I was asked by a friend to give my thoughts about the upcoming release of the latest snuff-fest videogame, “Hatred”. Nate Ward, one of the founding members of the Inked Geek Studios, had approached me about this, asking me if I had seen the now-viral video supporting this game, explaining that its premise is that the avatar for the game is a suicidal man in a trench coat (to see him instantly evokes painful memories of Columbine, with Klebold and Harris in their self-aggrandized “Trench Coat Mafia”.) arming himself to the teeth with weapons before going on a murder rampage. The premise is: how much destruction can one man do before he’s taken down? And that’s it. Period. No damsel in distress, waiting to be saved by some fantasy hero. No protect the planet from an alien invasion. No true sense of adventure or uplifting accomplishment. Just murder.
You can see the red flags, can’t you? Sure you can.
Let’s just break down the history of gaming, shall we?
With the advent of the late 70s and early 80s video games (Atari, etc.) the world was offered a new form of entertainment/activity…one that nearly signaled the death of the boardgame as we know it. 8-bit technology allowed us to become a new kind of gladiator; a participant that was now capable of traveling through the far reaches of space in tiny, triangular rocket ships or race automobiles in high-stakes competition. Many of the early games were based on contests that required developed hand-eye coordination, with sports-based themes where you were your own adversary (Break-Out, Pong, etc.). They were fun, but offered limited thrills or elements of the fantastic like their role-playing-game cousins did with Dungeons and Dragons. Eventually, game creators began tapping into that same vein, and began developing games that contained fully-realized adventures.
Those early games relied heavily on what Joseph Campbell would have considered the mythology of The Quest, or The Hero’s Journey. Granted, in the early days, that quest was nothing more than how many pellets of food Pac Man could eat before the ghosts got him. Or protecting your planetary home base before the alien invasion destroyed you and the planet. Still, there was a palpable conflict of Good Vs. Evil, and the player was always on the side of Good. Mario, the barrel-jumping plumber, was forever a Knight from the Kingdom of Chivalry, forever trying to save the princess from crazed apes and hammer-throwing turtles. Dig Dug was a warrior in the name of nature, trying to preserve his garden from crop-destroying creatures. No matter what 8-bit avatar suited you, you were constantly trying to reach a specific goal or destination, and the baddies of the videogame world were trying to stop you.
There was always an element of violence and death involved. For every quarter you pumped into a machine, you were given 3 lives, and the game didn’t end until all those lives were destroyed. You had somebody dropping barrels on you. Or shooting laser beams. Or trying to eat you. But the violence was always cartoonish and goofy, and never left you feeling anything deeper than a level of frustration. Even the sports related games like Karate Champ or Punch-Out were devised as nothing more than contests, and were not meant to suggest that you wanted to kill your opponent. The thing was, in those old arcade games, the violence was justified. If you shot or attacked an opponent, it was for the sake of self-preservation. And, it was consistent with the metaphor of standing up to those that would bully you. There was actually a sense of empowerment in cannibalizing the ghosts in Pac Man or blasting away alien creatures and rogue villains. For a lot of people (including myself), many of those old games were cathartic and uplifting. Sometimes, a videogame was the best quarter ever spent.
And that is the key to the enjoyment of videogames: They take you from the realm of voyeur to that of the active participant. They place you deep into that fantasy world, and give you the chance of being the hero you’d always dreamed of being. It’s fun. It’s empowering. And it’s often addictive.
The paradigm of the gaming world changed sometime around the release of the game “Doom”. This one is a shoot-em-up game where you are put into first-person perspective and soldiering through a maze of rooms and corridors where other people are hunting you down and trying to kill you. This game harkened the elevation in realistically portrayed violence, and sought to place you in the adrenaline-soaked world of the combat situation. You were still the “good guy”, but the goal of The Quest was diminished. Your primary incentive was, basically, to stay alive. In short, the creators were removing the goal (the conclusion of The Quest) for the sake of amping up the realism of the game. When they started doing that, the notion of Good Vs. Evil slowly became muddied. After all, war is based on a conflict where both sides believe they are fighting on the side of Good.
Jump cut to the present, where game creators in Europe are about to unleash “Hatred”.
I was asked to give my opinion on the game, and days after seeing the video clip and reading the article, I’m still on the fence as to how I feel about it. On the surface, I’m absolutely fucking appalled. Knowing full well that the purpose of videogames is to make the switch from voyeur to participant, one immediately disconnects videogames with the world of books and movies. The latter two also remain in the realm of the fantastic, and we can easily find bonds of empathy and emulation, but they also contain plot and conflict and resolution at the end of the story. The Quest is almost always fully realized, and the notions of Good Vs. Evil are always fully established. “Hatred” seems to run counter to everything within the paradigm of The Quest. There is no “Good” or “Evil”. There is no morality. There is no compassion. There exists only violence and mayhem.
Beyond that, there are human beings who are going to want to be participants, who are already frothing at the mouth, saying, “shut up and take my money!” as they wait for the game to be released.
I’ve never hidden the fact that I detest guns and am constantly advocating for better legislation. Right now, our society is on the crux of an epidemic of gun violence, and from a younger generation that is sorely lacking in parental attention and guidance, and believe the only way to find resolution to conflict is through violence first. On the same day that I watched the video premiere for “Hatred”, a school in Washington became the latest battleground for violent assault. Childhood is the LAST place where the concepts of “Good” and “Evil” should blur and become muddied. And the underlying question behind “Hatred” (or any other violent game) and its backlash becomes “Are violent videogames part of the problem?”
When Disneyland first opened their Pirates of the Caribbean attraction for its shakedown phase (its operation solely for the purpose of inspectors making sure the ride is safe and fit for the general public), there was an enormous fiasco concerning one particular scene of the ride. The scene where the port village has been set ablaze by the ruthless cut-throats was done so realistically that the fire inspector had to red-flag the ride, claiming that if there was ever a REAL fire, firefighters wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and that was extremely dangerous. I think this notion segues perfectly with a great deal of what makes “Hatred” so problematic. Getting past the weakly defined goals of the game, you’re still left with the perverse nature of just how graphic and realistic the violence is portrayed. For me, in the video, when you get to the killer pushing his gun into the mouth of his victim (a woman who is pleading for her life) and pulls the trigger, my gut reaction was “This is obscene. This is too over-the-top. I can’t believe I’m watching this.”
Which makes me a hypocrite. And that is exactly what the game’s creator wanted. That’s his selling point for “Hatred.” He insists that it’s time for the world to take violence seriously again, and dammit-to-hell, he has a point. After all, as a writer and as a fan of horror movies, nothing that happens in this videogame is something that I haven’t seen before. Murder, torture, bloodshed. Even in my own stories, I’ve come up with some pretty gruesome, nasty shit. But if I may say so, we’re back to the notion where that violence is somehow justified, that it plays a pivotal role in the story I’m trying to tell. I have a responsibility to maintain a sense of honesty and fairness, though. I’m not going to create a character whose sole purpose of existence is to kill as many people as possible. Characters need motivation. They need backstory. The violence somehow NEEDS to be justified. And the reader needs to understand that they remain a voyeur only as the story unfolds. The story is NEVER about the reader, and the reader should NEVER take away anything from the story that leaves them feeling they are required to do anything further than putting the book down.
As a writer and book lover, I have a compulsion to fight against censorship, and that fight almost demands total commitment. There is no “halfway” in that battle; you can’t pick and choose which titles should be allowed or banned. It’s either all or nothing, because you’re arguing fundamental concepts. I find myself (horribly) defending the right of the makers of “Hatred” to create and release their game unto the public. They have the First Amendment to fall back on (which he does, even though this right is really secondary to that of his Right to Make Money), and game fans have a right to buy and play it if they so choose. Plain and simple. But just because they HAVE that right, that doesn’t make it RIGHT.
We can argue all day long that there are damaged, fragile people out there in this world; the kind that will eventually snap like a dry cracker and assault their school. We can also argue that even without video games to help muddy their conscience, they’ll find some other trigger to set them off. These kids are already time bombs waiting to blow up, and will probably find inspiration waiting for them in comic books, movies, and music. They are just dying to make that crossover, from voyeur to participant, and that is the reality we need to fix.
We need to stop blaming the games and start examining ourselves and our families. We need to worry less if “Hatred” is going to actually go up for sale here in America, and worry more as to why the kids in our nation would want to play it in the first place. If you don’t like the games that are available now, start learning how to create your own games; the ones where “Good” is still “Good” and “Evil” is still “Evil”, and your Quest is one that you can discern pride and satisfaction from.
Trying to ban games like “Hatred” is a losing battle, especially when the war is really about saving the conscience and lives of our children.
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