Rockstar Games’ best-selling Grand Theft Auto series wasn’t often accused of political sensitivity during its legendary run from the late 1990s through the early 2010s.
In fact, parents and activists denounced the franchise for exposing children to a seedy world of sex, violence, crude humor, and wanton crime. Elon Musk even claimed that he couldn’t get into the last installment, GTA V, because he was mortified to play as a character who shoots police officers.
But times (and moral panics) change. In the 13 years that fans have waited for Grand Theft Auto VI—finally out on November 19—the American right-wing grievance machine has drifted from fears of impressionable kids turning to a life of larceny to concerns that they will grow up “woke.” And despite knowing very little about the forthcoming game, the agitators of the latter movement have decided it must amount to a stealth campaign to poison the youth with depictions of gender equality, LGBTQ acceptance, and racial diversity. (Rockstar did not immediately return a request for comment.)
Since the height of Gamergate in 2014, an angst-ridden subset of male gamers have maintained a paranoid vigil against what they see as the creeping influence of women and LGBTQ developers in the gaming world. Between the feverish anticipation for GTA VI and the various delays of its release date, they’ve had ample opportunity to foment a preemptive backlash to what is sure to be a massive hit, not unlike the failed furor over supposedly “woke” elements of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
“GTA 6 is a humiliation ritual for all male gamers,” an X user with the handle @Wokenessisevil complained on Tuesday, sharing a clip of the game’s two lead characters, Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, who are in a relationship that evolves based on the player’s choices. In the scene, Lucia, the series’ first mandatory female protagonist, asks Jason to pick an outfit for her and expresses mild annoyance when he seems more or less indifferent to the options she presents.
It’s an exchange that could have been lifted from any sitcom of the past 50 years, yet it seems to have fueled a reactionary narrative about the game’s male protagonist being subjugated to a nefarious feminist agenda. Another X user recently claimed, contrary to the clip’s bog-standard depiction of a heterosexual couple, that Jason has a “gay vibe,” since no straight man would know what sequins are or use the word “cocktails,” as he does in the clip.
“The script is definitely written by a woman who has no clue what a man thinks or how he talks,” they wrote. “Jason is written as a caricature, much like what a delusional woman thinks a ‘man’ should be.”
Similarly, a gaming YouTuber seethed that Rockstar was appealing to women and gay men by showing Jason shirtless in another scene. “Gone are the days of edgy based masculine GTA games,” he wrote on X. “I could be wrong but right now it’s looking like it will be a woke fest.”
While multiple leaks and a 27-minute “extended look” preview on Netflix have revealed key details of the game, and Rockstar creatives declared their intent to realistically portray the diversity of the Miami-inspired setting and bring a fleshed-out female character into the spotlight, would-be detractors are still straining a bit for reasons to pronounce it dead on arrival. One YouTuber has convinced himself that it will subliminally brainwash players with “bisexual lighting.”
Other men have simply defaulted to rank sexism, griping that Lucia’s breasts are too small because of “they/thems” working at Rockstar or posting jokes such as: “female lead in GTA 6? i thought the whole point of GTA was to be able to drive.” An AI enthusiast used an image generator to replace a woman of color in a crop top on the game’s cover with a white blonde in a bikini.
While each new snippet of content has become grist for more manufactured outrage, the tantrums over the ideological trajectory of GTA began long ago. In 2022, for its remastered version of GTA V, Rockstar removed a number of gags and non-playable characters that critics had described as transphobic, leading to complaints from some fans.
The following year, after the game publisher released a trailer for GTA VI, trolls floated the groundless theory that the Lucia character was a transgender woman. Last month, when former video game executive Mark Kern, known for his crusades against “woke” content, deemed Lucia attractive, his followers disagreed in openly racist and misogynistic replies.
Much of this ire is aimed directly at the Rockstar team, who have been blasted for allegedly embracing “identity politics,” reportedly making efforts to avoid punching down against marginalized groups in the game’s storyline, and allowing women to contribute in any way to the franchise. A photo of female staff at the company’s studio in Scotland, shared on social media in 2019 to commemorate International Women’s Day, has circulated widely with sneering comments about how they likely ruined GTA VI.
Yet a few prominent streamers on the right, including Zack Hoyt (better known as Asmongold) and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, have taken a wait-and-see approach, declining to bash the game before checking it out for themselves. Fuentes went so far as to mock those bemoaning its creative direction. “Just go outside, touch grass,” he told one viewer who brought up the topic in his live chat.
If any of these gamers entertain fantasies of an actual boycott or commercial failure, they are bound to be disappointed. According to one estimate of preorders from a third-party data analytics firm, Rockstar has already sold 5.28 million copies of GTA VI, taking in more than $500 million in revenue. Though it is likely the most expensive game ever made, with a budget somewhere north of a billion dollars, the studio stands to easily recoup that cost, possibly by the day it comes out.
That might call for a moment of reflection from the culture warriors—or so you’d think. It’s awfully difficult, it seems, to admit that you’re so out of touch with the mainstream and have no control over the popularity of various media. They will no doubt have their objections to other aspects of the game, but once GTA VI starts breaking records, there won’t be any point in continuing the crusade. By then, the next fake controversy will be on the horizon.
