Makes you think
I got this game because it was famous, it was $2 on sale, and I hated the promotional art. Months later I gave it a try. I loved the title screen (great title screen). I then proceeded to laugh out loud when it started with a hilariously straightforward expression of one of my biggest pet peeves in all of Video Game World: when a really violent video game goes like, “Did you ever think about how crazy it is that you’re being violent in a video game????”
This bugs me for two reasons. The first is: you guys made the game, not me. Just make it about water guns if it bugs you so much! Why_are_you_hitting_yourself.exe.
The second reason this “gotcha” bothers me is that video games are fake. Movies, television, novels, video games: even if they’re depicting real events, the events happened differently, because events happen in real life. These are aesthetic objects, which is to say they are objects which cast experience into a shape that does not resemble ordinary experience at all. A work of art can tell us something about life, but the quantity of overlap between a work of art and the actual experience of existing is relatively minimal.
While I think it’s worth stating this fact plainly, the implications can be nuanced, especially on the societal level. Obviously movies can have bad politics, and that bugs me; obviously art does something to shape our values, consciously and unconsciously. And there are evil works of art: The Birth of a Nation; Triumph of the Will; etc. We are going to pause here because this is not actually a self-explanatory point.
Looking bad
Maybe there’s a paradox here—art isn’t real; art can be evil—though I tend to think it’s one which motivates rather than deflates the ideological effectiveness of the work. It is precisely through these two films’ unreality, their artifice and remoteness from actual experience, that they can do so much harm. The unreality of Birth of a Nation is the unreality of ideology: the idea that a certain variety of organized anti-Black violence will lend a grandeur and dignity to experience that it expects the (white) viewer to desire.
And I do think video games can do this, to some extent. The connections between the US military and the Call of Duty franchise are relevant here. By putting the Coolest Freaking Guns in the game, by making it seem like being in the army is exciting and fun instead of a morally injurious nightmare, the game has actually served as an effective recruitment tool. But Call of Duty is a useful example because it has so little to do with violence in games in the abstract and much more to do with the relationship of specific material interests to specific ideological content. Being in the Army, by all accounts, fucking sucks shit: this is why American recruitment preys on desperate young people, especially desperate young men, many of whom play Call of Duty. The one-to-one correspondence between Call of Duty guns and real-life guns serves to strategically blur the line between reality and fiction: this is actually what it’s like.
On the other hand, most people who play Call of Duty don’t join the Army, because they know that the activities of accumulating trivia about contemporary weapon engineering and sitting on your couch testing your twitch reflexes against other people sitting on their couches bear essentially no relationship to the daily realities of active service.
All of which is to say: for most of us, the unreality of a game is precisely what allows it to be fun; if it were real, it would not be fun. This is the structure of most fantasy, I’d argue.
The Wolf of Wall Street is my favorite Martin Scorsese movie precisely because it is the most thoroughly perverse, the most committed to its own project—while nonetheless taking pains, observable to anyone paying much attention, to provide internal reasons to reject an experience and worldview whose appeal it nonetheless understands. That is to say: my enjoyment of The Wolf of Wall Street is predicated on the fact that I understand that what I am watching is not real, even if its referents are. If someone is such a fucking dumbass that they think it’s cool to be like the shitheads in a movie about shitheads, they need to leave the theater and go to school or church or something.
I do think there’s something interesting in how incredibly violent the media emerging from our culture is, and I think there are rotten ways to go about playing around in unreality. I just think that art tends to reflect society; art’s problems are, in general, society’s problems, and not the other way around (though there are exceptions). This trickle-down is often literal: the American military pays for all its coolest guns to be in Call of Duty. And I mean, I of course don’t have a lot of patience for shit that’s edgy for edgy’s sake, or whatever, because I am an adult, and I therefore understand that people have obligations to each other. In any case, art reflects society, and American society is dogshit. Of course the art we produce will include dogshit.
Getting into it
Anyway. Hotline Miami (which is not by Americans, though it is definitely about America) is a really good video game. It’s so fucking good. It’s the only video game I consistently play that makes my hands shake. It helped me understand why Devolver is the way it is. It almost—almost—has a claim on being genuinely interesting on the “violent game about violence” front. (Worth noting that there’s exactly one game that does this well, in my experience, and that game is the immortal NieR: Automata.)
I do not think it has much to say about violence as such, though the game’s hyperviolence is fundamental to the way it works. To my mind, what the game’s about—what makes it, despite its basically uninteresting story, great art—is the fundamental ambivalence of immersion in a task.
I don’t know if I believe in “flow,” but if there’s something vitalizing to the flow state, there is also something dangerous in it. This is how, say, slot machines work. There is a reason that extreme practices of self-obliteration, historically speaking, have been the domain of religious communities. There is a reason the Marquis de Sade scared people so badly, and it’s not just because his work is icky. I mean, this goes back at least to Augustine, if not the Stoics: the sense that there is a connection between sexual desire, between our most heightened modes of pleasure, and self-obliteration.
This anxiety about self-obliteration is one of the reasons that video games have always incurred the wrath of moral panickers. As a rule, “Satanic” art does not incur religious approbation: ask a fundamentalist if Paradise Lost is bad and—well, they’ll probably say they haven’t heard of it. Dungeons & Dragons, extreme metal, Doom: it’s not just that they’re Satanic. It’s that they encourage a mode of obsession that conservative parents (most of whom already hate their children and do not regard them as people worthy of autonomy and dignity) find incomprehensible. Harry Potter is another good example: despite being a series of books drenched in conventional Christian morality, written by a cultural conservative, it occasioned an insane moral panic. Why? Because kids liked it too much. They lined up outside the store and read them in a day.
Let’s go back to Doom. Famously, Sandy Petersen, a practicing Mormon, helped design a bunch of the levels; when a surprised John Romero asked him if he was okay with the game he was making, Petersen said he didn’t see the problem—wasn’t the character killing the demons? It is easy to forget, but important to remember, that he is 100% correct. In Doom, you are killing the demons. On a fundamental thematic level, Doom has more in common with mediocre Christian video games than, like, Norwegian extreme metal.
The problem is that Doom looks fucking crazy and plays unbelievably fast, even today. The joy of it, then as now, is of a piece with its madness. This is heightened by the fact that software is essentially magic: programmers inscribe numbers and letters and occult them from view and they summon sensuous phenomena into reality, and then you touch and affect them through a keyboard or a controller.
It behooves nobody to deny that video games can’t fuck you up, especially because the corporations who make them often design them with intentional malice. Free-to-play gacha games—games with a rotten gambling mechanic at their core—have been successfully laundered into the Western mainstream over the course of the last few years, thanks to a) the proliferation of slightly-less-insidious-but-still-fucking-insidious microtransaction-based games like Fortnite and b) MiHoYo’s successful laundering of the gacha mechanic through Western media by way of games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail—games whose quality and availability on consoles and PC allows them to pass as “real" games (that is, not mobile games—itself evidence of a Western bias, given that the majority of the world almost exclusively plays mobile games). “I beat the main game and didn’t spend a dime,” intone Serious Reviewers, thereby selling them to an audience some of whom will spend tens of thousands of dimes. Video games—and I say this as someone who loves games so, so much—have the capacity to wreak great harm on people’s lives. Obviously!
(This is a very interesting post about this topic: https://blog.joeyschutz.com/to-kill-a-dragon-video-games-and-addiction/. It’s a bit tricky, because I sort of think Schutz basically doesn’t like video games anymore—his previous post was about how gameplay loops are intrinsically bad; he argues that Celeste would have been better if it was an hour long—but I think his reading of the strange ambivalence of reviewers’ language of Balatro is useful, even though I think it’s not really a big problem that Balatro is really fun or whatever. It’s also funny because I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen cite Addiction by Design as though they’re the first ones to ever link it to video games. It’s a fantastic book and she was giving talks at the NYU Game Center like, a decade ago. But I’m just saying this because I’m guilty of the same thing.)
You might be wondering how you got here
This all bears directly on Hotline Miami because Hotline Miami is a game which deploys immersion and flow to straight-up blast the player’s brains into the ether. As I said, it’s mind-bogglingly intense. The game is about chaining together a mechanically exacting sequence of actions to take out a whole bunch of enemies who all kill you in one shot. You will die over and over again, but you respawn immediately. The scoring system is wonderful: you’re rewarded for speed and style; the combo mechanic in particular encourages a kind of play I, at least, never really indulged in before. It’s great!
Famously, though—and here’s the part people think is about violence—once you’re done with a level, the psychotically intense music cuts off and you’re left to wander back to your car through the carnage you’ve wrought. It’s a really brilliant touch. The whole thing feels so surreal and out of control: you receive a coded call from a stranger, go and do a bunch of murders, go get a pizza or whatever, then start it again.
What I thought about during those silences was not how I’d killed a bunch of people, because I hadn’t, and the game is so stylized it didn’t exactly feel like I had. What I thought about is how immersed I’d been. Say the lights come up and the music cuts off while you’re in the middle of dancing, your body in a strange position: what the hell was I doing? How’d I get so caught up in that? Where, during that time, did I—the self I think of as myself—go? This is why it’s such a smart design decision.
Ours, obviously, is a time of extremes. How strange is it that we talk about “binge watching” a show? When you’re just scrolling through your phone, looking at a bunch of bullshit you hate—that’s a kind of immersion, too, just like making a great painting or whatever is immersive. What is doom-scrolling if not a flow state?
Instead of attempting to forestall this capacity, as ascetic traditions and conservative societies have always done, modern technological capital attempts to capture and harvest it. Video games have an ambivalent relationship with this state, because video games are made for money, and the dominant mode of production, all the alienated labor and precarity, makes it pretty hard to have healthy fun.
Hotline Miami doesn’t have anything to say about murder, but it does have something to say about the line between healthy and unhealthy fun—a line which does not, in fact, exist; at least not for us, not now. It does an astounding job dropping you into one of the most exciting and visceral experiences of game immersion I’ve ever felt; then, when you “win,” it yanks you right out. It’s not shameful; the game isn’t chastising you, or calling you stupid for being into it. It wants to be a fun game to play, and it is. But it’s a fruitful thing to consider every now and again. Look what you did when you weren’t looking.