Satire, Freedom, Irony & Us: Replaying Grand Theft Auto V

Featuring Aaron Suduiko of With a Terrible Fate

This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge

There’s a discussion to be had that Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V is the most indicative and seminal entertainment product of the 2010s. Its achievements are legion, both tangible and abstract, PAL and NTSC; as much of its gold is in the air of the mine as in the seams:

• It’s the 3rd top-selling video-game of all-time, and the best-selling narrative oriented entertainment product of all-time, with 110 million packaged and individual copies sold worldwide and over $6 billion in revenue accrued.
• It spawned one of the most rabid online modding sub-cultures ever to spring up around a narrative-oriented game
• Most abstractly of all — and this shall prod the asp of our argument — GTA V apotheosised, via the vast popularity of the product itself, the series’ pursuit of its unmistakable moral philosophy, to the point of cultural latency, in which it through its size it gained the ability to affect and entrench the attitudes it presents as much as reflect them. The real-world imprint of events like Gamergate, which sprung up in the wake of this leviathan, are so real that one of the principals in that saga, Sargon of Akkad a.k.a Paul Benjamin, is now a…