A respectful rebuttal.
Grand Theft Auto is one of those old school scapegoats for violence portrayed in media ever since the day of it's top-down conception. Afterall, it was a game about stealing cars, committing crimes and making money; clearly the devil was inside that machine just desperate to corrupt the innocent souls who fed themselves to it! The waves of moral panic always come and go in vast tides that fissile away once the world becomes more familiar with this strange new 'corrupting' topic and common sense seeps back on deck; but the panic always leaves it's mark. Evil Dead may not have been banned for being an evil video nasty that would turn you into an axe murderer; before that was revealed to be ridiculous; but that panic still led to English ratings boards to dictate who could watch movies, and that movie has a stigma atop it in certain circles. Rock Music absorbed so much moral panic in the 50's that divisions grew off of classic rock to embrace the accusations of Satanism and purposefully feed into the counter culture. So was it the same with Grand Theft Auto?
Throughout the years that special brand of criminality and chaotic carnage which Grand Theft Auto offered has withered from it's place of exclusivity. In fact, these days there are game franchises out there which would make late 90's parents faint on the spot if they knew about them. Imagine if parents found out that Mortal Kombat has only gotten bloodier and more anatomically accurate in it's years! (And imagine if they heard the fact that the team studied actual dead bodies to research one of their games. That's a fact that even I find a bit beyond the pale.) But still that target which was originally affixed around GTA specifically marks that game as the whipping boy whenever video games are the targets of the latest moral outcry. Luckily we're no longer quite the hot newness, now that Social Media and Tik Tok has the media's attention; but brows still frown our way when people remember we exist.
And as far as poster children go; Grand Theft Auto is an actual stellar example of the industry for people on the outside looking in. Perhaps a bit too clean, when we remember the absolute deluge of sub par boring wastes of games that flood our industry most of the time. (Hmm? No, I never even said the words 'Gotham Knights'; why ever would you bring that game up...) GTA is a franchise that is always on the forefront of ambition, of gameplay or world forming innovation and of sheer brilliant spectacle. It's what they're known for. Well, that and being the giant sticky magnet in the middle of the industry to which all the filth and accusations are attracted; like moths to the world's most explosive night-light. If there's any issue someone has with the general gaming market, chances are they'll have an example about it they can use GTA to demonstrate.
Sometimes that is totally warranted. The modern trend of games to try and artificially elongate themselves beyond the scope of their fun and potential to try and suck time out of players forever is demonstrated very well by GTA Online. As is the greed of modern live services and the absolute fall-off for quality of services. GTA Online has done just about everything bad that an online game can do beyond shutting itself down prematurely; to me it makes for a fine demonstration. Although they've yet to tie in lootboxes and battlepas- wait, no they actually did introduce a Battlepass recently; how could I be so silly to forget!? But then there are times when I have to wonder if the person voicing their issues has actually taken the time to play the franchise they're critiquing; or if they have generalised industry gripes that they decided to try and blindly embody in Grand Theft Auto without really slotting things together in their heads first.
I'm talking, of course, about a recent article I read entitled something to the tune of "GTA Six needs to focus more on being Progressive and less on being an Edge Lord." And that made me frown, it really did. Because out of all the plethora of adjectives and pig-nouns I'd use to the Grand Theft Auto series over it's polymorphic history; never once would I land on the label 'Edge Lord'. And that's led me to address exactly what that term even means, what it means to be 'progressive', and whether or not Grand Theft Auto really does have a path of change required ahead of it in order to improve into the future. And we can start down this train with a definition: What exactly is an 'edge lord'? Simply; an 'Edge Lord' is someone who intentionally attempts to be distasteful and offensive for the sole purpose of making themselves look rebellious and non-conformist towards the standards of moral decency; which by extension is commonly understood to be 'cool'. That, in broad strokes, is an edge lord. But is that GTA?
I've said it before, but the heart of Grand Theft Auto is satire. Mockery through exaggerations and mocking depictions that are designed to point at loud aspects of American or just modern culture and invite the player to laugh along with them. That is why so many of the characters are larger-than-life, why every single company imbued in the world is a play upon a real world company, typically with a pun. Criminal life is the lens through which the narrative is shone, but criminality is not the extent of the parody; it flys left and right to the point where everyone, even the player character and the person playing as them, are targets. But is it ever mean-spirted or punching down? That really depends on your ability to compartmentalise entertainment and differentiate between the real world and that of fiction; a divide that is becoming more and more blurry in today's age.
Having just played through the Grand Theft Auto IV trilogy (the original, I feel the need to say because Rockstar are inevitably working on remakes as we speak) I can highlight one aspect of those games that some people who think ill of GTA might take Umbridge with; the use of slurs. Pretty much every slur you can think of, save the N-word with the hard R, (I think, there might have been one in The Lost and Damned. That one was about Bikers, afterall) is uttered throughout GTA VI, and if you divorce every such swear from their context it can absolutely feel like Rockstar are trying to be provocative for the sake of humour. But context is important. Observe the people who speak like that, who they are and how the game presents them, and you'll notice a couple of things. Firstly, that the people who act that way are never the sympathetic characters we're supposed to like, (except for Yusuf Amir; but he's just terrible misguided and out-of-touch) and they're all the butt of the joke.
So why do they speak like that? Typically because it's a decently accurate depiction of the sort of nomenclature and attitude typical of that snippet of culture. Are wiseguy mobsters going to be pointedly racially insensitive? Of course they are, their entire criminal structure is based on racial superiority! Bikers being racist? Their movement is seeped in white supremacy. Homophobia? Ran rampant throughout the 2000's; that's just how people talked. In fact, TBOGT was actually praised at the time for perhaps the first depiction of a major gay character in gaming who acted like a real person who happened to be gay; and Tony is a perhaps one of the funniest characters in the entire GTA franchise; his lines are all gold. Does that sound like the attitude of edgelords who are trying to be mindlessly provocative, or satire artists who are trying to depict a world for you to experience?
I have a lot of problems with the way that Rockstar handle themselves in the real world, but when it comes to the games the team have surprisingly been more mature than many others in the space. Saints Row prided itself on edge lord behaviour (to a modest degree) so much it became a part of it's identity until the reboot sucked all the life out of the property. Watch_Dogs lacks the conviction to really address any topic of the world's it creates with anything tougher than kiddy-gloves- resulting in consistently limp narratives. Grand Theft Auto of the modern age is loud and eccentric, but also clever and occasionally touches on pathos and darker themes therein. Grand Theft Auto VI shouldn't pull back from the sardonic depictions of criminals, it should broaden their net to leave nobody out of the introspective eye.
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