DevWil

@bvilleneuve said:

@joachimo said:

For the record, the girl who 'moves in' and cleans your apartment is not just some random girlfriend, well.. she is, kind of. But the point is that you save her life from being a drug riddled hooker, and I guess as payment for taking care of her she cleans up the house.

I think this might bear some discussion, because that wasn't how I interpreted it. The way I see it is attached to the ending of the game, so don't read on unless you've finished all the chapters and put in the password.

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

So you're getting calls throughout, and they always come from PHONEHOM, but they always originate from those two nationalist dudes in the sewers. Aside from their ideology, they seem to just get some sick pleasure from seeing guys do what they want them to do. In the third chapter, what they want your guy to do is kill all the guys in the building and then save that girl. Their minds see that as good and just, and they don't understand on a metatextual level how problematic the "damsel in distress" character is.

But that's when the magic begins. With the usual damsel in distress, you get thanked (a kiss or something) and then you never see her again. But with this woman, you get none of that; rather, over the next couple chapters, you see her apparently deep in isolated thought (looking into the bathroom mirror, taking a bath), and then ultimately coming out but staying in the apartment. Over the next few chapters, things start getting tidier around the apartment. It's important to note that this isn't just saying "a woman's touch is needed here"--the apartment beforehand is in such a state that any human being would do the same bits of cleaning. So things get cleaned up, and then the other bed in the bedroom has sheets put on it, and then the beds get pushed together, and then she gets killed by another masked man. It's a really fantastic emotional arc.

You don't save that woman. You only give her the opportunity to save herself. Hotline Miami's nameless female character with hardly any dialogue is one of the best female characters ever in a video game. Hotline Miami is art.

Is this what you think I was ignoring?

Sorry, I see this as the domestication of a former damsel in distress. I don't like either part of that. The fact that "any human being would do the same bits of cleaning" doesn't change the fact that they (apparently) made a woman do it in this game... after being rescued by a man.

I'm not convinced that she's "saving herself" in any meaningful way, and it's not because I'm so invested in my perspective that I refuse to acknowledge any others. I'm simply and honestly not convinced.

Your interpretation is as legitimate as any, but I think you're being pretty creative.

But I'm working on second-hand information. I've acknowledged this from the beginning, so I humbly ask that folks calm down and not put words in my mouth.

@Akrid said:

@DevWil said:

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it. I'm not saying this is a generous deal, but it's a promise I'm willing to make. I don't want to pirate the game (I prefer to pay for media created by living people), but I'm not rewarding them for what I perceive to be a negative influence on culture. If it's not negative per se, it is at least disagreeable to me (obviously)... so my purchasing decision will follow that sentiment.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. You realize that someone else's 10 dollars is just as good as yours to the developer if they buy that for you, right? Furthermore, sorry to tell you but your review is really not that valuable.

I told you, play Norrland and you will not need to scam someone of 10 dollars to speak intelligently about this developer. You will see they are definitely way too smart a bunch of guys to be putting out Hotline Miami without some deeper meaning.

Then calm down and don't buy me a copy of the game. I'm honestly not offended, and I'm not expecting anybody to take me up on this.

I obviously really don't care to play it, but if someone is so sure that I need to that they're willing to buy it again, then I will accept a copy of the game and play it.

Even if I think Norrland is brilliant, it won't change anything about the actual content of Hotline Miami. Just because someone makes one good thing (or even many good things, as the case may be) doesn't mean they're incapable of making a thing that isn't so good.

@HarlechQuinn said:

@DevWil said:

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it. I'm not saying this is a generous deal, but it's a promise I'm willing to make. I don't want to pirate the game (I prefer to pay for media created by living people), but I'm not rewarding them for what I perceive to be a negative influence on culture. If it's not negative per se, it is at least disagreeable to me (obviously)... so my purchasing decision will follow that sentiment.

...So in the end this was just a gigantic ruse to get a free copy of the game on Steam. Well played sir, very well played!

I'm not new to this whole "Internet" thing. If I wanted to play a video game without paying for it, I know how to do that.@bvilleneuve said:

@DevWil said:

@jakob187 said:

Also, the chick in the game was about to get tortured and murdered (and possibly more, who knows) by some big fat black guy that I bucked three times with a shotgun before rescuing her. For all I know, she cleaned up the goddamn apartment as a thank you for saving her life. She never speaks, and it's all interpretive. By the way (***SPOILERS***), she ends up becoming your girlfriend at some point, gets murdered on your bathroom floor, and you go after and murder the people responsible for that.

Thanks for clearing up the specifics. In my opinion, you've proven my point(s) (and then some).

Wait a minute, are you seriously just ignoring everything I wrote about this very issue? I think you've somehow fundamentally misunderstood the idea of serious video game criticism. The point isn't to just scrabble around and find a reason to hate whatever's popular. It's to actually think deeply about video games, rather than just accepting (or rejecting) them at face value and then ignoring any opinions that criticize yours.

What you're doing is actually harmful to serious conversations about the medium of video games.

I'm acknowledging your comment. Let me look back at what you've said, because I'm honestly confused by your reaction.

@Voidoid said:

I agree with you on almost every point, and am mostly commenting just to add another voice of approval in the midst of this onslaught of childishly defensive over-reaction. You're brave to bring this discussion up on a forum like this. Like you I will not buy this game on account of its violence, even though the tactical puzzle action it offers, if moved to a more neutral or abstract setting, would absolutely intrigue me.

What I disagree with is something that others have already brought up: from the footage I've seen it does not at all seem like this game "glorifies" violence. To glorify is to portray as beautiful, virtuous or positive.

But why would we stop this critique of glorification once violence becomes "fun"? How is this not similar to portraying violence as "beautiful, virtuous or positive"? Do we not equate "fun" with "positive"?

If you take out the violence of the game, it ceases to be fun (or, at least, it ceases to be Hotline Miami). If the game isn't fun, most people would want nothing to do with it, yes? So I don't see what's so inappropriate about me saying that the game is, overall, glorifying violence and being praised for it. The little guilt trip postludes everyone keeps mentioning aren't convincing to me.

To those of you criticizing me for not playing the game... here's the problem: I don't want to do the part that you're supposed to feel bad for after you had been gleefully doing it for 15 minutes. And then do it again. And again.

Though I haven't played much of his work, I do have a general understanding of Cactus's aesthetic (and I respect him). However, that doesn't mean I can't question whether Hotline Miami is an overall positive for our medium or culture at large.

Again, I'm not going to apologize for taking games seriously. Media is important. It shapes who we are. Games aren't exempt, no matter how much you may want them to be.

@OppressiveStink said:

Hey everyone, this is copypasta from an article in Gamasutra. Except there, most people had enough sense to not reply to the topic.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DevinWilson/20121026/180284/Why_Hotline_Miami.php

I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to post my blog on two different websites if I want to. I don't have an exclusivity deal with Giant Bomb or Gamasutra, and it's the best way to get my ideas out there (as evidenced by the nearly 200 comments on this thread).

@jakob187 said:

Also, the chick in the game was about to get tortured and murdered (and possibly more, who knows) by some big fat black guy that I bucked three times with a shotgun before rescuing her. For all I know, she cleaned up the goddamn apartment as a thank you for saving her life. She never speaks, and it's all interpretive. By the way (***SPOILERS***), she ends up becoming your girlfriend at some point, gets murdered on your bathroom floor, and you go after and murder the people responsible for that.

Thanks for clearing up the specifics. In my opinion, you've proven my point(s) (and then some).

Whether or not I'm missing out by not playing this game is beside the point if, with every new bit of information about it, I'm more and more certain that I don't want to play it and that it's not good.

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it. I'm not saying this is a generous deal, but it's a promise I'm willing to make. I don't want to pirate the game (I prefer to pay for media created by living people), but I'm not rewarding them for what I perceive to be a negative influence on culture. If it's not negative per se, it is at least disagreeable to me (obviously)... so my purchasing decision will follow that sentiment.

Finally, as always, sorry if I'm not responding to anybody who would like me to, and thanks for reading/commenting. I appreciate it. I wouldn't have written this if I expected everybody to agree with me, but it is certainly encouraging that some folks at least see where I'm coming from.

@Sargus said:

@DevWil said:

Finally, movies and games aren't the same, and appealing to violent movies doesn't impress me anyway.

I have two questions:

1) Yeah, it's obvious that games aren't movies, but what differences between the mediums matter in this specific case? Is it the interactivity? What would make Hotline Miami "different" in terms of violence than Pulp Fiction?

2) Do you ever think that violence in more "high-brow" violent movies is justified? If not, then completely different arguments need to be made, and regardless I respect your opinion, even if I disagree. But if you think that movies should be able to get away with things that games shouldn't, I have to ask: Why? Because I think they're very comparable in many ways.

I personally think that, while glorifying violence is not something I promote and it's something that makes me uncomfortable (it's part of the reason I've never played the Manhunt games. They may have some merit, somewhere, but I just can't handle them), I think it can be done well and respectfully in both movies and games. If you disagree, that's OK, but I also think your rant disregards some of the "smarter" uses of violence as a storytelling or gameplay device.

I say this especially because, according to your profile, you play a lot of Counter Strike. To me, that seems like a more glorified version of violence than, say, Grand Theft Auto. Because at least in GTA the game acknowledges that you're doing crime and your character is not a good person. CS doesn't address that at all.

Yes, the fundamental difference between a game and a movie is the difference between doing and watching.

I think that violent content in games and other media can totally be justified.

But here's the thing with Hotline Miami: I think it'd be way more successful if it were just a short (like, 10 minutes or less) game in which you do some awful stuff to people and then are forced to reflect on it, and that's the entire arc of the game. However, the fact that the game asks you to do it over and over again (in the name of fun) really deflates any arguments for it being a strong commentary on violence. The reason people keep playing is for the violence, and most of the content really seems to be celebrating violence.

Regarding Counter-Strike... I played Global Offensive a lot when it first launched, but not so much lately. I see a couple of big differences between CS: GO and Hotline Miami: the former is multiplayer and the violence is much better contextualized, I think. In fact, I think CS: GO actually says some surprising things in its game mechanics. For instance, to play a complete match, you have to embody the roles of both terrorist and counter-terrorist, and I think that's actually very interesting. That's something people tend not to think about (and it's something a lot of people in this thread would discourage me from analyzing...).

In CS: GO, I sort of see through the violence into the play structure underneath, and I think a lot of other people do too. It's not exactly about "shooting people in the head", it's about clicking the left mouse button when my cursor is on the opponent's player model. It becomes much more abstract. The primary interaction of a CS: GO match is not "kill the other team". It's not even "destroy/protect the bomb site". It's "win more than half of the possible rounds" (so, win 16 rounds if the halves are 15 rounds each).

However, after playing CS: GO, I can notice myself feeling more irritable and agitated, even if I was playing well and winning. I'm not sure it's a healthy activity.

And I fully appreciate that there's an element of that kind of abstraction in Hotline Miami (many people have talked about the puzzle-like nature of the gameplay), but I don't think it gets away with it to the degree that a game like Counter-Strike can. There's so much attention to detail in modeling the gore and the game itself seems so gleeful about your homicidal ways. The violence never seems like a means to an end for me. It seems like an end in itself.

And, simply put, I think single-player games and multiplayer games are fundamentally different. In a game of Counter-Strike, anonymous as the interactions may be, you are arguably engaged in a social activity. Similarly, we can look at a chess match and say that the two players aren't at war with one another (despite chess's militaristic content), but rather they're simultaneously collaborating and competing. They both want a challenging experience, and they know they depend on the other player for that. A grand master wouldn't want to play against me, because he would win too easily.

On the other hand... I'm developing a strong distaste for single-player experiences, at least in the way they're typically designed.

This is going to sound like an exaggeration, but bear with me:

Most single-player computer games are about obsessively killing cartoon characters.

Am I really that far from the truth in saying that?

Is that really what we want to do with our time? For me, the answer is no, and I don't see the point in playing Hotline Miami if the main point is to get as many red pixels of blood out of as many animated characters as I can. The eeriness might very well be effective, but it's entirely secondary when considering the broader experience of playing the game (as far as I can tell).

And, while this isn't directly related to the rest of what I've written here:

I've read another review of the game since my original post. Eurogamer gave the game a 10/10, and I'm still left uncertain as to why it's good. Here are some excerpts:

"There is no time to think. There is no 'think'."

There's something to be said for gameplay becoming so intense that you're not actually thinking about it (flow, etc), but Tom Bramwell (who wrote the review) spends an awful lot of time actively refusing to actually analyze the game.

"...it's amazing slapstick fun. Stop thinking."

"I don't know why I like the Don - I haven't thought about it."

"It's not haunting or anything like that - this is a silly video game, right?"

This type of "criticism" is exactly what I'm embarrassed about. If a game is fun, we tend not to look at it any closer. If a game isn't fun, we tend not to look at it at all.

If all we want out of our games is for them to be viscerally pleasurable, then we might as well be drug addicts.

And, again, sorry if I'm not responding to anybody's criticism of my words. I'd really like to do so, but it becomes a bit unmanageable. Thanks again for reading and commenting.

Yuck. Apparently the simple version of the comment field doesn't save paragraph breaks. Sorry for the wall of text.

Most of you who are disagreeing with me are saying one of three things: 1. Don't take games seriously; they're just supposed to be fun. 2. Play the game and maybe you'll feel differently. 3. Movies are violent too. The second is the only disagreement I can entertain. However, it is a complete failure of both marketing and game criticism that I've read two reviews, watched a trailer, and watched a Quick Look and have the opposite impression that the game wants me to. Perhaps most importantly, you can't simply do something and say you're making fun of it. If Hotline Miami is satirizing violence, I don't see it. It seems like people are focusing their experience around how exciting it is to kill people in the game. Finally, movies and games aren't the same, and appealing to violent movies doesn't impress me anyway. Thanks to everybody who has responded, and I hope I cleared some things up. Sorry if I didn't answer your argument directly. This comment thread sort of blew up, and I'm typing this on a tablet, as I'm not home right now.

Quite simply: I’m baffled.

I haven’t played Hotline Miami. I’m not going to buy Hotline Miami. I’m not going to pirate the game, either. I have no interest in playing the game because I don’t see what there is about Hotline Miami that isn’t pure adolescent nonsense. Feel free to correct me on any details, but I’m not giving the developers of this game the time or money required to play it. I don’t feel bad about that. I have better things to do (including writing this).

I am quite literally embarrassed by the overwhelmingly positive response to this game. We keep talking about how video games are a young medium and how we’re eager for it to grow up. Then we see what is, as far as I can tell, a wholly immature work named Hotline Miami, and its ultraviolence and gore are greeted with the stereotypically uncritical responses of “Awesome!”.

I’ve read two reviews of the game, watched one trailer, and watched the Giant Bomb Quick Look of it. From this information, all I can gather is that it’s an unstable game about killing people. Oh, and it has music that some people seem to like.

And it might be somewhat anti-feminist judging from this line of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun review: “There’s even a strange vein of sweetness, as a female presence introduced into the player’s apartment in an early mission sees it gradually evolve from dingy cesspit to clean, decorated home.”

Yes. How sweet. A female presence cleaning and decorating a home. This is exactly the kind of representation of women that we want in games, right? No!

Are we ever going to get serious about representations of women? About making games that aren’t just blood-soaked murder simulators? Why is it okay that Hotline Miami's cover art has a scantily clad, unconscious woman who is ostensibly being rescued by the male protagonist? Why does Hotline Miami get a pass for being about nothing but killing other people, when everyone is reportedly sick of first-person shooters that do the same thing? It’s completely offensive to me, and I think we should all be ashamed of it.

Keep in mind that I am mostly criticizing the reaction to the game, which is why I’m so comfortable talking about it without having played it. When the Giant Bomb Quick Look ends with the sentiments “This game is awesome!” and “This game seems really great” based almost entirely on the game’s violence, this is exactly the problem with the discourse surrounding games. Why is killing a bunch of people great? We sound completely mad when we exclaim stuff like that!

I’m not even strictly opposed to killing or violence in games, mind you. I can appreciate it as a means to an end in a game. However, Hotline Miami is apparently nothing but a crass celebration of violence in itself, and I’m not into that at all. None of the coverage I’ve read has convinced me that it’s much more than that, and everyone seems to be transfixed by the amazing bloodstains you leave on the environment (even if blood can apparently spray through walls). I watched people play this game for more than 20 minutes, and I was still left with the impression that it’s simply about how great it is to kill people.

But apparently it’s fun. And if something’s fun, that means we don’t have to think about it. It means we shouldn’t criticize it beyond its ability to be fun or maybe “trippy” in its audio/visual components.

Knock it off, everybody. Stop making so many games that glorify violence and stop praising the developers who do it. And yes, if a game calls you a “winner” for being more violent than not, it’s glorifying violence. It’s not interesting anymore (if it ever was), and I swear it makes us look sociopathic (at best) for continuing to enjoy it. In the Polygon review of the game, Chris Plante praises the game by saying, “Playing Hotline Miami made me feel like an empowered homicidal maniac.”

What a unique, positive feeling for an action game to evoke!

Honestly, take any well-regarded single-player computer game about killing (and there are plenty to choose from), insert its title into the previous quote, and I think you have a perfect encapsulation of the general state of game criticism. It’s terrible, and it’s completely discouraging for me, personally.

Update, October 28th: I played Hotline Miami up through Part One. Don't feel any different, except I didn't think even it was fun as an action-puzzle-stealth kind of game. Really didn't feel like I had a good reason to be doing any of the things I was doing.

Update, October 29th: I've now been educated on the narrative arc of Hotline Miami. I stand by all of my previous arguments with one small qualifier: yes, it seems like the creators of the game tried to comment on this ultraviolence in the game itself. However, I sincerely think it's a case of them trying to have their cake (violence) and eat it (comment on it) too. I don't think the game's structure supports the kind of introspection that everyone is giving it credit for. The vast majority of the Hotline Miami experience seems to be killing people and/or pressing R to try killing these people again. The non-gameplay elements are not inconsequential, but they seem completely overwhelmed by the gameplay elements. My response to the gameplay was one of disgust and, both before and after playing, abstention.

Finally, let the record show that abstaining from gameplay is not the same as abstaining from completing a book or movie. This will likely be my last word on Hotline Miami. I quite honestly just have too much work to do to let a game I disapprove of consume my free time.

Thanks everybody for reading and/or participating, even if you aggressively disagreed with me.

“Let’s face it: Games, in general, suck.” Jason Rohrer said this in his wonderful “The Game Design of Art” article from 2008. Obviously, we haven’t faced it and such an indictment still rubs people the wrong way. Earlier this year, Taylor Clark wrote a portrait of Jon Blow that many saw as an ignorant slight against the medium they love so much. Though accusations of exaggerations in Clark’s writing may be valid, attacking the sentiment that provided the foundation for the piece is far less so. Still, the Twittersphere and such exploded when computer game fanatics (and ‘fanatic’ is certainly not an exaggeration in this case) defended the honor of their $60 murder simulators.

So, Clark followed it up with a piece called “Most Popular Video Games Are Dumb. Can We Stop Apologizing For Them Now?” Apparently the answer to this question is a resounding “no”.

“Dumb games are the modern-day rock music” by Jason Killingsworth makes no mention of Clark, but can not be read as anything but a response to his ideas. While he makes no clear attempt to say which band games should emulate, the artists he refers to are far from obscure. He tries to characterize games as having a spirit akin to the unbridled passion found in popular rock acts, and—while I hesitate to make such a direct comment—this is an utterly glib appreciation.

Most of the anti-establishment sentiment found in “impassioned” rock music is completely superficial. Bands that act like they refuse to follow the rules (punk bands specifically come to mind) actually adhere to well-defined conventions. Their musical structures and styles are not inventive, despite pretensions to the contrary. Tattoos, piercings, and wild hair become a standard-issue uniform for legitimacy. The lyrics and appearances of their performances become nothing more than hand-waving.

This is where I’m perfectly comfortable having violent games and rock music compared to one another. How many games have you played that can be summed up as, “You, the indispensable hero, must save the world from the moustache-twirling forces of evil, mostly by killing creatures who don’t look like you”? How many rock songs are just a predictable I-IV-V chord progression? If you consume either of these forms often enough with a critical eye, they become completely stale.

This isn’t to say that violence has absolutely no place in games, nor does aggression have no place in music. However, having a truly rebellious spirit doesn’t mean regurgitating conventions angrily with no further comment. It means creating something new because the existing paradigm doesn’t satisfy you. To draw upon my own musical tastes, Meshuggah (alongside groups like Cynic, Exivious, Animals as Leaders, and the like) exemplify this in a way I find particularly relevant to this discussion. Meshuggah is intelligent, violent music. They eschew traditional rhythmic patterns and incorporate jazz fusion flavors into a style that could superficially be disregarded as unsophisticated. Meshuggah’s regular homages to Allan Holdsworth are interesting in themselves, but you also need to take a look at what makes Allan Holdsworth so unique.

Allan Holdsworth didn’t originally want to be a guitarist. He wanted to be a saxophone player like John Coltrane. This is why his music is so original: he was influenced by something outside of the form he was working within. His guitar solos sound more like fluid saxophone runs than the clunky blues-rock rigmarole that is more recognizable as normal lead guitar playing.

The people who make and play games are often woefully ignorant of the culture outside of their own, leaving us with an echo chamber of game design conventions. If they’re not ignorant, they tend to cling to this idea that games aren’t art and, as such, should not take any cues from art. This may be the only reason that the “games as art” debate is worth pursuing at all, to convince people who like games that their medium does not exist in a vacuum. Somehow game aesthetics are something like a century behind the larger discussions about vital issues of representation and the like. Photorealism is still a concern in games, 140 years after Monet’s seminal Impression, soleil levant launched a tradition of visual art that allows itself to proceed outside of strictly photorealistic representation. In addition, we’ve learned nothing from Duchamp’s Fountain as a community. We refuse to acknowledge our medium as art, maybe because art isn’t fun to most people who like games.

I don’t want games to be rock music, unless we’re talking about something like Rush or Frank Zappa. These people legitimately had a passion for pushing boundaries, and not simply technological or financial ones. Killingsworth is right: computer games are an awful lot like rock music. They’re popular, commercial, uninteresting, and formulaic. Their participants objectify women and glorify addiction.

As Pippin Barr once said, “We need some Duchamping in game making.” When we lash out at people like Taylor Clark for wanting more out of a medium with so much untapped potential, it’s embarrassing. It’s not pompous to be tired of immature, derivative, kitschy wastes of time. It’s pompous to act like games couldn’t use every kick in the pants they can get.

after sorta picking out each riff on guitar, they're different enough that it's not a direct quote... but it's close enough to be a possible connection, i think.

So I was just playing a quick round of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and a musical phrase in Cammy's stage struck me as especially familiar after I hummed it to myself for a little while. After a few minutes of having the melody stuck in my head, I couldn't tell whether I was remembering a Super Street Fighter II riff or a Yellow Magic Orchestra riff.

Turns out I'm probably not crazy (well, not for this). Check it out:

Click here for the SFII phrase (cued up and everything).

Ditto, YMO.

(Embedding the videos wasn't working)

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a conscious tribute by whoever wrote Cammy's theme, as my understanding is Yellow Magic Orchestra had a big influence on Japanese video game music.

Even if it wasn't deliberate, it's not so insane to think this little riff snuck into the subconscious of the composer.