DIALOGUE
Grand scheme
It’s not often that the arrival of a new videogame elevates my anxiety levels, but the release of the latest trailer for GTAVI does fill me with a sense of unease that we’re about to embark on another era dominated by alpha-male gaming. My experience of having anything remotely critical to say about GTAV a decade ago on social media or online forums in terms of its depiction of minorities was not a positive one, and although things have changed since then, I do wonder to what extent. I get that Rockstar has made some progress in recent years, but it’s often only been in response to concerted pressure over a period of time. Queer leads are almost comically one-dimensional; trans characters portrayed as over-the-top stereotypes who work in ‘taboo’ professions such as the sex trade. And then there’s the optional violence against women or minorities without repercussion inside or outside the game, shared via clickbait clips which you’d struggle to find in other mediums unless they were trying to capture the incel market. The claim that it’s all down to the player feels disingenuous; there are plenty of things developers restrict without explicitly flagging them. Still, the general Reddit consensus remains: “It’s a satire and has a go at everyone – get over it”. That’s basically the old Bernard Manning defence, which delegitimises any concerns without engaging with them.
Perhaps an element of this is being a dad to a nine-year-old these days and wondering what impact a game like GTAVI will have on boys in particular, and their perception of gender roles and identity. It was so refreshing to see much of the gaming media including Edge swerve coverage of a certain videogame last year because of its association with exclusionary views, but with Rockstar’s record in this area being at least debatable, I guess I just really hope it doesn’t set things back again. They are not by any stretch the worst offenders but because of the sheer number of games they sell they are the most visible, and to people experiencing prejudice and violence in a real-world setting, how they portray diversity will potentially have a lasting impact on how a whole generation thinks about these issues. I could of course be worrying about nothing if GTAVI turns out to be a bastion of wokeness, and I realise in even raising this issue I risk fulfilling another stereotype: the over-sensitive snowflake. But it’d be nice to think that the game’s release when it happens doesn’t make online spaces in which certain people already feel unsafe even more unwelcoming.
As videogames’ popularity continues to grow – along w
