I think the moral part of a game would be what choices it encourages the player to make. Has anyone seen enough of GTAVI to know or is he talking about GTA in general? I feel like a major theme of the series is that average people commit crime and get into violence because of conditions they are in already. The player character in my view isn't evil or malicious (except maybe Trevor at times? But he does a lot of meth or whatever), I admit I didn't beat GTAV though but I've played through a good portion and all other GTAs. Missions in GTA don't tend to be like, "rob all the old people because it's fun", it's like, your homie is in trouble, you have to help him by shooting the rival gang, which in the situation isn't necessarily immoral. I think that's part of the huge popularity, it doesn't make you feel bad for doing things that are seen as 'bad' like robbery and murder, it doesn't make it seem like something you are supposed to do either really.
tocopherol
"Why are those Caribbean tourists so violent?? What did Israel do to them?"
Nice try Elon, we know the driver was decapitated instantly, we all saw the pics.
Who's this 'hexbear' dude, why was he mistaken about that?
The angry mobs are already incited, he's just giving them good rhetoric
No one is really arguing whether he's funny or not. I think most are trying to point out that even if a person is 'just joking', telling racist, bigoted, etc jokes, it can encourage that sort of attitude and normalize bigotry in general, especially if you already have a massive platform, and to deny that is just ridiculous.
As a queer who has watched essentially everything he's released in his career, he has always had material that came off as bigoted against queer and trans people, and I've still been a fan of his until recently but I don't have a strong judgement on what his actual views might be, comedians always try to be controversial. What are the diverse groups you are talking about? Has there been some kind of objective study on the average response to his comedy? It's always been popular among a decent number to make fun of queers and trans people, women, disabled people, other groups, does that mean we can't still say "wow fuck that guy" when they do it?
Comedy is part of a conversation, all art is, an artist is using their medium to say something. He has a massive platform and he is choosing to encourage even more hate against trans people. Even if his jokes about it weren't so played out and dumb there are endless things he could joke about. It's an asshole move and he chooses this topic probably because he knows it riles people up, because he is lazy and has nothing better to joke about.
He is one of the GOATs if you look at his history and he probably can still make good jokes about better topics if he chose to. Massive assholes have had huge crowds plenty throughout history, it just proves that plenty of people are dicks too.
It's not about getting 'riled up about what someone else said about a third person'. You don't need to see a whole special or context to know transphobic or bigoted language when it's so prevalent. What he has said, whether he was joking or not, was already hurtful, and there is no quote or context that isn't him doubling down further.
I get what you are saying though and I agree, but I do think it's tough to not have any kind of emotional response when people are encouraging things that question your humanity or right to live.
A lot of transphobes, white-supremacists, and similar ideologues would support eugenics for disabled people so that isn't a far off description. Whether comedians like him realize it or not, they are normalizing social darwinism essentially.
In my experience most popular games encourage you to make a moral choice versus immoral, even when killing it's usually in war or isn't explicitly required if its actually murdering innocent people. When a game does make you an immoral character it seems to be even more controversial than GTA, like the Postal games. Or there was an indie game long ago where you played as Lee Harvey Oswald recreating the JFK shooting, it was seen as a pretty offensive thing.