Our Nightmare Society Isn’t Ready For GTA 6’s Launch

When Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on November 19 this year, it won't be the most important event happening in the world. Realistically, what will top the front pages is anything involving the dire political landscape we currently live in. Who knows what wars (ongoing or unforeseeable) will be ravaging, what public health crisis the world will be spinning over, or what social upheavals will be unfolding by then? This is the world that GTA 6 will enter: one that is vastly more volatile and unpredictable than the one we lived in even 13 years ago, when GTA 5 released. Nowadays, when a video game comes out, it's just a blip in the big picture–a speck in the vast mosaic that is the larger world.  While that could be the case with GTA 6 as well, Rockstar's forthcoming blockbuster is an unusual beast. The world may not stop for GTA 6, but it will likely pay attention, more so than any other game release before it. As history has shown, the mainstream media and others unplugged from gaming are largely unequipped when it comes to discussing video games and their themes and content. Video games certainly aren't the first medium accused of negatively influencing children–you can go back to the dime novels of the 19th century, comic books and rock music in the 1950s, Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s, and so on. The interactive medium quickly became a common scapegoat of politicians, watchdog groups, and activist lawyers, ostensibly being the root of violent crimes and antisocial behavior amongst our youth. And that’s in part to video games, in the medium's early days, originally being marketed as experiences for adults. Grand Theft Auto 6 (Rockstar) "When video games first came out, they didn't tend to be marketed towards kids," said Tony Rowe, an associate professor at Drexel University who is also a game development veteran, with credits in Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, and numerous LucasArts titles. "You'd see arcade games in bars, taverns, and cocktail lounges." It wasn't until the late 1970s that games were geared towards children, according to Rowe, with establishments like Chuck E. Cheese providing younger audiences with spaces to play arcade games.  The 1970s also spawned one of the earliest public controversies about a video game, spread by a panicking media dealing with a nascent medium. Exidy's 1976 arcade game Death Race attracted negative and provocative headlines from outlets like Associated Press. Death Race had players driving a car and running over what appeared to be humanoid figures, leading to outcry from organizations like the National Safety Council. To observers, Death Race crossed a line by having players reenact violent acts. The outrage surrounding Death Race escalated via a multi-step process, with the AP's coverage of the game's violence picked up by the National Safety Council for its own magazine, which was subsequently amplified by The New York Times and programs like The Today Show, according to Rowe. "Video games were still pretty new in the mid-70s, and I think news reporters found something hot and interesting to grab onto," said Rowe. "The press benefited from the newness of video games and making a sensational story out of it." By the early 1980s, games were exploding in popularity, but adults were still less versed in what video games were and how they worked. "Part of it was this newness, this mystery of, ‘What is this thing, and what does it do to people?' Because games are entirely enchanting–they are dynamic and colorful and fun and interactive, and it was this new aesthetic form that people hadn't seen before," Rowe said. "And so, concern came up that it was why kids are skipping their homework and spending their lunch money, and then it grew from there into, ‘It's going to cause violence,' and all these sorts of threats of the boogeyman of the day." Grand Theft Auto 6 (Rockstar) In retrospect, the case of Death Race and the almost-viral nature of outrage surrounding it became a model for video game controversies that came after. The list is near endless, from the 1993 US Senate hearings stemming from content in Mortal Kombat and Night Trap to the blatantly misinformed 2008 Fox News segment about sexual content in Mass Effect, along with every single time then-lawyer Jack Thompson made a stir about Grand Theft Auto on the television airwaves. It's easy to forget, but Grand Theft Auto was arguably born from controversy. DMA Design, the studio behind the first GTA game (released in 1997), hired publicist Max Clifford for the game's marketing campaign, who then leveraged the game's violent content to stir the pot for free press. "He ended up getting the game in the ear of Lord Gordon Campbell of Croy in Parliament, and he got him to condemn GTA in the House of Lords back in 1997," Rowe said. Radio ads in the UK for the game subsequently contained Campbell's sound bite: "Is it true, as reported, that that game includes thefts of cars and joyriding, and hit-and-run

When Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on November 19 this year, it won't be the most important event happening in the world. Realistically, what will top the front pages is anything involving the dire political landscape we currently live in. Who knows what wars (ongoing or unforeseeable) will be ravaging, what public health crisis the…

When Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on November 19 this year, it won't be the most important event happening in the world. Realistically, what will top the front pages is anything involving the dire political landscape we currently live in. Who knows what wars (ongoing or unforeseeable) will be ravaging, what public health crisis the world will be spinning over, or what social upheavals will be unfolding by then? This is the world that GTA 6 will enter: one that is vastly more volatile and…