Los Santos Pride
Stockholm Pride
Issue 42 | March 2017
Agency
Garbergs
Creative Team
Art Director William Löthman Copywriter Sedir Ajeenah Account Director Joakim Landin Account Manager Lotta Thunved PR Nasim Kabiri Web Developer Mattias Alfborger Stockholm Pride Festival Director Christian Gerdes Head of Communication Jonathan Poll Deputy Head of Communication Rikard Westelius
Production Team
Scripting JulioNiB Machinima/Editing 8-Bit Bastard Texture Design TheFriedTurkey Merfish & TheNathanNS Music Coordination Nadja Chatti Jonas Holst
Other Credits
Special Thanks Pete Tong
Date
June 2016
Background
Stockholm Pride, founded in 1998, had become the largest Pride festival in Scandinavia. The organisation sought to raise awareness of LGBT+ issues and create a forum within which the LGBT+ community could safely express themselves.
Idea
Forbes magazine had sparked debate with an article titled "Is Gamer Culture Anti Gay?"
Tapping into this and in pursuit of Stockholm Pride's mission to spread love and equality, a digital pride parade was created inside one of the world's most violent games, 'Grand Theft Auto 5'.
Named after the fictional city within the game, the Los Santos Pride Parade was free to download so every player could have their own pride parade. The modification (a plugin created by real GTA5 fans around the world) was launched with a trailer on Youtube and Facebook.
To honour the victims of the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016, the parade was made indestructible. Why? Because love will always triumph over hate.
Results
Los Santos Pride instantly sparked a debate in the comment sections on Youtube and Facebook, where thousands of gamers gathered to discuss equality and representation. Many of the comments revealed the homophobia within the community and the need for initiatives like this. International media (BBC, Metro, NBC) reported on Los Santos Pride as did respected gaming media such as Kotaku, Polygon and PC Gamer.
The campaign collected over 35,000 social media shares. Organisations and personalities such as YouTube via their Twitter feed, BBC tech show presenter Kate Russell and creators of GTA Rockstar Entertainment expressed support.
The video received over 6 million views on Youtube and Facebook combined. There were 7,000+ downloads of the modification and 35,000 shares in social media in 133 countries in all.
Our Thoughts
One of the major anxieties about social media, Facebook in particular, is that people only get served content they agree with. In other words, your opinions never get challenged, only endorsed so you end up with a distorted impression that the whole world thinks like you do.
So what is intelligent about this is that Stockholm Pride put the message in the faces of (probably) their greatest enemies. Thus they unleashed homophobia on a grand scale, which, in turn, got supporters to declare themselves. The whole point about starting a war is not just to flush out your enemy but to flush out your allies. (Sounds like the sort of thing Frank Underwood would say.)