So as I’m sure everyone knows, a new Grand Theft Auto is coming in 2025 and its first trailer was released early last week. Grand Theft Auto 6 certainly looks like a Rockstar production: the trailer features shots of the city, nightlife, people gallivanting atop cars, and the criminal element that’s come to define one of gaming’s most popular series. It also confirmed aspects of the game which leaked last year, like one of the playable characters being a Latina woman named Lucia and the story of the game seemingly being influenced by Bonnie and Clyde. Atop that, the series looks set to maintain its satirical edge, with many scenes of the trailer poking fun at Florida, the basis for the state of Leonida and Vice City, which appears to be a lawless land overrun with at least a handful of killer gators. Other scenes from the trailer depicted some of Vice City’s more ludicrous characters, including a few mud wrestlers, a criminal who kind of looks like Timothee Chalamet in that one SNL skit, and a few crazy older folks brandishing weapons and/or cupping their genitalia in the middle of the road. Suffice to say, I’m sure this series that has built its reputation on poking fun at the depravity of American culture has at least a few volleys in the tank.
Though the series has worked less and less for me over the years—at times feeling lost in its own criticisms and forgetting where to draw the line—and Rockstar’s games have become more and more synonymous with the attitudes and trends in games that I abhor, I can’t deny the games are worth looking into, and GTA 6 in particular strikes me as the most interesting entry in some time for a fair few reasons.
First and foremost for me is the trailer’s lens. Many of the events of the trailer are captured and shared through social media, which has erupted since 2013 when GTA 5 first came out. I’m not even sure “influence” was a term ten years ago. At the time, a plotline of the game let you break into the equivalent of Facebook and poked fun at toxic tech startups and how full of shit they often are. Light jabs were made about endemic problems like exploitative labor and the buying and selling of users’ private data before eventually blowing the head off of the in-game analog for Mark Zuckerberg in a televised conference. It’s an indictment on Rockstar’s poor writing the last time around that the only thing they could really think to do with the plot was killing someone off for shock value at the end of a plotline like that.
This time around, the actual product that those startups make seems to be the focus. Social media is a baffling and invasive thing that delights me as much as it disgusts me pretty regularly. It’s most of what anyone is doing on their phone at any given point, and it’s altered the way people talk to one another, the quality of the relationships we maintain, and the values of our society. Social media is a superpower to some, and represents an actual imbalance in the distribution of status and influence. It’s almost single handedly one of the greatestand worst developments of the past few decades.
Social media’s placement front and center in GTA 6‘s trailer seems to point to Rockstar feeling like it has quickly become an integral part of American life and I just hope the game is ready to critique it like it does everything else. The frenzied and erratic nature of the scenes shown through social media posts suggest that Rockstar gets the dichotomy of it—social media can be as entertaining and informative as it can be dangerous in the wrong hands—and if nothing else, the game’ s observations of social media will give me ammo and a chance to reflect on my own positions towards it.
GTA 6 also takes place in an analog for Florida, a place that has become a nightmare and hotbed for the worst kinds of politics and people since the last time the series meaningfully touched on Vice City. While the game has been in development for some time, and probably has no room for an interpretation of Ron DeSantis and his war on Disney and everyone who isn’t a white cisgendered heterosexual, there’s plenty to examine and criticize about the state’s turn to outright fascist attitudes, not to mention the always present racial tensions of the American South. The latter point feels like it’ll even be further pronounced due to Lucia’s prominent role in this game. If there were ever a AAA game that could blatantly talk about the dangers of whiteness, it very well could be this one.
Even if GTA 6 fumbles these points, which I’m not ruling out, the fact that it’s likely to tackle these things at all gives me something to look forward to. Rockstar has proven its capable of writing great stories and after GTA 5‘s toothless take on LA, I really want this title to have something to say. GTA 6 is going to be the biggest, not to mention most unavoidable, game the year it comes out, so it may as well be a good conversation starter too.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.