Matthew Jeffery is an experienced global talent and recruitment leader, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.
On 19 November, somewhere in suburban Britain, a tired parent will finally get the children to bed, another will close the laptop after the last email of the evening and millions of otherwise unremarkable adults will settle onto their sofas after another day of mortgages, commutes, school runs and work.
Within minutes they will be stealing cars, robbing banks and fleeing police helicopters through the neon-soaked insanity of Vice City. Try the same evening in Croydon instead of Rockstar’s fictional Florida and it ends in armed officers and a prison van. Instead, a few hours later, the controller goes down, the dishwasher goes on and ordinary life carries on exactly where it left off.
Grand Theft Auto VI will not arrive quietly.
Its predecessor has sold around 230 million copies. It will also be violent, which guarantees the return of a question nearly as old as gaming itself: does simulating violence make people more violent? It’s a fair question and I have no patience for the corner of gaming culture that treats asking it as an attack on the hobby. But the sharper question hiding underneath is whether Britain still trusts an adult to be handed something violent or stupid and put it down again afterwards.
The evidence on the psychology is genuinely mixed and I won’t pretend otherwise.
The American Psychological Association says violent games have a small, reliable association with some aggressive outcomes but also says there is insufficient scientific evidence to establish a causal link to actual violent behaviour. That distinction matters. A short-term measure of aggression in an experiment is not the same thing as somebody becoming a violent criminal and the dramatic version wheeled out after every tabloid front page, that GTA turns ordinary people into criminals, simply isn’t what the evidence shows.
Here is the conservative argument, stated plainly rather than left for the reader to assemble. The question is not whether GTA VI is good for you. It’s whether the state should be the one deciding that. There are three different relationships in play: parents regulating children, adults regulating themselves and the state regulating adults. A conservative should put responsibility as close as possible to the person who can actually exercise it and deal with problems at the lowest level capable of dealing with them. Parents deciding what a twelve-year-old plays is responsibility. An adult deciding how to spend their own Friday night is liberty. Whitehall deciding either on their behalf is neither.
GTA isn’t only played by thirty-five-year-old men. Women make up close to half of UK gamers and more than two in five of them have played the series. Plenty of the people picking up GTA VI will also be teenagers, which is precisely why age ratings exist, why retailers are legally required to enforce them and why the burden sits with parents rather than Whitehall. The conservative alternative to state censorship was never “children should see whatever they like.” It’s adult freedom, parental responsibility and proper enforcement of the restrictions we already have.
That leaves the regulator, who can step in where there is a demonstrable case for intervention. The question isn’t whether government has a legitimate interest in reducing harm. It plainly does and the examples are real: food advertising restrictions exist to reduce children’s exposure, gambling financial-risk checks target customers already in difficulty, Scottish minimum alcohol pricing is a genuine public health measure with evidence behind it. None of these are stupid policies. The real question is where intervention stops being proportionate protection and becomes the assumption that adults cannot be trusted to make choices for themselves. Hayek’s line about economists applies just as well to ministers: “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Harm and prohibition are not synonyms.
Trusting adults does not mean believing adults always make good choices. It means believing that making a bad choice is not, by itself, grounds for the state to make the choice for them. Mill put the principle plainly enough in 1859, in the language of his time: a person’s own good, physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant for power to be exercised against their will. Nothing about a controller changes that.
Worth pausing on what’s actually arriving in November because “violent video game” undersells it. At its centre are Lucia and Jason, a criminal couple, cast by most coverage as Rockstar’s own Bonnie and Clyde, moving through a fictional Florida of influencers, conspiracy theorists and hustlers filming their own crimes for clout. Rockstar isn’t simply satirising criminals. It’s satirising a culture in which criminals, influencers, politicians and ordinary people increasingly compete for the same thing: attention. Private lives become public content; every humiliation becomes a viral clip and success gets measured by what’s seen and shared as much as by what’s actually achieved. Increasingly Rockstar isn’t inventing an absurd world so much as exaggerating tendencies that already exist. Reducing that to a body count misses the point on purpose because the point is inconvenient.
There’s an industrial argument too and it’s one Conservatives specifically ought to be making instead of leaving to the trade press. Britain is genuinely good at making games. According to trade body Ukie, the UK games industry supports 73,000 jobs and contributes around £6 billion in GVA, while more than half of development jobs are outside London and the South East, in exactly the regions every growth strategy of the last decade claims to care about. Rockstar North, the studio behind Grand Theft Auto, is based in Edinburgh and by one tally of Take-Two’s filings the GTA franchise has generated more than $10 billion in revenue since GTA V’s release in 2013. That’s not a niche hobby. It’s one of the more successful creative exports this country has, too often treated in Westminster as an afterthought rather than something to boast about.
Worth noticing, too, how selective the unease is. Nobody worries that The Godfather turns viewers into contract killers. The assumption seems to run the other way: that a broadsheet critic can be trusted with three hours of the Corleones and a delivery driver with a PlayStation can’t. Last year schools across the country were encouraged to screen Adolescence, a drama built around a child murdering a classmate, after the Prime Minister praised it publicly. It was treated as serious and necessary. The point isn’t that schools were wrong to show it. The point is that we instinctively distinguish between material that depicts disturbing behaviour in a serious dramatic context and material consumed interactively by people we don’t quite trust to tell fiction from reality. The material was never really the issue. The audience is.
Most people who raise these concerns are not enemies of freedom. They’re responding to a genuine instinct to protect people from harm. The mistake is assuming protection and restriction are always the same thing. But when GTA VI lands, somebody will upload an appalling clip within the hour, a columnist who has never held a controller will diagnose the moral state of an entire generation off the back of it and a minister will become an expert on Rockstar North about fifteen minutes before a television appearance. Disapproving of something you’ll never touch, that millions of people enjoy without incident, costs the disapprover nothing at all. It is concern with none of the inconvenience of caring.
There’s a human argument too, alongside all of this.
It has been a genuinely difficult year for a lot of people. Unemployment has crept up over the past year and the number of NEETs, young people not in education, work or training, topped a million in January to March for the first time since 2013, before slipping back to 981,000 in the latest figures. A few hours spent somewhere ridiculous and consequence-free is one of the oldest, most ordinary ways people cope with a hard stretch and it has never needed anyone’s permission before.
Eventually the controller goes down and Vice City disappears. There’s work in the morning and children to collect and nobody returning to that life needs to be told that shooting a police officer is wrong because they shot a fictional one the night before. GTA VI isn’t really a test of whether millions of adults can tell fiction from reality. They can and always could. It’s a test of whether we still trust them to run their own lives without supervision. Thatcher herself called liberty a moral quality, one that carries accountability for how each person uses it.
The conservative case for GTA VI isn’t a case for Grand Theft Auto. It’s a case for adults.