Yet it’s also true that this is a product that consumes endless hours of people’s lives and immerses them completely in the universe, with little of the critical distance most of us rely on when we watch, for example, a violent film, and none of the satire that is often fundamental to other visual media concerned with moral depravity. Numerous studies have been conducted into the effects of violent video games and there is no substantive evidence that there is a causal link between playing them and real-life violence. For this reason, it would be reductive to draw direct comparisons between GTA and reality, between players’ behaviour in Vice City and San Andreas and their behaviour in real life. They often rest on the premise of defeating an enemy if that enemy is a person, killing them is allegorical, a means to an end to reach the next stage of the game. The point of video games is that they are not the real world: their appeal is in the fact they are self-contained spaces with their own set of laws, and where the meaning and significance attached to actions is different. But don’t be fooled by Rockstar’s virtue signalling – Lucia, the new lead character in GTA VI, can’t change the fundamentals of a game that has previously been so blasé about its disregard for women.Ī trailer for ‘Grand Theft Auto 6’ was released earlier than planned following a leak (Photo: Rockstar Games/AFP/Getty) This is big news for GTA, a franchise constructed mainly on fantasies of dominant masculinity, in which women, as the journalist Helen Lewis put it back in 2013, are “wallpaper” – or, as the gaming critic Carolyn Petit put it more explicitly in her Gamespot review of GTA V, “strippers, prostitutes, long-suffering wives, humorless girlfriends and goofy, new-age feminists we’re meant to laugh at”. Yet there are some modern inflections too: as well as the TikTok-style footage of different scenes in the trailer, one of the main characters is – shock horror – a woman. At a glance, it still seems to be about car heists and strip clubs and drug deals and alligators and underground antics. In some ways, it looks like the same old GTA: the game returns to Vice City (a fictional city based on Miami), where it has been set twice before, in 20 (its other main settings are San Andreas, based on San Francisco, and Liberty City, based on New York). Ten years later, players have finally been treated to a trailer for GTA VI, released by Rockstar this morning after an online leak. Combined with its online version, it is now not only the most successful game, but the single most profitable entertainment product of all time. On its first day of release its sales exceeded $800m (£634m) and it has now generated more than $7.7bn (£6.1bn) of revenue. On 17 September, 2013, Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V became the best-selling game in history. Grand Theft Auto VI (Photo: Rockstar Games/AFP via Getty Images)
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