What Annoys Me About GTA 6 – Essay by Greg Luti
Updated: 9 hours ago
An essay about hype that refuses to stop. In “What Annoys Me About GTA 6,” Greg Luti looks at the constant pre-launch marketing and wonders why no one inside the machine seems willing to push back against it.
The Circus Around GTA 6
The biggest game of all time, GTA 6, is going to be released in a few weeks, and if you are like me, you don’t mind hearing the news, hearing the madness to it all. The entire circus is quite fun from the sidelines.
People are upset at the prices. Many claim that the company Rockstar is practicing unlawful treatment of its workers. The game has potentially gone woke, freaking out every dude gamer out there. The amount of actual storage for the game itself is insane, as Rockstar tells gamers they have to delete other games to play this one. Yeah, this game will take up so much space on a person’s console that the gamer has to be warned about the download. The game had a freaking special on Netflix. Not a movie special, but an actual inside look at the game, which, of course, people then spent time dissecting each frame. And then there are those that are upset with the nature of the game, which is where a player can go around and basically shoot and steal from anyone. I even heard there are some women who are pissed that there are some men who are going to treat their virtual girlfriend in the game better than their actual girlfriend.
I am not making any of this up, by the way. The game’s news is actually a story in itself.
I won’t lie when I tell you I like to hear about what new madness is happening for the game before it comes out. Maybe there is another leaked clip that is somehow incomplete with its graphics but fills a curiosity fans have of the new release. Maybe someone new from Rockstar was interviewed. Perhaps the voice actors from the other game, GTA 5, have something I have not heard them say. And you know that the guys are going to go nuts about the playable woman character in the game, so that is something to avoid, or look into (depends on how you look at it). As I said, the gameplay, where you literally go around shooting people, is not the craziest part of it all.
The Real Problem
There is something that irritates me about GTA 6, and no, it is not any of what I mentioned already. But something else…
Before I get to my point, can we all take a second to appreciate that the voice actor for one of the most insane video game characters of all time, the character who was introduced in the game by stomping on someone’s face, actually reads classic novels. Yeah, the voice actor, Steven Ogg, who voiced Trevor from GTA 5, mentioned Crime and Punishment in an interview and was surprised that the interviewer didn’t know about it. Apparently, the interviewer didn’t know that the novel is considered a classic because it kind of justified the murderer, in that it explained the thoughts and reasons for his crime, rather than painting him as a pure evil human being. Boy, if that whole setup is not cosmic irony in real life, then I don’t know what is.
Anyway, back to my original point…
The Marketing Has Gone Too Far
The absurd amount of unfiltered, shameless marketing for GTA 6 disappoints me. It is downright pathetic to a certain point. I get you need marketing for a game, but I mean, having the Miami Heat not be the Heat for a game is something else. Or opening up actual venues that are in the video game in a real-life arena. Let’s just say it for what it is; the city of Miami is whoring itself out for the potential financial growth this video game can offer. I kick you not, there are some Miami politicians who think that people will flock to Florida because of the video game. Most people I know go to Florida to escape the New York winters, not because of the potential interaction with a popular video game franchise.
The Irony of It All
The game is featured everywhere. I mean everywhere. Commercials, YouTube videos, social media, buildings, airports, buses…. Name something, and somehow the game was marketed there. Even South Park had a segment of the game in an episode. This is all before the game is even launched. No one has played this game yet. No guns have been fired. No missions have been completed. All of this is before that. A game that is about mocking the capitalism of America is using extreme marketing tactics as a promotional tool. You can’t help but laugh at it. I don’t know if it is wrong to say, but Rockstar and perhaps even the GTA franchise itself would be mocked by GTA in the game for how they are currently handling things.
What gets me is not that the game does this, since I get it; the game is popular. Our culture has things that are like that. Movies, music, and other entertainment venues have moments that capture the masses, and that mean a lot to people. That is not changing anytime soon. But there was always someone who would speak back against the machine, and tell it the truth. The person would wink that the entire event is nonsense as they are apart from it. That person is all but gone now. The machine won, and we are all downloading their newest game.
Where Is the Rebel?
The two rebels against the machine I think of with this are two creatives who handled their unusual fame in different ways, but had the same contempt for the machine that built them. Both were built by the machine, yet they both saw that the machine had a level of fakeness that they didn’t want to be a part of.
JD Salinger
The first person is author JD Salinger. He wrote the book Catcher in the Rye, and was so upset by how the public and society made his words their own, and in his opinion, warped the meaning of the story, that he flat out stopped producing novels. The world asked for the sequel or for more books of that style, and he said, “No, you did too much to my first book. I would rather not publish ever again, than allow the machine to ruin my words.”
Think about that. The guy would prefer not to publish a book that would make him a bunch of money, because of his paranoia towards the public and media’s use of his words. We are told that the man was a hermit in his life and was not easy to get an interview, but perhaps he was not wrong in seeing that the machine that built him could ultimately control him. Unless, of course, he didn’t give the machine anything new to work with.
Kurt Cobain
Then there is another example of someone I think recognized the absurdity of the machine that built him, and that is the musician Kurt Cobain. He knew that the band got popular because of the overplaying of their song, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and he saw how everyone all of a sudden loved them. Instead of completely backing out of the limelight, he switched gears, and the next time the band had to write something, he didn’t give the people what they wanted. Not another song MTV could play to death, which they did anyway. I know that he would openly sing the wrong lyrics to the song after a while, not allowing himself to be put up on stage as a puppet for the song. He may not be involved with the promotional part of it all, or how the reviews of the music went or what the media said of him, but at the end of the day, he was making the songs his own, and there was no one who would stop him. Sure, he was built by the machine, but he didn’t mind if the machine ripped him down either. It was his music, not theirs.
The Machine Won
Where is that person for GTA 6? Where is the person who is saying the marketing has gone too far? The voice actors are signed to an NDA, so you know that is not coming from them. Rockstar wants our money, so they are not going to say anything like that. None of the developers seem to have any voice, and if they do, it is quickly overshadowed. The politicians will be hypocrites if they try to address the truth one day, but the marketing plans the next day. The game has gotten so big that no one tries for the truth, since that may hurt the person’s wallet. So everyone goes along with it and pretends as though the absurdity is just something that should be accepted, not questioned.
The video game world will celebrate the biggest game of all time when the latest GTA 6 game is released. I will be there following along to it, and I will eventually get to playing the game (I am waiting for the online edition to come out), but no one will say that the game is wrong, that the game has gone too far.
And let’s be real, it can’t come from you and me. We are the consumers. We are not in the actual development process. We didn’t make the art. This can only come from someone on the inside. A guy like me saying this is only seen as an observation, and nothing more, since I was not a part of the process. It means more when the guy on stage speaks of the show than when the fan in the front row does.
The machine won, it seemed.
And what is worse, no one is even upset about it. We are all paying for the premium edition anyway.
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