On 17 September, 2013, Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto [GTA] V became the best-selling game in history. On its first day of release its sales exceeded $800m (£634m) and it has now generated more than $7.7bn (£6.1bn) of revenue. Combined with its online version, it is now not only the most successful game, but the single most profitable entertainment product of all time.
Ten years later, players have finally been treated to a trailer for GTA VI, released by Rockstar this morning after an online leak. 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 2002 and 2006 (its other main settings are San Andreas, based on San Francisco, and Liberty City, based on New York). At a glance, it still seems to be about car heists and strip clubs and drug deals and alligators and underground antics. 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.
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”. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. And so it’s not reductive to point to the egregious ways in which GTA has leant into misogyny that, for reasons of allegory and fantasy, is all just part of the fun.
In GTA, women are not only pigeonholed into “wallpaper” roles, but treated appallingly. In GTA V there is a mission that involves the player helping a paparazzo upskirt a female celebrity. Driving in the Los Santos hills listening to music, the player suddenly hears an interruption on the radio in which a man talks about using a woman as a urinal. Players are encouraged to buy and run strip clubs. Prostitutes are everywhere and visiting one boosts your health score – but, naturally, you have to pay them, which is a definite minus. Easily fixed, though – on GTAForums.com I find the helpful suggestion: “pick up the Ho and drive to the beach right near the sea and she will do her business, she will boost your health to 150, when she gets out kill her and get your money back”.
All this is just part of the fabric of a game in which winning is achieved by dominance, aggression and depraved behaviour (GTA also got in trouble in 2006 due to a racially specific altercation in which the player is told by another character to “kill the Haitian dickheads”). If the arrival of Lucia shows that women can do that too, it’s only because Rockstar knew it had to tick a box, and, allegory or not, GTA remains sexist to its core.