• averyminya@beehaw.org
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    4 months ago

    We are a small circle. For every 1 of us that do not care, if you would simply go to Facebook or reddit you would see that there are more than 10 who do care.

    This is the dynamic of the public sphere, where broadness to reach as many people as possible means allowing for a narrative that can be interpreted in such a way that each individual can be right in their perception of it.

    While I saw the trailer for GTA6 as being a poor imitation of real life, in that the events of GTA4 and 5 were more creative in their situations because they were larger than life. These are things that are so crazy but they still could happen in real life. Instead of continuing that trend, the trailer is a 1:1 recreation of actual events that happened in real life… IMO, that is a drastic shift, as to me it would indicate that the creative direction is referencing, or recreating crazy events that have actually happened. Where previous installments tend to have commentary about the events.

    Btw, doing my best to compare the actual trailers between the games, not what we know after the fact. Of course, GTA6 could completely go a different direction and those 3 instances of real life could be the only time something like that happens. I doubt it, but it could be. My whole point here is that you and I can analyze media and pick up on facets about the themes or the narrative, and in response in the public sphere the response you get in return are, “bro it’s not that deep it’s just GTA”, or “bro is literally writing an essay about a game”.

    These are actual responses I got to a pretty heartfelt comment I made about the trailer. Media literacy, analysis, basically anything that isn’t the surface level just doesn’t matter to like 80-90% of people. Not one response I got even attempted to dig deeper into what I was trying to say, the closest it got was justifications about why R* did real life events for the trailer, and how the game won’t be a mishmash of memes.

    So, I write all this to say, we are a small portion of the population. Also, I think R* is one of the last few companies to have “good grace” with its fan base from the era of when hype would last. A decade ago it wasn’t uncommon for a game to be announced at E3 and that game would be present in people’s minds for 4 to 6 years and each mention of it gets them more hype.

    In the last 6 years, this has died in the majority of spaces. Metroid Prime 4 had hype, it still does but it’s drastically diminished. If the exact events right now were happening 1 or 2 decades ago, Prime 4 would still be extremely hype.

    Cyberpunk was another example of this, at the end of the era where it has good grace, it had an extremely long hype, and then marketing brought that even further and then lost it all - likely a significant reason why hype overall isn’t as prevalent.

    Finally, Red Dead Redemption 2 was the same situation as GTA 6, where it had a few years where everyone knew it was coming soon, then it was announced, and now the years are going by waiting for release. So with that said, hype still does exist for a lot of games as long as it’s within 2 years, but beyond that it’s basically forgotten about or could even be criticizing at this point for its extremely long development time, unless the studio has a large enough fan base for it to not matter, like Halo, CoD, Battlefield, whatever.