system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Would it be possible to make a sandbox style game using Google Streetview as a template for a real city?

So I know very little about game design (as much as a five year old, one might say). Could the images generated for Streetview be used to generate a gameworld for a GTA-style game?
gpt
They could certainly be used as a framework for doing so.

However, you'd run into two significant obstacles:

1. Real life is boring.  There are good reasons cities end up arranged as they are.  Those good reasons do not include 'compelling gameplay'.  After the 100th time you have to walk past featureless tract housing that exists as only non-interactive scenery on the way to your real destination, you'll probably get very bored.  Sandbox games compress reality so you don't have to spend all your time commuting.

2. The images from Streetview aren't actually 'three dimensional' in a useful form.  Games render their scenes by starting from a wire frame outline and then pasting textures onto it.  But Streetview doesn't work like that.  Rather it's just a series of flat pictures which are morphed into one another.  You could theoretically come up with an algorithm to transform multiple two-dimensional images into a wireframe/texture structure, but it's a lot easier to just hire artists to design your structures - even if they're just trying to copy a real world location.