@DynamiteAdam: That's why I was careful to point out that I was talking about the series as a whole and not just GTA 5. I've played all the major games in the series, and they've been consistent in tone; the biggest difference has been that Rockstar's narrative gets more intrusive as the budget goes up.

The only thing that would change or invalidate this blog post is if GTA 5 comes out, and it turns out that the story really does say something about the concept of masculinity, and it says it in a way that only three male protagonists can. But let me say that I'm extremely skeptical that's going to happen. You do make a valid point that "skeptical" is not the same as 100% sure, but that's why I go on about how they use "satire" in the rest of the series, and on the launch site for the new game — there's no indication that they're suddenly going to go for a major shift in tone or depth, any more than they're going to stop including car chases.

Even if I hadn't played enough GTA to get what it's about, there's an even more obvious problem: if you're telling a story about what it means to be masculine, and you're introducing three characters with different perspectives, then including a woman protagonist just obviously has so much more potential than any of the stereotypes we've seen so far. Again, the "offensiveness" of it doesn't bug me so much as the laziness. None of the characters as described sound interesting at all, like anything I haven't seen 100 times before — if I get GTA 5, I'll be buying it in spite of the characters, and not because of them. It's just a huge missed opportunity and wasted potential not to include a character that makes me think, "Now that sounds like an interesting story."

If it does somehow turn out that Rockstar has managed to defy everyone's expectations and tell a story with genuine depth that actually says something about "masculinity," you better believe I'll write about it on here. Not just as a retraction, but because that would be hugely exciting. I'm all about improving the state of video game storytelling, and if one of the biggest franchises in video games suddenly started to tell stories with more depth than a Fast and Furious movie, I'd be all over that shit.