{"id":25576,"date":"2015-01-06T03:00:24","date_gmt":"2015-01-06T08:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25576"},"modified":"2015-01-06T04:03:33","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T09:03:33","slug":"errent-signal-grand-theft-auto-v","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25576","title":{"rendered":"Errant Signal: Grand Theft Auto V"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lZcX_ZdlW3Q\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lZcX_ZdlW3Q'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>The video makes it sound like Rockstar is taking the game even further in the direction I hate: <em>Now with 50% more arrogant sneering hypocrisy!<\/em> It&#8217;s the ultimate product of bombastic, base, crass, violent, stupid, shallow, consumerist culture, and it spends the entire game looking down on bombastic, base, crass, violent, stupid, shallow, consumerist culture. You could argue that it&#8217;s going for some kind of &#8220;Spec Ops&#8221; style criticism of the genre, but GTA <strong>is<\/strong> the genre. It&#8217;s like making Spec Ops into a core Call of Duty title, so the game spends its entire running time criticizing the existence of tropes that it invented and continually perpetuates. <\/p>\n<p>And that would be fine if it was self-deprecating, but instead the game pretends it&#8217;s somehow above all that. GTA V making fun of beer commercials for their excess of tits and marketing-engineered machismo is like <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/David_Cage\">David Cage<\/a> making fun of the button-mashing stuff in Telltale games. <em>Dude, your house is a pile of glass shards and you are out of rocks. Shut up already.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Rockstar should just make the protagonist Holden Caulfield, except in their version instead of a red hunting hat, Holden is wearing a Nike baseball cap<span class='snote' title='1'>The original red hunting cap would be available as a pre-order bonus. It would still have the Nike logo, though.<\/span>, Levis, Air Jordans, and a Nickleback concert T-shirt. He&#8217;s got a spray tan and drinks Mountain Dew while bitching about all those big corporations that are like, hurting the environment or whatever. He would call people phonies, but only if you buy the &#8220;Everyone is a Phony&#8221; DLC.  <\/p>\n<p>And yet, as much as I hate the swaggering stupidity and tone-deaf condescension of GTA, that footage from Errant Signal really makes me want to get the game and explore that world. Which means I am the dumbass consumer they took me for, and they really are the soulless corporate shills they&#8217;re mocking. I guess the joke is on all of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) The video makes it sound like Rockstar is taking the game even further in the direction I hate: Now with 50% more arrogant sneering hypocrisy! It&#8217;s the ultimate product of bombastic, base, crass, violent, stupid, shallow, consumerist culture, and it spends the entire game looking down on bombastic, base, crass, violent, stupid, shallow, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}