The Culture War Comes Full Circle

Late last week some rumors and leaks surfaced about the new Grand Theft Auto game Rockstar is working on, including the basic statement that the protagonist of the game was likely going to be a Latina woman. As you can imagine, this statement sent some Gamers into a tailspin, accusing Rockstar of caving to “diversity and inclusion” and other nonsense typical of reactionary shitheads these days. Basically, hurt dogs will holler, that’s the vibe we’re running off here.

But cutting through all that noise was one particularly notable comment from a Republican Congressional candidate from Miami named Lavern Spicer. Spicer tweeted: “GTA 6 is going to go woke. They’ll also go broke.” Now we’re gonna get into why that’s funny in a second, but it does bear mentioning that the rest of Spicer’s tweets are just her (or likely one of her staffers) trying desperately to connect with a younger demographic while also towing the party line on everything. She throws in a lot of oblique references to Tik Tok memes from six months ago, retweets fuckheads like Matt Walsh and Ian Miles Cheong, makes the same “lol pronouns” jokes over and over and generally just follows the 2022 Republican candidate playbook otherwise. In other words, the kind of mundane fashy awfulness that we should all be concerned about but nothing that makes her, like, stick out like a Marjorie Taylor Greene or a Paul Gosar. She sure is trying tho.

But there’s a very specific reason why her GTA comment is funny, and it boils down to two words (fellow Elderly Gamers already know): “Hot Coffee.” For those unfamiliar, the rundown: In 2004, a few days after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out, modders discovered a minigame in the GTA: San Andreas source code that allowed CJ to have sex with his girlfriend. Rockstar devs had made the content inaccessible so as to keep on the ESRB’s good side, but once modders made their findings public, shit hit the fan in the worst way. The game was reclassified as “Adults-Only,” which actually got the product removed from shelves in stores like Best Buy, and the game was straight-up banned in Australia.

Additionally, politicians from both major parties began to draft legislation: in 2005, Democrats Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh introduced the “Family Entertainment Protection Act” which would have instated heavy fines and community service on anyone selling Mature or AO games to minors; and Sam Brownback introduced the Truth in Video Game Rating Act in 2006 – this act would have essentially folded the ESRB into the federal government and enabled the organization to access all the work made by developers. Neither bills made it out of committee, likely due to extensive emergency lobbying by the Entertainment Software Association, but the ESRB did start tightening their ratings up, including going back and re-rating games already on store shelves (the most notable being The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion‘s bump from T to M).

GTA: San Andreas is also by far not the only game in the GTA franchise to be controversial; any time a new entry in the series comes out, there’s always a bit of an uproar about how it portrays gang violence, cop-killing, violence against women (and particularly violence against sex workers), drunk driving, racial stereotypes, and more. Longtime anti-video game hack Jack Thompson once called GTA IV a “murder simulator” during an interview with conservative pundit Glenn Beck. The list goes on and on forever. (Personally GTA‘s never been my thing; I’m more of a Saint’s Row enby. What other game series lets you run around with a dildo sword and a dubstep gun? But I digress.) (I have been informed that GTA: San Andreas did have a dildo as a melee weapon. BUT DID IT HAVE A DUBSTEP GUN? NO I THINK NOT)

So yeah, it’s kind of funny that a Republican political candidate is out here like “GTA is going woke!!!” because we know that it won’t be. The game’s gonna come out and you’re gonna be able to, like, plow through a bunch of cops in a bulldozer or something, and all these people are gonna go back to clutching their pearls over the game just like always. But I’d argue that it doesn’t really matter. The individual tiny things being swept up in the culture war don’t by themselves matter. They’re just ammunition being used in a weapon that has a bigger purpose. Right now you’ve got states actively policing and surveilling the bodies of women and children in the name of keeping them safe and “protecting the family.” Armed thugs are showing up to harmless events like Drag Queen Story Time because of a pervasive anti-queer “groomer” narrative. In my state, parents now have to sign and get notarized “Biological Sex Affidavits” for their children, just so that the OSSAA can make sure no icky trans children are allowed to play sports. Can’t talk about slavery in schools or libraries, can’t have discussions about indigeneity and what settlers did to First Nations people, can’t talk about non-heterosexual orientations, and so on and so forth.

And people like Lavern Spicer – and every other milquetoast conservative out there, let’s be honest – use the little things like “GTA is woke now!!!!!1” to build up a larger fascist narrative of “attacks on our values from the outside!” that allows them to do shit like ban books, ban reproductive healthcare, make being trans an act of child abuse, prevent the accurate teaching of history in schools, and make even mentioning “diversity and inclusion” a symptom of the “cultural marxist” takeover.

We can sneer, we can laugh, we can mock the hypocrisy, we can nitpick the details all day long. But our time might be better served counter-organizing, not just on an electoral level (y’all probably thought I was just gonna tell you to vote, huh?) but in the communities where this misinformation, jingoism and bigotry is spreading, and in the streets. Relatively harmless and stupid shit like “GTA 6 is woke” is one thing, but when “concerned parents” start flooding school board or city council meetings with specters of the “woke globalist mob” hanging over their shoulders (as they have been doing for honestly the last several years), it’s already too late for idle banter. The best time to take this shit seriously and stop the fascist creep was 2016; the second best time to do so is now.