“Save Your Carnival”

This article, translating earlier work published in Portuguese, focuses on the carnival party organized by Grand Theft Auto (hereafter GTA) Roleplay server Cidade Alta in February 2021, sponsored by brands such as Tinder, Engov, and Trident. Cidade Alta represents a starting point to develop the idea of a gamer scene, utilizing the concept of scenes by Will Straw (1991, 2002, and 2014), as well as its application in games in Sara Grimes’s 2013 article, and the connection between play and culture proposed by Huizinga (1949) and Caillois (1967). Exploratory research was carried out on streamer broadcasts on Twitch, and we analyzed journalistic stories published in the press and the content produced by AltaNews (the news portal of Cidade Alta itself), to investigate the double suspension of everyday life of a carnival within the game.