GTA Online's Success Undermines GTA 6's Relationship With Political Satire

If there's one thing that the Grand Theft Auto series is no stranger to, it's American politics. There was a time when lawyers and politicians were practically tripping over each other in an attempt to denounce Rockstar Games for any number of reasons.

Much like how rock and roll and Dungeons & Dragons were considered countercultural at best and outright satanic at worst, GTA was seen as one of the faces of an industry that was corrupting children and turning them into violent criminals.

Thankfully, those days are effectively gone. The rise of modern internet culture, aging demographics, and a better understanding of games as a whole certainly contributed to the normalization of Rockstar Games' image. Nonetheless, Grand Theft Auto 5 still managed to attract its own fair share of controversies.

While Grand Theft Auto 4 did touch on political issues like immigration, GTA 5 turbocharged the political messaging by literally putting it in your face. Most people probably don't need to be reminded how an entire arc of the game addressed the manner in which the United States utilized torture, domestic spying programs, private military companies, and many other dubiously moral means to protect "freedom" and "democracy." 

Grand Theft Auto 5's Edgy Satire Loses Its Edge

Of course, GTA 5 is merely a game, so its exploration of sociopolitical issues was largely limited to surface-level analyses. As shocking and uncomfortable as GTA 5's torture mission was, it wasn't really advancing a revolutionary viewpoint to say that torture is bad.

If anything, the game's criticism of the U.S. War on Terror and domestic police policies were wholly unoriginal by the time it released in September 2013. Case in point, Spec Ops: The Line came out in 2012 while Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance came out in February 2013.

The same could be said of GTA 5's portrayal of society. It's fun to laugh at social media, celebrities, and reality shows, but the game isn't providing any new commentary. Most of the time, you'd get some grade-school sexual innuendo before being whisked away to the next joke. Consequently, the audience is rarely left with a deeper message.

The largest casualty of this by far is Michael's family. Everyone is an unlikable walking caricature, and their story arc concludes in such a way that it may as well be lifted from a reality show. The depiction of the family almost fails to be satire as it is neither clever nor enlightening and only barely manages to be funny.

GTA Online doubled down on the absurdity, culminating in the infamous flying attack motorcycle. In all fairness, the multiplayer portion was never expected to be serious or grounded in reality, except it's hard to imagine that anyone was expecting such a wild turn. 

That's not to say that every game has to be a complex and serious deconstruction of modern society. GTA 5's approach to political topics is only worth mentioning because it's almost juvenile when you look at Rockstar's earlier games. 

L.A. Noire for example is a rather serious story about PTSD, corrupt cops, society's treatment of war veterans, and massive fraud. Max Payne 3 features more corrupt cops with ties to an organ-harvesting ring, set to a backdrop of political corruption and general class conflict. Red Dead Redemption had a story and themes that, though not wholly original, were at least presented in a relatively unique way by virtue of the setting.

Grand Theft Auto 6 and the "New" Rockstar

If Grand Theft Auto 6's trailer is any indicator, Rockstar is going to continue satirizing the more unflattering aspects of modern American society. The trailer itself had more than a few scenes that looked like punchlines to the Florida Man meme.

Amusing as it may be, there's a fine line between essentially putting a well-known joke into a game and a billion-dollar company punching down at people who can't defend themselves proportionately. 

There's also the question of how Rockstar will approach criticisms of corporations and consumer culture. GTA 5 allowed you to turn a CEO's head into instant ketchup on live TV and relentlessly mocked Facebook and Apple, yet GTA Online's success can easily be attributed to the same vapid consumerism that enabled these modern tech companies to thrive.

One could go so far as to say that the moment GTA Online became successful is the moment that Rockstar turned into one of the societal issues mocked by their own games. It's satirical in and of itself that a company, which benefits from the status quo, would have a flagship product that's essentially "Society Sucks, Do Crime." 

Coincidentally, a parody game in GTA 5 has also turned out to be prophetic. The initial target may have been the Call of Duty series, but seeing as how GTA 5 was re-released multiple times and became bloated with microtransactions over the past decade, the joke hasn't exactly aged well.

With the Subtlety of a Rockstar

To their credit, Rockstar's writers are still quite sharp when it comes to political issues. Red Dead Redemption 2 practically beats you over the head with its political messaging by the end, pitting you against capitalism in a figurative and literal sense as you fight against both Pinkertons and the U.S. government.

That being said, at the end of the day Rockstar poured all of its resources back into GTA Online when it was clear that Red Dead Online was not as popular. Unsurprisingly, a company is going to chase what's popular as that's where the money is, and money is their priority above all else.

What this means for GTA 6 is unclear at this time, but it presents a worrying possibility. It's not out of the question that Rockstar might take GTA 5's over-the-top satirical tone into GTA 6 and crank it to eleven. Everything is a joke because that's what sells, in spite of the series' inherent sociopolitical undertones.

Incidentally, this would turn the game into the same corporate-approved edginess parodied in the modern GTA games, serving as a more accurate parody of society through its mere existence than what any game can hope to achieve.