Fort/da: why waiting for GTA 6 became a game

Psychoanalytic countdown to GTA 6 · text 8 · 6 days to go
This is a special series on the blog, one piece a day up to the launch of GTA 6. Just arrived? Start with text 10 or read the previous one, text 9.

On October 20, 2026, the first TV commercial for GTA 6, a trimmed version of the launch trailer, aired on the NBA's opening night. By the next day, fans were listing the differences: a few extra frames after Jason playfully punches Lucia's arm, a few more in the bit where she jumps off a truck onto a plane's landing gear. One of the accounts that posted the list is called GTA 6 Countdown.

Thirteen years after GTA V, people are counting frames. You can laugh at that, and I do. But the wait has become an activity, with its own methods, community and calendar. Freud described a similar game in 1920.

An absence with a calendar

GTA V came out on September 17, 2013. The first trailer for its successor, in December 2023, passed 90 million views in 24 hours, a record for a video game trailer on YouTube, according to Guinness World Records. Slated for 2025, the game was delayed in May of that year to May 26, 2026, and in November to November 19, 2026. Both times, Rockstar thanked fans for their patience; the second time, it apologized "for adding additional time to what we realize has been a long wait."

After the second trailer, in May 2025, more than a year went by without a third, and the wait took the shape of a game. Fans tracked the phases of the moon for clues and did the math on the SPF of the sunscreen an NPC was wearing in a trailer. One checked Google to see how busy a café a block from Rockstar North was, to predict the next trailer. Others treated the earnings calendar of Take-Two, Rockstar's parent company, as an oracle.

The reel

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud recounts that he spent some weeks under the same roof as an eighteen-month-old boy and his parents. The text doesn't say so, but the boy was his grandson, the son of his daughter Sophie. Praised for being well behaved, the boy never cried when his mother went out for hours, though he was deeply attached to her. But he flung every small thing he could get hold of far away, with a long "o-o-o-oh" that his mother and Freud agreed meant fort (gone).

With a wooden reel wound with string, the game became complete: he threw the reel over the edge of his curtained cot until it disappeared, said "o-o-o-oh," and pulled it back out by the string, "greeting its reappearance with a joyful ‘Da’ (there)," in the words of the 1922 English translation. Disappearance and return.

Freud ties the game to what he calls the child's great cultural achievement: giving up an instinctual satisfaction (Triebverzicht) so as to let his mother leave without a fuss. The boy compensated himself, so to speak, by staging the same disappearance and return with the objects within his reach. In life, he suffered the absence; in the game, he was the one producing it. Freud considers an urge for mastery (Bemächtigungstrieb) at work here.

I've used this reel on the site before, for horror games and Dark Souls. There, it was inside the game; here, the object that disappears and comes back is the game itself.

The objects within reach

Nobody can make Rockstar release anything a day early. What you can do is play with whatever is within reach: the trailer, the screenshot, the investor calendar, the moon. Going through a trailer frame by frame is pulling on the string: the absent game reappears in pieces, paused, zoomed in, under the viewer's command. Every detail found is a small da.

Freud notes that children repeat in their play whatever has made a great impression on them, "and so to speak make themselves masters of the situation." The community does the same, as a crowd: it turns a wait that would otherwise be merely endured into something done.

The first act, on its own

In Freud's account, the first act, the disappearance, was "the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the second act." Why stage on its own, and far more often, the very part that hurt?

The community, too, rehearsed the fort more than the da. When the first delay hit, social media filled up with memes listing everything that had arrived before GTA 6. Freud ventures another reading: throwing the object away might gratify an impulse of revenge, suppressed in real life, against the mother for going away. Its tone would be defiant, which the 1922 translation renders as "Yes, you can go, I don’t want you, I am sending you away myself." Whoever laughs first at the next delay sends the game away before being left by it.

The patience Rockstar thanked

Go back to the boy who never cried. For Freud, his mother's leaving cannot have been pleasant, or even a matter of indifference: good behavior had a cost, and the reel was the compensation. The patience Rockstar thanked was real. It just wasn't made of silence. It was made of theories, comparisons, memes and countdowns.

This reading doesn't repeat the ones about FOMO and idealization I've written here before. FOMO is wanting something because everyone else wants it; idealization is imagining a perfect game no release could ever match. Fort/da is humbler: it is the work of bearing an absence you can't control by turning it into a game you can.

When the reel loses its job

Freud admits that a single case yields no sure conclusion. I don't know what happens to this community when the game arrives, either. I'm thinking of the game of waiting, not of disappointment, which is another conversation. Starting November 19, the reel loses its job: the game will be right there every day, with no need to be pulled back. Some may miss something they can't quite name; others will find a new reel right away.

And the question isn't only about video games: when the thing you waited so long for finally arrives, what happens to everything you invented to get through the wait?

Tomorrow, in text 7 of the countdown: a real city that decided to wear the fantasy.