Woke or Not? Grand Theft Auto VI breaks the internet over a year before its release

Grand Theft Auto VI may not be releasing until 2025, but the hype has already been unprecedented.

The trailer was released seven days ago and already has 143,000,000 views on YouTube, which has absolutely destroyed all previous trailer launch records.

Lauren Chen, among others, is wondering whether or not the game will follow the recent trend toward being “woke” in AAA gaming.

Chen notes that “distrust” and “skepticism” have been growing in the gaming community since so many other games have begun to cater to the easily offended.

“There are just a lot of gamers out there who I think are rightfully pretty tired of politics being injected into their games,” Chen says, adding, “the hard truth of the matter is that they are probably right. Just based off of history, this game will likely have some woke elements.”

One of those “woke elements” gamers have pointed out is the “high number of POC” that were featured in the trailer.

Other gamers have pointed out that the game is based in Miami, which is an incredibly diverse city in the first place.

“Considering that the non-white people are being depicted as criminals, I’m pretty sure that actual woke people would not like those depictions, that they would say it’s racist to have all these criminals being black in a video game,” Chen says.

Elon Musk has joined the conversation, saying that when he tried to play GTA V, he “couldn’t do it” as the opening scene required shooting police officers.

“I think not wanting to play GTA because you don’t like doing crime is perfectly legitimate,” Chen says, noting that GTA is however just “a game.”

The game is also featuring its first playable female main character named Lucia, a fact which Chen says some feminists are using to “take a victory lap.”

However, Chen has noticed that there haven’t actually been many complaints about Lucia, and the feminist victory laps may be for no reason.

“I actually saw way more people complaining about people complaining about Lucia than I actually saw complaining about Lucia,” Chen says.

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