In a fit of frustration over Hotline Miami and the way gamers discuss violent games, I ended up talking to game critic/provocateur Cara Ellison. She adores Hotline Miami, you see.
Originally I meant to consult her about a different article, but our conversation was much more interesting than what I wrote. So weâre publishing our correspondence instead, which touches on the bullshit surrounding the discussion of violent games (which has gotten even more complicated lately), whether or not we confuse loving winning to loving digital murder, and more.
From: Patricia Hernandez
To: Cara Ellison
Subject: murder
Cara, something I read last month is haunting me. I keep returning to it. Thereâs an article on Midnight Resistance where Liz Ryerson dissects hyper-violent Hotline Miami and its reception. In it, Ryerson asks âhow can you rhapsodize at great lengths about the joy of violence in a videogame without sounding like a complete psychopath?â
The article is compellingâshe doesnât suggest that violence shouldnât be in games, but she does urge us to take a look at why itâs there and how it affects as as folk who probably arenât about to go commit murder. And for once, this discussion isnât being anchored by the suggestion that games will corrupt us forever⊠just, that we do an awful job at examining what the violence does or mean, even though weâll go at great lengths at describing how enjoyable it is.
I think itâs worrisome that we donât talk about this stuff. Weâre so sure that the value in the mechanics of these games is self-evident enough that they donât warrant examiningâreally examining. Like, beyond the idea that it feels good to kill someone. That part is the easy, obvious part.
I canât stop thinking about Ryersonâs question thoughâcan we, do we sing praises of the joy of violence without sounding psychopathic? I decided to check out reviews of Hotline Miami and found that by nature of having to explain how the game worksâwhich involves playing as a killer-for-hireâ sounding unhinged is an inevitability. The more a reviewer likes the game, the more true this is. Whatâs up with that?
There was one review that pinpointed the game as a âmurder simulator,â but stressed that playing the game doesnât make you a bad person. Insecurity?
Whatâs curious about this is that many people pose that thereâs little time to think while playing, but that in-between missions, or after you shut the game off, that changed. But by the time reflection finally came, well⊠who knows?
Maybe Hotline Miami doesnât have to make a statement, thatâs fine. But we can. I want to hear about what the reality of what weâre doing is and what it means in the wider societal context in which it exists, or what it might say about us, and not simply a mechanical breakdown. I come to you, as resident Hotline Miami lover.
I find myself frustrated when I read much of the discussion around the game, because there are no statements, no conclusions. How valuable is an unanswered question? When we donât make statements about what the game makes us consider, how, in effect, is it different from a game that doesnât make us think at all?
Lovingly murderous,
Patricia
From: Cara Ellison
To: Patricia Hernandez
Subject: re: murder
Dear Patricia,
This is an interesting question, moreso as it is something that I have never found myself worrying about. I actually think that the more stylised you make the violence the further you separate yourself from the gameâs imagery, and the less important violent actions or themes are. The more abstract you get, the less you are attached to the actual idea of what is happening. Hotline Miamiâs violence is almost a post-process realisation that you are murdering people. The characters are not people you identify withâthey are abstracted, little top-down dudes. Hotline Miami is extremely stylised, and does its utmost not to be hyperrealistic.
Hotline Miami is a beat, a rhythm, a process, a series of tiny challenges to overcome. It is only after the control is taken away from you by the game, and you throw up, then the realisation really connects with you that you are controlling a guy whose job it is to kill people, and the pleasure that you are getting from the crunch of a baseball bat is that of an assassination.
Hotline Miamiâs job is to present a a room full of guards to you and have you puzzle out how to solve the problem of them. You get a sense of achievement from offing those guys one by one like you would being Mario bopping Goombas on the head in quick successionâand after, you think, woah. The game is trying to tell me that I am not just a puzzle-solver hereâI am a murderer. The cutscenes emphasise itââWhy are you doing this?â The cutscenes make you think about what you have done in a way that pushes me to feel like I am in the mind of a killer, when really I feel like it is a strategic puzzler at heart?
Why is Hotline Miami framing me for murder after the fact?
Yours bloodlustily,
Cara
From: Patricia Hernandez
To: Cara Ellison
Subject: re:re:murder
Cara,
Speaking of sounding unhinged: framing you for murder, huh? Heh. Thatâs curiousâbecause, as you said, the game makes sure to remind you youâre a murderer with the cutscenes, but it also it tries to distract you from that idea with its stylization. In addition to that, it detaches you from the situation when it suggests that youâre not in complete control of your actionsâthat youâre being controlled by a shadow organization.
I feel conflicted. Much of the discussion about the game lauds the fact that it asks us whether or not we enjoy hurting people. THAT is psychotic: so what weâre saying is, most games donât make us think? âŠ.we have to be prompted to think? That idea doesnât reflect very well on us. Thatâs funny, considering how easily we get mad when the media/non-gamers look at these violent games, and how easily we can say that theyâre not looking closely enough.
Iâm not even sure that Hotline Miami is so different from just about any other violent gameâif we stopped to actually think whatâs going on. Itâs not necessary to have hazy, vague cutscenes between levels of a game asking you if you enjoy killing to dare to wonder on your own. The fact that weâve needed to be asked, to me, is alarming.
Granted, it occurs to me that most games work hard to make sure weâre distracted from what we do. I mean, they have to, right? It would be horrifying if we felt the weight of every single murder in the games we play.
But now that you brought up how Hotline Miami goes back and forth on reminding you and distracting you about being a murderer, I feel that much more conflicted! What is the game trying to do? I canât tell if itâs a purposeful tension or the sign of a muddled game. My cynicism gravitates me toward the latter.
If the game is framing us for murder, why do you think that most people endlessly praise how good digital murder feels? Are they actually talking about something else they enjoyed with the game without realizing it? Assuming weâre actually being framed, the game sure tricked everyone into thinking that theyâre guilty.
Conveniently innocent,
Patricia
From: Cara Ellison
To: Patricia Hernandez
Subject: re: re:re:murder
Patricia,
I donât think Hotline Miami is a good game because it is violentâit is pure mechanics working to give a chemical response in my brain that is the rush I get when I feel achievement. I find it difficult to connect my knifing a guy in Hotline Miami to the idea of doing it in real lifeâthere is an interface that is giving me feedback that creates that abstract feeling of winning when some pixels collide.
I tell myself I have completed a task with my hands, and my brain gives me a biscuit (or a cookie, as it is there in the States). There is an obvious progression to reward in the framework of this virtual painting, whereas most well adjusted adults know that there is no excuse for violence in the framework of real world society and there is certainly no reward for it. The oppositeâthere is serious punishment and great societal distress. Knowledge of the rules is important wherever you are.
The cutscenes in Hotline Miami are interesting, because they are actually there to remind you that the game is about horrible murder lest you forget that it is about horrible murder. Why?
The cutscenes in Hotline Miami are interesting, because they are actually there to remind you that the game is about horrible murder lest you forget that it is about horrible murder.
Because itâs based on the film Drive and stylised violence can be made to look cool. But really, the process of winning or the mechanics that underlie that game are nothing to do with violence. You could have a totally abstract set of squares and triangles bumping into each other, exploding, sort of like a slappers-only Geometry Wars, and the same satisfaction would pop out. Am I making excuses? I hope not. I am just trying to analyse my own brainâs processes.
I think when people talk about the glory of the violence in Hotline Miami, they are confusing it with the joy of winning and projecting the frame back onto the game. Itâs interesting to note that I personally also confused the feeling of winning with what the game wanted me to feel was the glory of murderâwhen actually it is the same feeling you get when jumping on a Goomba (which I guess is still murder but wouldnât traditionally be thought of as that).
Lots of people in Hotline Miami reviews have done that. I actually dance more around the issues of violence completely in my preview here because I donât think I saw enough of the cutscenes to press the âviolenceâ frame on me. I wrote more about the rhythm and music back then.
In our Rock Paper Shotgun Verdict the violent style seems much more praised, as Iâd played it for a long time by then. Note the contrastâand we still have very little to say about what it actually says about violence because the gameâs mechanics are primarily our fascination.
Note also how we all get het up and excited and confuse the rewarding mechanics for a judgement on our penchant for violence. At one point I say I love the âpurity of the knifeâ, which is to say, that I like how the knife mechanic functions in the game, and then say that I am worried it makes me look psychotic. This is what the frame of the game narrative wants me to think.
Then later I get so excited talking about the game that I ask for camomile tea. The remaining part of the euphoria of this game is in the 80s neon art and the exceptional soundtrack. It is easy to confuse all of these for a fetish for violence, because the game constantly asks you to actively confuse your pleasure of the game for the pleasure of murder, and then a cutscene points to you and says âTHAT IS FUCKED UPâ. And you donât disagree. OrâŠ
We come back round to this: if I am worrying that it is making me look psychotic, that is a good thing right? But if I am not, perhaps I need to worry about my attitude to violence. Is that what we are saying? Are games then, just what we personally read into them? Arenât they just a mirror of ourselves? If you are a violent person, would you look at this game as a come on or a dampener? I donât know. I played GTA from age 12 and I have never been tempted to be violent towards anyone.
Busted,
Cara
From: Patricia Hernandez
To: Cara
Subject: re: re: re:re:murder
Hey Cara,
Aha, here we come to the big hangup when it comes to this conversation: personal responsibility. I suspect we as a community shy away from this discussion because the assumption is that weâre trying to crucify each other or feel guilty about what we doâthat the apex of this conversation is âshould I feel bad or notâ or âdoes this make me a potential murderer or not.â
While I donât discount the value of figuring that stuff out, itâs too easy to hand wave. People go âwell Iâm not a bad person, so as much as I might pause, Iâm not going to change my opinion that these things I enjoy reflect poorly on me/say something awful about me.â
There are other ways of discussing what violence means or says in a game. I put forward Liz Ryersonâs own conclusions with Hotline Miami:
âGames like HLM cut to the core what of what a pretty big chunk of life in the modern world is about. People feel that they have no control over their own lives. They want to be able to exercise that control somehow, somewhere. They want some sort of releaseâotherwise they feel like theyâll just explode. videogames have come to fit the desire for release like a glove. Games have done this so well, in fact, that theyâve created a significant culture of people who use playing games for the sole purpose of feeling in control over the rest of the world.â
Theyâre puzzles, as you said, which we solve. This reading makes sense to me.
As other examples, I think of how Merritt Kopas has written that the way games can lie to us about what violence is, because they only focus on the physical kindânot the structural kind of violence (sexism, racism, etc) that we cannot always perceive on a granular level.
I think of Cameron Kunzelman discussing how XCOMâs usage of torture reveals that many of us have normalized the behavior, rationalized torture in our heads before the game even startsâso when the engineer spouts his lines about us losing our humanity and the way many reviewers took this to mean the game was critiquing something, it falls flat.
âI knew immediately that I was going to have to torture aliens and genetically modify my soldiers in order to play that game. The possibility for cooperation was always-already closed off, though I canât articulate why. I just knew. There is no question. The ethical question, then, is a beautiful failure. Why have the debate in game? Why pretend like there is some kind of grey area that the player is having to navigate? Is is supposed to make me ask questions?â
These are the types of discussion about violence that I want to seeâscrew whether or not games might make us bad people. Weâre too close to that discussion to really be able to say something critical, we repeat the same platitudes over and over, and I donât think weâll ever really âsolveâ that issue. We never move on from it though, if we talk about violence at all.
Iâm curious, though: if what weâre doing doesnât matter because itâs simply the frame, then why do games like Dyadâabsolutely, positively not âviolentâ in the traditional senseâpackage their games under the same language? Rowan Kaiser notes that the terms for what we do in the game are really combative: we lance things, we hook things, and so on. The game looks like youâre on drugs for christsakes.
It seems to me the packaging is either important, or somehow along the way weâve forgotten how to think about things outside of that framework.
Violently troubled,
Patricia
From: Cara Ellison
To: Patricia Hernandez
Subject: re: re: re: re:re:murder
Patricia:
I think you hit the button when you said that it is the packaging.
Our culture is obsessed with looking at games, this interactive medium, as if it were the interactive part that corrupts us, when in fact it is in a long line of media that we have worried over. When novels first appeared, they were a corrupting influenceâwomenâs brains would overheat, they saidâand anyway, newspapers and journals were the only thing worth reading. And then it was movies, rock and roll music. A short time ago, rap music was the thing that was going to kill me.
Games do not exist in a vacuum. The biggest problem, as the end of Hotline Miami attests, is our predilection for, or perhaps our lack of concern over, violent media. Of any kind. Violence is so prolific in our entertainment these days that itâs becoming an important question: why are we seeing so much of it? And why, such as when the Rockstar Hot Coffee debacle happened, are we more outraged by being shown an act of love in a game, than we are by someone being shot in a gameâan act of hate?
I think the packaging is a symptom. It is a mirror we are gazing into. It is telling us we are already sick.
We are just seeking cathartic shelter from it, a way of dulling its poison by working through it in Hotline Miami.
You can make the symptoms go awayâremove violent games from supermarkets, take away rap music and gangster films. Burn copies of Puzoâs The Godfather on a pyre. You can do all of those thingsâI meanâif it really is those that are at fault. For a violence free societyâsureâburn the fucking lot. I never want to see it again if it created this mess.
But as long as there is fear, resentment, neglect and a weapon on the table, people will hurt other people. Either we take away the fear, resentment and neglect in society, or we take away the weapon.
Games are a distraction. From the horrible real world, and from where the actual discussion lies.
Cara
From: Patricia Hernandez
To: Cara Ellison
Subject: re: re: re: re:re:murder
Cara,
Video games arenât the only things to be criticized as agents of corruption youâre right, they just happen to be the flavor of the era. And yes, this conversation is much larger than video games, and should be pursued in that larger stage as well. We just happen to be game journalists!
Even so, I hope that in the future we donât need a game blatantly prompting us to think, or a tragedy doing the same. Well, no. Youâve probably noticed how many people have posted similar sentiments recently, about the necessity to reflect.
As I said earlier, there is no use in an unanswered question (âwhat does the violence mean/reflect?â) I hope we actually voice what it is weâre thinking about.
You know, everyone keeps telling me games are a distraction. It feels important, almost, to convince each other that they are distractions. But when Iâm playing, ah, I donât feel distracted at all.
