Um... I haven't played Hotline Miami but I've seen videos. The violence appears to be over-the-top, cartoony and border-line ridiculous. Is that a fair assessment?
Yes, but it's not a barrier from all criticism.
Article said:
The woman in this game was exoticised by her tokenism. No male character in this scenario was singled out for rape. It has made my safe space – where I am a powerful thug who isn’t accountable to anyone – no longer safe. I have been forced to identify with the one person the game has given no agency. My agency has been removed not only from Pig Butcher, but agency was never given to the woman I now identify with – not even AI. Your arsenal has expanded. Hotline Miami manages to convey seediness well in two dimensions. The colour palette’s the same, too.
....
Pig Butcher drops his trousers, and the director at the side of the screen yells “cut”. “Pig Man, well done, but don’t be afraid to be rougher. And you there, blondie – you need to work on your femininity. Act more helpless and scared. You know, more girly.”
But this framing comes too late. Hotline Miami 2 has already used her for shock and power. Videogame women don’t get very many other roles to play but the helpless damsel. I played the rest of the excellently constructed murder simulator demo in silence, and left feeling uncertain of why I was so upset. It was because I was manipulated.
I think this is the most interesting part of the article, and also the most important. The scene in question is absolutely meant to be shocking, and is supposed to speak more about the depravity of the characters and situation you are stuck in rather than being about a cheap thrill.
At least, I'd hope. The problem is that, on paper, this is actually quite a powerful scene; there's a film out right now that actually has a very similar conceit in its trailer. You should check it out, it's called The Act of Killing. In the film, actors are directed by real warlords in a film about their conquests, and scenes of horrific violence are punctuated by the happy (or otherwise emotionally distant) warlords as they end the scene and talk to their actors. It's surreal, uncomfortable, and shocking. It does not make me feel good.
Cara Ellison makes similar remarks about the Hotline Miami sequence.
it starts to make me feel incredibly hypocritical: you liked the violence, I think. You liked, as the game says, hurting people. Why do you feel ugly now, for playing a game where your character rapes a woman? It isn’t even graphic, but implied.
This is a pretty complex emotion for a video game to evoke, especially intentionally. Lots of games butcher their portrayals of women in distress on accident; Hotline Miami appears to be doing it with laser-accurate purpose. This scene is supposed to be horrifying and conflicting. This is territory - not the subject matter per se, but the emotional weight and internal reflection - that books, films, music, and practically all other art forms occupy on the regular, but video games still have trouble with.
Still, there's a reason video games don't offer this sort of conflict often. For one thing, video games are interactive and are typically built around rewarding the player for doing, which makes things like rape scenes an even tougher sell than they would be in a film. Second of all, there's the undeniable fact that video game writers are immensely stupid. Video games are stupid. The best written video games are lauded for having merely competent stories, because the people writing them did their best to stretch their knowledge of Robert McKee's
Story to fit a twelve hour experience instead of a two hour one. Video games, for the most part, have terrible stories told by semi-competent writers, and any attempt to approach an actually difficult topic is typically handled with the grace of a man with two literal hams for hands. Video game writing sucks.
Hotline Miami's writing sucks, too, which makes this scene feel even more out of left field. The pieces are all there - in my brain I think this is
supposed to be a scene about the way women are treated in this gangland culture, this is
supposed to be a commentary on violence in video games, this is
supposed to bring player agency into question - but at the same time, the scene doesn't work for me. I watch it and think "this is tasteless." This is the same team that gave us a nonsensical ripoff of Drive last year, where every character spoke in spooky, edgy one-liners that sound like they belong in straight-to-DVD Boondock Saints sequels.
So... yeah. I understand what they were trying to do with this scene. I think. I hope, at the very least. That's the problem; Hotline Miami is not a unified artistic statement. This scene feels like a squeamish semicolon between more video game levels. I wouldn't tell them "this scene needs to go," but I think they should be prepared for more negative reactions like PC Gamer's. They should probably at least revisit the scene. They should probably think about whether Hotline Miami is really an appropriate venue for such show-stopping commentary, or if they're just trying to be developer punks who don't give a fuck. Cara Ellison is not the only person who is going to feel like shit because of this scene. And that's okay - not all art has to make people feel good. It's alright to look at a game/film/book's subject matter and think "this is not a safe space for me." But is that what the Hotline Miami devs want a good chunk of their audience to do? Do they have something truly interesting to say, or is this just a throwaway scene that'll make people feel like shit?
