Jinan's Puzzle Nook

Do You Like Hurting Other People?

No, not especially :)

I just saw the trailer for War Fantasy and, among a smorgasbord of excellent themes I'm excited to see it explore (taking notes from Spec Ops: The Line is a great start) there were a few moments that felt like they were exploring a theme I'd seen before and found lacking.

Hotline Miami is a fantastic game famous for a lot of things, but up there is definitely the question: "Do you like hurting other people?"

Now, surprisingly for someone who really likes games which make me think, I will often approach videogames with more of a vibes-based mindset. If I'm playing an obsessive character who will stop at nothing to achieve a morally ambiguous goal, I will happily embody that character and pursue said goal and then allow the exploration of that obsession to wash over me as the game progresses.1

So when I was asked this question, I didn't really think of it as a question to actually answer. It was a rhetorical device, a question almost seductive in its implications, made titillating by its obvious application to the player rather than their character.

Part of that isn't just because I was playing a videogame though. It was also because, well, it's kind of a silly question?

I don't enjoy hurting other people. All my worst shames are from hurting other people. I have only ever been able to bring myself to hurt other people when dissociating in a fugue state due to overstimulation. I don't think I have ever desired for another human being to be hurt, even ones who have personally and gleefully visited hurt upon me. If you gave me a button which gives me a million dollars and hits a stranger in the leg with a golf club, I would put good odds on me being unable to hit the button.

All of that is intuitive to me. The suggestion I could enjoy bringing physical pain to others is so laughably absurd it immediately enters the realm of fiction. Could I be convinced there was some part of me which, when pushed to a limit, would want to hurt someone? Absolutely. Is it mildly interesting to ask whether enjoying violent media says anything about you, and was that untrodden ground for Hotline Miami to explore when it released? Certainly.

But retrospectively Hotline Miami's question, at least to me, always boiled down to one of two interpretations:

Combat is Physical, and Physicality is King

As easy as it would be for a worried parent to see violence in media as incitation to satanic activity, violence is really well suited to simulation and competition.

The reason almost every competitive videogame is a sport or a fight is because those things are really easy to model and to intuitively reason about as a player. Abstractions like Hit Points, Accuracy %'s, fighters moving themselves and their opponents in space, these are very intuitive metaphors to comprehend with obvious implications for emergent gameplay.

Games trying to model things that exist in a more social, emotional or intellectual space tend to end up struggling to generate this kind of immersive experience without falling back on the intuitive metaphors of physicality2, and many simply fail to capture emergent gameplay at all.3

Even games which shirk the shackles of violence love the emergent and intuitive nature of physicality: factory builders and Zachlike puzzlers love convoluted solutions caused by space constraints, parkour platformers and Mosa Lina love physics-based mobility enhancements, and organisational/cleaning games rely on the emergent chaos of junk accumulating in physical space.

It's really difficult to find abstractions which can compete with the beast that is physicality on both the level of player intuition and ease of digital implementation. It even works excellently on a narrative level, because...

Combat is Conflict, and Conflict is Good Storytelling

I'll keep this brief, but it's well established that conflict is an effective means for raising narrative stakes, driving tension and revealing new dimensions to characters we wouldn't otherwise get the chance to explore.

Combat, in addition to being all of those things, is easy to picture when described to you, flashy and engaging when shown to you, and threatens the very real possibility of character death, one of the most dramatic conclusions you can have to a character's story.

I never read or watched Game of Thrones, but for a show that I gather is 90% political intrigue I would have to say that 90% of its cultural impact was people losing their minds over the Red Wedding. All the abstract political, social and emotional consequences of every other action in that show were dwarfed by "What if a bunch of important people died?".

I think the appeal of physical conflict is naturally apparent in the debates people endlessly rehash on the internet. It's never "Could Professor Layton find the Zodiac Killer before Monk?", it's always "Could Batman beat Superman in a fight?".4

Combat can even do a better job at telling stories than stories do. Monty Oum's fight scenes in RWBY famously do a better job of characterising the cast than rest of the show ever does, and it gets to do that all the while looking really, really cool.

I do not like hurting other people

I've only scratched the surface of the myriad ways "hurting other people" is a really effective tool in the hands of any artist, and a very compelling subject for the appreciation of any viewer. And none of those reasons relied on ideas like "Real life violence is awesome and human beings love killing each other" or "You secretly have a suppressed love of violence and enjoy having an outlet for it".

If anything, we can look to reality to prove this to us. The military doesn't get its soldiers to listen to heavy metal, play Warhammer and hold Call of Duty tournaments to help them manifest the killing machines they always were, deep down. Military training is a gauntlet of dehumanisation, unlearning every critical instinct you might have, getting deeply propagandised on the lack of humanity within your enemy, all performed under the pressure cooker of high intensity exercise and ruthless aggression from authority. I would almost go as far as to say you could never turn someone into a soldier on videogames alone, they are simply consumed in too comfortable of an environment to completely hollow out someone's brain like that.5

With that in mind, I think the most obvious lines of enquiry Hotline Miami's question might lead you down end up with relatively mundane answers which seem to conflict with the tone that question gets presented in. Personally, I think this is the destiny of many similar questions: to be exciting and provocative but ultimately not warrant concern of any kind.

I'd even argue that there is a hidden fear the persistence these questions reveal.

...But do you like hurting other people?

We seem to care immensely as a culture what the things we like say about us, and about others. Connoisseurs consider the masses tasteless and tacky, the masses consider connoisseurs pretentious and elitist. Fandoms relentlessly fight over their superiority. Everyone is chomping at the bit for an excuse to say that the media they don't like isn't just not to their taste, but that that taste was a deliberate a noble choice not shared by the degenerates who choose differently.6

Introspection is awesome, actually, but I fear that most of the time when we seriously ask "Why does this make me feel this way?" or "Why do I enjoy this?" we can discover surprising causative answers ("I feel stressed when my partner expresses affection because I can't imagine someone sincerely likes me that much") which we then compulsively interpret through a judgemental lens ("I don't trust my partner despite their consistent trustworthiness, which makes me a bad person"), even though the answer is usually "Chemicals in your brain which make no judgement about your character made you stressed".

Most of the preferences we have actually say shockingly little about us on some fundamental, moral level, but pretending they do is such an easy gateway to the satisfying realisation that your taste is due to your earned superiority while others is due to their lazy moral degradation.

Hotline Miami, through this lens, isn't asking you to meditate upon your relationship with violence. It's an accusation: "Do you realise you enjoy hurting other people?". I've never played Wrong Number, it's actually banned in Australia (in an ironic twist), but from what I've read Dennaton do seem deeply judgemental of their players. A video-essay I watched long ago pointed out how different characters appear intended to represent different demographics of the audience of Hotline Miami, and frankly some of the depictions are not flattering.

Is that attitude healthy? Or are the ideas from this game ones anyone would immediately dismiss if it weren't in a brutal, artsy, neon action game?

But all art simply provokes the mind to ponder

You might intuit, after all this, that I consider Dennaton to be harsh, antisocial critics. That I consider Hotline Miami to be an artistically shallow demonstration of Poe's Law. But I don't think any of that.

Hotline Miami is art, and Dennaton are artists.7 They explore their themes sincerely and - despite how obvious I've always found the answers to the questions they pose - good art is not built from ideas you agree with but themes well executed. The thoughts I've fleshed out here have been ruminating in my brain for years after playing Hotline Miami, and I appreciate it for its ability to provoke that.

But the results of that introspection and analysis do not lend themselves to a newcomer in the marketplace of ideas trying to rehash a concept I've already thoroughly explored. Especially one which, for all the interesting analysis it provoked me to do, seems ultimately more encouraging of fearmongering and judgemental attitudes than the conclusions I reached.

So I hope War Fantasy doesn't just rehash these themes but instead expands upon those ideas to bring some powerful new insight to the table. I'm excited to see what the result is when it releases.

  1. I suspect this is a common way people interact with videogames, which is why games like The Last of Us and Lisa: The Painful work so well. You embody a character whose motive you're sympathetic enough to to feel comfortable helping them chase their obsession, and then the game shows you the natural result of that character doing that, which resonates hard because you feel like you were that character.↩

  2. On the intellectual side, think puzzle games like the upcoming Order of the Sinking Star, where every abstract idea (a block which causes you to lose the game if it is next to one of several other blocks) is presented as a more compelling physical metaphor (a goblin will kill your heroes if they get within range). Alternatively, a game in the Shadowrun series where hacking is literally grid based combat in cyberspace. On the emotional side, picture something like Darkest Dungeon's sanity mechanics, where Stress is basically a second, more fragile healthbar, emergently interacting with the other combat mechanics.↩

  3. It's difficult to name a single game which manages to make social interaction have emergent properties without having to manually author an absurd amount of content (looking at you, Scarlet Hollow), which is why games with a social emphasis tend to secretly do their best silently negate player choice.↩

  4. I'm being a little cheeky here. Plenty of people find both of those questions equally uncompelling. But for every example you can give of the masses or a microcommunity going absolutely wild for something purely intellectual, social, emotional or political (chess competitions and reality TV come to mind), there is too many other cultural obsessions which rely on the physical to count↩

  5. I've heard of someone who played a lot of videogames, went mad, and shot up their school. The leading theory at the time was that their PC did this to them, not through the games they played, but through Cabin Fever. Lights constantly flickering in your periphery is one of the causes of Cabin Fever, and the theory was that the lights in his PC, sitting next to him while he was gaming, was what caused his mental state. I have no idea if this theory is true, and I can't even verify this was a real story, but it is personally amusing to imagine that human sensitivity to changes in peripheral brightness is a more effective way to use someone's PC to make them a killer than violent videogames are.↩

  6. Not to get political, but you can see how this manifests in our current high-judgement social environment pretty easily. Exercise for the reader: can you think of any harmless preferences someone might have, indulging in which might have major social or legal consequences? There may be more than those that immediately come to mind!↩

  7. Though perhaps not the most phenomenal game developers (this is less of a diss and more me really wanting an excuse to share this absurdly detailed document)↩

#Game Design #Musings