from you, possibly running you over in the process. And when I say he was patched out, he was sort of just demoted. You still call him, but he doesn’t drive your car over to you anymore. It just appears nearby.
Secondly, though, and this is the most important thing: Johnny on the Spot could have been a menu. I know this because now he is basically just a menu and the whole thing works, arguably, a bit better than it did before. But I love Johnny on the Spot because he wasn’t a menu. He was a person who had been created and coded and shoved into the game to do the work of a menu.