Grand Theft Auto VI—you may have heard of it—is set in a fictionalized version of Miami Beach, and with the game’s release fast approaching, developer Rockstar Games reached out to the real City of Miami Beach to propose a marketing partnership. As Kotaku notes, the idea of empowering the City Manager to negotiate such a partnership was debated at a City Commission meeting on Thursday, and things got weird.
The first speaker, Commissioner David Suarez, came out guns blazing, although that particular metaphor would doubtless appall him, because he describes Grand Theft Auto as tantamount to incitement to do crimes. It is, he says, “an adult video game where players steal cars, deal drugs, commit crimes [and] murder.” After a short pause, he clarifies that players murder “civilians,” and finishes by observing that they also “assassinate police officers.”
As a brief linguistic aside, there are two interesting things to note about Suarez’s description. The first is his use of “civilian,” which is a prime example of how military terminology has infiltrated everyday speech in America: it’s a military term derived from international law on war and armed conflict, neither of which is taking place in Miami Beach, as far as we’re aware. The second is the distinction between “murdering” people and “assassinating” police officers. Why two different verbs? “Assassinate” usually refers to the murder of a prominent figure for political reasons, but can also imply murder by cowardly or clandestine means. The implication is that any death of a police officer is by its very nature an assassination, whereas the death of a “civilian” is not.
Suarez concluded with a concern about “brand consistency.” Miami Beach, he says, has “spent over a million dollars over the past three years trying to move Miami Beach away from an image of chaos and lawlessness,” and trying to reinvent itself as a “family-oriented city.”
This is an admirable goal, and we have ideas that might help. For a start, we note with concern the multiple references to Scarface on the city’s own website. This is a film that features a veritable blizzard of cocaine, along with the commission of multiple crimes, including a man being murdered with a chainsaw—a scene referenced directly on the site as “the infamous chainsaw scene.” And that’s before we even get to the site’s spotlight on “Coppola’s 1974 classic” The Godfather Part II—highlights of which include fratricide, violence against women, a scene where someone is gutted with a knife, and multiple other killings. And if you really want to talk about Miami’s relationship to crime, let’s talk about its former mayor, Francis Suarez, doing a full-court press to make the city the “Bitcoin capital of the world.”
Suarez’s speech was followed by one from the sponsor of the proposal, Commissioner Monica Matteo-Salinas. She clarified that “we’re not going to be giving away pistols and cocaine to people”—stop it with the groans of disappointment in the back—and argued that the proposal is actually about “gamer nerds… such as myself.”
In news that will probably come as a shock to the “video games cause violence” crowd, she proclaimed, “I’m not going to play the game and go on a crime spree,” and followed up with the most curiously specific profession of being law-abiding you’ll ever hear. “I am a law-abiding citizen,” she begins. “I don’t waterboard. I don’t even own a gun.” We’re glad to hear it, Commissioner.
Her colleague, Commissioner Joseph Magazine, followed up by observing, “They fight. They beat the crap out of each other. They curse… They’re the Miami Dolphins.” His point, he said, is that “we can differentiate what’s for entertainment and what’s for real life.” This particular distinction between reality and entertainment might be disputed by football players with CTE, but the point stands.
Commissioner Magazine also injected some actual pragmatism into the conversation. “This will be the biggest video game launch in global history,” he said. “Whether we accept this partnership or reject it, millions of people around the world are already going to experience a fictionalized version of Miami Beach through this game… We’re not selling our soul, we’re entering a partnership to bring in … millions of dollars.”
The discussion is an interesting insight into how the political sausage is made. To Suarez and his supporters, this seems like a genuine ethical dilemma, albeit one informed by a faulty understanding of the relationship between art and life, and shaped by the exact sort of rhetoric Suarez himself produces here. Apart from Matteo-Salinas, who seems to both genuinely love the game and—more importantly—to understand it, the argument for the initiative boils down to “it’s not real” and “they’re going to give us hella money.” Philosophy 101 this is not, but I guess it doesn’t have to be. The final word went to Magazine, who summed up the conversation as follows: “We can reject this [partnership], or we can embrace it, put our narrative on it, and get millions of dollars.”
For the record, the motion passed 4-3. We await the inevitable explosion of crime in Miami Beach with baited breath.
The whole quarrel was part of a session live-streamed on YouTube. The discussion starts at about 7:20 below, and it makes for interesting viewing.
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