‘GTA VI’ Has Already Sparked a Bizarre Moral Panic Fit For Our Age

In every new generation, a Grand Theft Auto game is born, and a moral panic rises to meet it. So it is with Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest installment in the nearly 30-year-old franchise, which released its first trailer on Monday. 

As of this writing, the trailer has been viewed 74 million times on developer Rockstar Games’ YouTube count alone. The game is the first GTA title to drop in the strange, reactionary post-Trump era we’re in, where unhinged far-right pundits and grifters rake in cash from Elon Musk by posting on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. In the 24 hours since its release, blue checks on X have declared  it “degenerate,” The Independent published a pearl clutching op-ed, a conspiracy took off, and dozens of YouTube videos with the word “woke” in the title gained a few more views.

The GTA franchise is the perfect fodder for a moral panic. It’s massively popular, violent, and garishly stupid. The series has long courted controversy, and the panic accompanying each entry says something about the era in which it occurs. It’s early days, but I see two overlapping  strains of panic hitting the GTA VI discourse. The first is that the game will lead players astray into a life of pornography, crime, and sloth.

“GTA 6 is only one piece of the mass social engineering project to permanently rot the personalities, values, and ambitions of young men,” X user H.Ali said. “The only ones who defend this new form of simulated softcore porn, OnlyFans, PornHub, and more are already rotted and in denial.”

“WE NEED TO BAN GTA 6! CHILDREN SHOULD NOT BE PLAYING THIS GAME!!! #BanGTA6,” another X user wrote in a post containing an image of a woman in the game twerking that was viewed over 300,000 times. 

An op-ed in The Independent followed a similar line of argument. “I’m no prude, but GTA 6 should give us cause for concern,” is the headline. The author notes that video games don’t turn kids into killers, and essentially says that in-game crimes such as auto theft and shooting police are no big deal. “The problem is, the possibilities do not end there,” the author writes, listing other player activities such as killing sex workers and mass shootings. 

“Now, this might not mean anything,” the article says. “It’s not an endorsement of real-life violence; cherubic teenagers aren’t being turned onto a life of crime because of it. But the fact that the game can be used in this way obviously raises contravenes [sic] the boundaries of sensitivity and good taste.”

Elon Musk even weighed in on the franchise’s moral scruples. “Tried [playing Grand Theft Auto], but didn’t like doing crime,” the billionaire posted on X. “GTA5 required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just couldn’t do it.”

Similar arguments against the GTA games have been around for more than a decade. During the reign of GTA: San Andreas and Vice City, then-lawyer Jack Thompson attempted to blame the video games for lots of outlandish crimes, including murder. He attempted to prove this in court several times, failed, and was disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court. The blue checks of X and other assorted influencers aren’t looking to win any court cases, though. Grand Theft Auto VI is just the latest thing they can use to soak money and attention from their reactionary followers.

It’s a game they can point to that proves, to them, that the West is a fallen place with degraded morals. They’ll trot out the same line the next time Marvel has a huge hit, or something like Barbie takes off.. And when GTA VI releases, I’m confident cable news hosts and old media pundits will write a thousand more moralizing articles. From novels to comic books to rap music to video games, new forms of entertainment are met with resistance from old heads who fret about violence in forms of art popular with younger people.

The second strain of moral panic is more pernicious, and paradoxically accuses the game of being overly progressive. This is the first post-Gamergate Grand Theft Auto release, and conservative culture warriors in that mold hated GTA VI prima facie. Leaked footage of Grand Theft Auto VI hit the internet a year ago, and a minority of aggrieved gamers were upset to discover that the main character is Latina.

This led to a wave of YouTube videos and posts about the impending failure of Grand Theft Auto VI because of its perceived adoption of “woke” politics. Videos with titles like “Woke Feminists Ruined GTA 6: Female Protagonist, No Controversial Jokes” and “GTA 6 Will Have WOKE Cops” litter YouTube and predate the trailer’s release by a year.

Now that Rockstar has released some footage of the actual game, this contingent of weirdos is in a frenzy. One of their top concerns is that Lucia, the game’s protagonist, doesn’t look feminine enough. “First look at ‘GTA 6’ female protagonist. She is rumored to be transgender,” one account said on Twitter.

Another, replying to the account spreading an unfounded rumor, said, “If that’s true the game will flop I promise. Go woke you WILL go broke. Follow us if you agree.”

Finally, there is an apparent conspiracy being pushed by some popular right-wing X users that says GTA VI is pro-Zionist and should be boycotted. It seems as though this claim originated with Jackson Hinkle, a right-wing troll and X personality with 2.2 million followers who recently pivoted to posting pro-Palestine content. Hinkle initially said he was “DISGUSTED by the level of degenerate filth in the trailer” and then linked the game to Zionism in a follow-up tweet that called for it to be banned. YouTuber Sneako repeated the claim to his more than 700,000 followers on X hours after Hinkle’s post. 

It’s entirely unclear what this could possibly be based on. Rockstar Games has made no public comments about Palestine-Israel since the conflict flared up after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. 

Disgraced lawyer Jack Thompson battled Grand Theft Auto and lost. He was an attention seeker, but he seemed to believe in something and he was willing to have his ludicrous battles out in a courtroom. There were stakes. In the era of influencers, as social media slowly dies, it’s hard to tell who actually dislikes Grand Theft Auto VI and who is just trying to make a quick buck off of the aggrieved.