If Fyre Festival could be stripped down to only events which took place on-script, then its entirety consisted of a small party on Norman’s Cay. From there, a series of images grew like vines, splaying all over and through social media under the auspices of a few parasitic signs - Fyre Festival, Fyre, Billy McFarland. Months later, a hoard of wealthy American descended on the Exumas for what these images had promised to them. It was not delivered and the event has gone down as one worthy of a twin of tragedy-films. The tagline of one of these films, The Greatest Party That Never Happened reveals the psychoanalytic importance of Fyre Festival, the festival likened here to the objet petit a, one by a network of images created from a single microcosm which took place on Norman’s Cay.
Scattered throughout the world of Los Santos are fifty locations where the player can perform a “stunt jump”, achieved by driving a vehicle through the setup in the proper fashion in order to trigger a slow motion video of the stunt through a cinematic camera angle. This carries over into the rest of the game and is inherited from the genre at large: a vast empty world with premade sets to be an actor in. The campaign contains missions which promise freedom, multiple appearing on the map at any given time, a story that takes a little while to become more clear, but the missions themselves are as the stunts jumps, very closely scripted. Each mission is a set of premade actions which the player is under the illusion they are free to take, but if the player attempts to deviate from these objectives, failure screens are triggered extremely easily, returning the player back to just before the setup.
Repeated by Billy McFarland throughout the footage shown in Netflix’s documentary is the ethos of “never stop filming”, the mantra of the entire field of self-photography. For a vlogger or celebrity in the vein of McFarland, the life may be “glamorous” by itself - as was the party which took place on Norman’s Cay, but this is never enough. In Grand Theft Auto V, the jumps themselves may be impressive or noteworthy, things that come naturally as emergent gameplay from a game with such robust vehicle mechanics, but it is never enough that they simply occur. They must occur in order to be filmed, processed into polished images, and most importantly, uploaded in order to fit into the schemes of their dominant sign. For the Norman’s Cay party it was promotion of the Fyre Festival. For Grand Theft Auto V, it is continual promotion of the game through the epic screamer moments of a Twitch or Youtube personality.
In the content produced in both these cases, the advertising still works in the same way, however with its production is decentralized onto the consumers, expected now to produce advertising for the very thing which they are currently inside consuming. A third industry of advertisement-surrogates has cropped up in the form of platforms such as Youtube or Instagram which facilitates, by monetizing those who participate, the outsourcing to the consumer of the advertising of the product which they are consuming, in essence, participating in the cynicism of selling the unattainable desire while supposedly attaining it themselves. Rockstar has no need to advertise strongly for the various trinkets one can buy with shark cards, there’s already a cottage industry of Youtube and Twitch content creators who are daily uploading video of themselves enjoying all the benefits of being a whale in Grand Theft Auto V. Similarly, Fyre Festival in order to promote itself and thus create the drama for which it is now infamous, had no other task than to set the self-production wheels in motion.
