{"id":397755,"date":"2026-09-12T08:46:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T08:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/397755\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T08:46:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T08:46:21","slug":"is-gta-vi-good-or-bad-for-miami-beach-the-city-commission-is-tearing-itself-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/397755\/","title":{"rendered":"Is GTA VI Good or Bad for Miami Beach? The City Commission Is Tearing Itself Apart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grand Theft Auto VI\u2014you may have heard of it\u2014is set in a fictionalized version of Miami Beach, and with the game\u2019s release fast approaching, developer Rockstar Games reached out to the real City of Miami Beach to propose a marketing partnership. As Kotaku notes<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201can adult video game where players steal cars, deal drugs, commit crimes [and] murder.\u201d After a short pause, he clarifies that players murder \u201ccivilians,\u201d and finishes by observing that they also \u201cassassinate police officers.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a brief linguistic aside, there are two interesting things to note about Suarez\u2019s description. The first is his use of \u201ccivilian,\u201d which is a prime example of how military terminology has infiltrated everyday speech<\/a> in America: it\u2019s 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\u2019re aware. The second is the distinction between \u201cmurdering\u201d people and \u201cassassinating\u201d police officers. Why two different verbs? \u201cAssassinate\u201d 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 \u201ccivilian\u201d is not.<\/p>\n

Suarez concluded with a concern about \u201cbrand consistency.\u201d Miami Beach, he says, has \u201cspent over a million dollars over the past three years trying to move Miami Beach away from an image of chaos and lawlessness,\u201d and trying to reinvent itself as a \u201cfamily-oriented city.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is an admirable goal, and we have ideas that might help. For a start, we note with concern the multiple<\/a> references<\/a> to Scarface on the city\u2019s 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\u2014a scene referenced directly on the site as \u201cthe infamous chainsaw scene.\u201d And that\u2019s before we even get to the site\u2019s spotlight<\/a> on \u201cCoppola\u2019s 1974 classic\u201d The Godfather Part II\u2014highlights 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\u2019s relationship to crime, let\u2019s talk about its former mayor, Francis Suarez, doing a full-court press to make the city the \u201cBitcoin capital of the world<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suarez\u2019s speech was followed by one from the sponsor of the proposal, Commissioner Monica Matteo-Salinas. She clarified that \u201cwe\u2019re not going to be giving away pistols and cocaine to people\u201d\u2014stop it with the groans of disappointment in the back\u2014and argued that the proposal is actually about \u201cgamer nerds\u2026 such as myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

In news that will probably come as a shock to the \u201cvideo games cause violence\u201d crowd, she proclaimed, \u201cI\u2019m not going to play the game and go on a crime spree,\u201d and followed up with the most curiously specific profession of being law-abiding you\u2019ll ever hear. \u201cI am a law-abiding citizen,\u201d she begins. \u201cI don\u2019t waterboard. I don\u2019t even own a gun.\u201d We\u2019re glad to hear it, Commissioner.<\/p>\n

Her colleague, Commissioner Joseph Magazine, followed up by observing, \u201cThey fight. They beat the crap out of each other. They curse\u2026 They\u2019re the Miami Dolphins.\u201d His point, he said, is that \u201cwe can differentiate what\u2019s for entertainment and what\u2019s for real life.\u201d This particular distinction between reality and entertainment might be disputed by football players with CTE, but the point stands.<\/p>\n

Commissioner Magazine also injected some actual pragmatism into the conversation. \u201cThis will be the biggest video game launch in global history,\u201d he said. \u201cWhether 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\u2026 We\u2019re not selling our soul, we\u2019re entering a partnership to bring in \u2026 millions of dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014more importantly\u2014to understand it, the argument for the initiative boils down to \u201cit\u2019s not real\u201d and \u201cthey\u2019re going to give us hella money.\u201d Philosophy 101 this is not, but I guess it doesn\u2019t have to be. The final word went to Magazine, who summed up the conversation as follows: \u201cWe can reject this [partnership], or we can embrace it, put our narrative on it, and get millions of dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the record, the motion passed 4-3. We await the inevitable explosion of crime in Miami Beach with baited breath.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Grand Theft Auto VI\u2014you may have heard of it\u2014is set in a fictionalized version of Miami Beach, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[158491,123,1642,125,124],"class_list":["post-397755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-gta-vi","tag-miami","tag-miami-beach","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}