A few days ago, a trailer surfaced for a video game called Hitman: Absolution. In it, a suave-looking man called Agent 47 puts on a suit while a group of nuns walk down the road to his motel. The nuns then shed their clothes, appearing now in fetish gear and carrying a load of guns, which they use to destroy the motel Agent 47 is staying in. The camera - virtual, of course - leers at them, full of boob shots and slow-motion hip waggles, before Agent 47 emerges from the flames and kills them all. It’s incredibly stupid, misogynistic as hell and (hopefully) doesn’t represent the calibre of game that the Hitman franchise tends to present. It’s the basest-level advertising bullshit, the kind that appeals to men who think that it’s okay to hurt women, so long as they’re sexy.
This is all par for the course in video games, unfortunately. No form of media gets it right - female characters only really flourish (as a trend rather than the exception) in books, which have the advantage of centuries of development and experimentation over film, TV and games. Personally, I’m optimistic about the future of games - they’re a young format, and if you look at the infancy of film it tended more towards appealing to stupid people and less towards producing art-house classics. All of that came later, and while you still have big-budget silliness that panders to the status quo, there’s also a thriving industry that challenges commonly-held views (good and bad), and that’s great. Even better is that we tend to give awards to films that are good, rather than successful (with a few obvious exceptions).
These are all lessons that games have yet to learn. With the exception of independent-oriented ceremonies like the IGF, Game of the Year awards tend to reflect sales to a strong extent - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is by no means high art. The indie scene is starting to blur with mainstream stuff - games like Dear Esther are doing well for the first time, and bigger companies like Double Fine and inXile are crowdsourcing funds rather than having to conform to depressing marketing constraints imposed by distributors whose only interest is making money. But there’s a while to go before you can pick up any game and have it stand a reasonable chance of impressing you because it’s complex, or deep, or affecting in any way. Even in narrative-driven triple-A games, the stories have a tendency to be drivel that books and films could never get away with. I don’t want to scream about the ending of Mass Effect 3, because everyone else has done that, but it’s telling that a game like that received millions in funding, and they (apparently) were still sketching out the ending in the last few weeks.
I say all of this because video games also have some of the most ardent defenders, and not all of them are doing it for the right reasons. Video game criticism isn’t taken seriously in the sense that literary criticism is, because most games have to operate outside criticism to work. And this means that games get away with bullshit tactics like the trailer for Hitman: Absolution.
Penny Arcade, a website that started out (and continues as) a webcomic - which should give you an idea about the quality of their journalism - doesn’t have the best views on things like that trailer. This kind of makes sense - the creators also run a series of huge game conventions across the USA, and without developer interest they can’t function (and, presumably, profit). On Friday, Jerry Holkins said a few things, like this:
being mad at it is apparently a thing, a compulsory thing.
And:
Only a necrophile could be titillated by something like this: by the end, it literally defies the viewer to maintain an erection.
And:
I think that once a nun produces an RPG from her habit, we have passed through a kind of “veil” critically speaking.
And:
Nobody is going to approve of the entire continuum.
The post itself is a bit longer - you can read it here - but these four quotes betray a lot. Above, we’ve got four archetypal statements that betray what we might as well call “U Mad” philosophy - the idea that getting pissed off by idiocy is never useful. There are a few other posts like the one above, but they can all be boiled down to the above four, with varing degrees of extremity.
On the idea of compulsory rage, especially against something as silly as a trailer for a video game, I can empathise a lot. I am not a person who gets angry on the internet (for the most part), and tend to veer away from those who do. What’s more, I expect that someone like Holkins, who runs an incredibly successful website about video games and has courted controversy (by making fun of rape victims) in the past, probably received a ton of emails asking for some sort of comment. In the first paragraph of that post, he mentions that he initially ignored the trailer, dismissing it as nonsense, and that should be commended - in an ideal world, everyone would do that and trailers like this would be total marketing failures.
By the same token, like it or not, by profiting off the success of Penny Arcade, Holkins is in a position of influence, and while it might be going a little far to call it his “duty” to advise gamers to avoid bullshit like this, he certainly shouldn’t be defending it. Apathy is something that just is - you don’t take pride in it, and while you can address the problems in activist groups, writing off loud and angry people as a mob is insulting - almost as insulting as having that mob demand you join the fray.
Next: the “rape culture is decided by my boner” argument. Here’s something shocking: it isn’t. There is already a culture where women exist on a continuum between culturally inferior to men and totally objectified, even in the most advanced democracies, and no more so than in video games - it’s relatively easy to name ten well-defined male characters in big-budget productions off the cuff, and considerably less easy to do so with women (it’s entirely possible that there aren’t that many in video gaming history). You don’t need to get hard to know that rape culture exists, especially if you’re a good person (though no-one’s going to convince me that Holkins is a good person). We’re not all adolescent boys who salivate at the merest flash of a boob. But perpetuating the chastity myth - the idea that all nuns are really sex maniacs, and that really no always means yes - contributes to rape culture. It deprives women - or, let’s broaden this, anyone other than men - of agency and their own minds. It’s fucking stupid, and that trailer isn’t doing anything new. It isn’t creating the culture - it’s validating the people who already contribute to it on a daily basis, and that’s shitty.
The idea of work being exempt from criticism because it’s silly is just stupid. Having just completed a three-year course at a surprisingly forward-thinking university (we spent two weeks analysing The Walking Dead and Battlestar Galactica), I’ve learnt that nothing is exempt from criticism. Sure - the critical consensus can be “this is vapid, misogynist bullshit devoid of any real substance”, but it’s still a critical consensus. Pretty much anything is culture, and can be commented on, and trailers like this are very much in the public eye - it’s not the bathroom graffiti of a fourteen-year-old boy, so criticising it is fairly important. It sounds miserable, but without negative criticism, artists don’t learn from their mistakes. This crap ends up being perpetuated.
And all of this boils down to that last quote. Here’s the thing: there is a place for offensive material in any culture. There’s a reason why excellent novels like 1984 are banned in countries with established dictatorships - it’s because they challenge the status quo, and - in that case - do so in a good way. There’s also offensive work that doesn’t do that at all - people are still writing books about how it’d be a great idea to go over to Africa and colonise it all over again and tame the wild Um Bongo tribes and confiscate their spears, but it’s weird niche literature because most of us aren’t so horrifyingly racist.
The trailer for Hitman: Absolution has nearly 500,000 views in about 4 days - and that’s just from Youtube. It is not a niche product. And here’s where it differs from transgressive work: it’s offensive, and it also feeds into the status quo. For every person who’s disgusted by it, there are likely two or three who at the very least see nothing wrong with it. There is already a climate that writes off sexual assault as a lesser crime, that blames victims, where a single event that might require decades of therapy carries jail time of - on average - less than six years. Women are paid less, have a pathetically small voice in the media on the issues that matter to them most, and are trampled over by men. Not all men, sure - we’re all aware of the reverse victimisation process that certain men’s rights activists get locked into - but a proportion that’s big enough for it to feed into legislation and mass culture to a huge extent.
In that sense, the trailer for Hitman: Absolution might be seen as a gleeful celebration of everything that’s wrong with society’s view of women. And maybe that’s deserving of curiosity from an anthropological standpoint, but don’t defend it.
To crystallise it: yes, there’s no sense in getting angry at bad art. But getting angry at bad art when it’s hugely popular is more than okay. The more voices that say “shit like this isn’t good”, slowly drowning out the voices that bay for more, have the potential to feed into video games as a cultural medium and elevate it to something better. As long as there’s room for improvement, there’s value in criticism. It makes for better books, it allows for the diversion of funds to make great films, and it can do the same for video games if it’s given a chance.