I feel that I need to start this article with a disclaimer: I am not easily offended, especially when it comes to media and art. I believe that art, including video games, music, and movies, should be free to explore any area and any content that might cause controversy so that we can begin to discuss it and discover what it is that makes it controversial. It is one of the main purposes of art, in addition to providing entertainment and escapism. It allows us to deal with what scares us in a safe way.

So I don’t offend easily. Remember that after my next statement.

I completely agree with Valve’s decision to pull Hatred from the Steam Greenlight platform for reasons that “it was not something that they would publish on Steam.” Hatred, currently in development by Destructive Creations, is a game that puts you in the role of a mass murderer going on a shooting rampage. On the surface, it shares a lot of similarities with Postal and even Grand Theft Auto, which certainly allows this kind of behaviour (though it stops short of actively encouraging it). In fact, looking at Hatred, it seems to be a less stylized and ironic form of Postal.

I am not trying to make any sort of statement about violence in video games. It is the primary way that we interact with our virtual worlds at present and though that might change as indie developers find new and exciting ways to play. For the most part, violence is a vehicle for telling the story or for driving the game forward. Even as games have gotten more photorealistic, I haven’t felt that the violence was making any big impact either on myself any more than action films have made me jump out of windows and say witty one liners to my enemies before explosions.

My concern with Hatred is that it doesn’t bill itself as anything other than a mass murder simulator and seems to have a minimal plot or story behind its madness, so I struggle to justify its existence within my personal definition of art. Is it entertainment? I guess, in the same way that snuff films could technically be entertainment, but I don’t know anyone who would admit to watching them even if they were legal. Hatred doesn’t seem to want to do anything other than be violent for the sake of being violent. I doubt the team will go through the trouble to create a stylised world or to layer its violence with a sense of irony or satire that Rockstar does with GTA.

Is it escapism? Is that the kind of thing people want to escape into? I certainly don’t see the value of escaping into that sort of situation and I honestly would question anyone who said that they did. Escapism is the act of wanting to leave your current situation and exist in a different one. Fantasy games are escapism allowing you to be the big damn hero. GTA (I keep coming back to this one because it keeps getting bandied about as justifying Hatred’s existence) is escapism because it allows me to live a life I might have lived had I had a different moral core. Hatred, I would argue, is only escapism if you want to escape into the role of a gun-toting madman and I don’t think there is value in that sort of escape.

Now, the big question is does Hatred confront some sort of controversy? Certainly it is controversial. It’s a video game with guns so it will be controversial. However, what is the purpose of its controversy? What does it seek to teach us? That slaughtering innocent people is bad? Because I thought we’d agreed this. Was there a meeting I missed where this was questioned? I don’t anticipate learning any sort of lesson from this game other than some people are crazy. I already knew that.

Based on this, I don’t really see the need to protect Hatred as a piece of art. I think the developers are actually being irresponsible by creating it and Valve has been irresponsible for reversing their decision to pull the game. Already the message boards on the Steam Community for Hatred are filled to the brim with the worst kind of threads. People asking for real people (Gamergate victims, world leaders, religious groups) to be included. Others have asked for the option to include children and babies in the game (seriously guys?!). While there are people who seem to be level headed in their approach to the game, most seem to be people who simply want to slaughter virtual people for the sake of slaughter.

Hatred honestly isn’t art, but now that Gabe Newell has reversed his company’s decision to pull the game, reportedly with a personal email of apology to the developers, he has given them a sense that what they are doing is protected in the same way that art should be. He has given them a cry to rally around and legitimised the game as something that does belong on Steam.

Destructive Creations has every right to create this game, which I don’t doubt will cater to the kind of crowd they are trying to reach out to. I expect that they will find this crowd will be smaller than they expect it to be, that it is just a vocal minority that feels this provides either entertainment or escapism. I seldom hope that someone will fail because I’m not a terrible person, but I hope that Hatred is released to an underwhelming reception because that is what something like this deserves. I hope that we discover that the bulk of gamers aren’t into the ultraviolence advertised here and that, in fact, the number of people that this appeals to is very limited.

© 2014 – 2015, zero1gaming.com. All rights reserved. On republishing this article your must provide a link to this original post