Warzel asked about viral posts claiming that playing the new Grand Theft Auto, with its couple-protagonists, counts as cheating on your spouse. Plante notes that earlier games in the series were argued over before Congress and the Supreme Court, while leaked footage of this one shows players killing police officers and unhoused people, which barely registers.
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…you have to ideally attend to their relationship and keep each side happy. Some of the articles that I've seen have sharing these social media posts from people who are arguing that simply playing the game is cheating on your spouse if you have a spouse. What do you make of a controversy like that?
I think it's incredible how we've gotten to real controversies meaning so little and fake controversies meaning so much. And by that, I mean when the original Grand Theft Auto’ III and its sequels came out, right, these games would be tried out before. Congress. I mean, these are really serious issues. There were Supreme Court cases that decided the future of games as a medium in part reacting to these video games. And then after that, and it's gotten more and more and more, the controversies around this game…
Well, what I think is interesting, though, is the way that this kind of mundane, you have to manage a relationship controversy. The way it's come into the culture, though, I think speaks more to the culture, right? Like, I don't know if I fully agree that it's like just people trying to grab a…
Yes, that's so interesting to me because for I would have put it as this speaks to our general prudishness of the fact that like someone kissing in a movie is now seen as like kind of shocking if it's like a like romantic or sensual kiss versus even in like the 90s. But what you're saying sounds…
Yeah, if you had to predict a couple of these like these outrages, like what do we think? I mean, we've got, right, this takes place in, you know, a facimile of Florida, not veiled at all, but there's a lot of Florida man in there, right? Like type, you know, the meme, the stereotype of the Florida…