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1.the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.
Yesterday there was a lot of buzz about the trailer for the new game, Hatred, by indie developer Destructive Creations and most of it seemed to be around the violence portrayed in the gameplay trailer and more specifically, the targets of said violence. The victims appear to be civilians and police officers and it depicts the player character inserting guns into their mouths, pulling the trigger and in stunning detail, ending their “lives” at very close range. One female victim even begs for her life before the killer pulls the trigger. There are also several shots of the player character running around with automatic weapons, shooting into crowds.
It’s intense, and disturbing for sure.
Our very own Kevin Pourmostofi wrote up his thoughts yesterday asking, “have video games crossed the line?” To which I ask, “whose line are we talking about?” Everyone has their limits of what they find acceptable and if they are talking about what they personally find acceptable in art, I respect that. However, when the question extends beyond the individual and starts reaching out to what others should or shouldn’t find acceptable, that is where I have a problem and where my line is crossed.
For better or worse, Hatred is a work of art and all art should absolutely exist. Art needs to exist. Art should push boundaries and make people reflect on themselves and as a society as a whole. When we start damning art for pushing said boundaries because we aren’t comfortable with what it’s doing, we tread a very dangerous line. It should never be up to us to dictate what is good for other people when it comes to art, and Hatred, no matter how reprehensible people might feel it is, has every right to exist and it should exist.
Art, in all its forms – music, paintings, literature, poetry, film, has always pushed the boundaries and there has always been a societal push back. There was a time when Elvis was deemed vulgar by pundits because of hip swiveling, when Rock and Roll was considered the Devil’s music but the religious right, when Siskel and Ebert launched a campaign against slasher films because they felt they were misogynistic (never mind that their number one target, Friday the 13th, not only had an equal number of men and women in the film that were “killed,” but also had a female heroine and villain). I can literally fill up 2000 words with examples of art critics and society have found to be nothing but trash, but as the saying goes, “one man’s trash, is another man’s treasure.” Even art created for shock value has the word “value” in the term.
Yes, I am well aware that video games are under an incredible amount of scrutiny in particular because of violence and threats of violence, but people just seem to forget that every form of art has gone through this when it becomes popular. Video games will survive this just like every other art form has in the past and will do so by allowing games like Hatred to exist. The moment we start deciding what is and isn’t acceptable for anyone other than ourselves, is when the freedoms we have will start to slowly be staved until all that’s left is Tetris, if we’re lucky.
The bottom line is, we can’t say “games are art” and expect to be taken seriously if we start condemning other works of arts because they push the boundaries of what we’re comfortable with and “cross” arbitrary lines. We have to take the good with the bad here, folks.
Yup. My thoughts exactly.
Thanks for reading!
Well put. And I wholeheartedly agree. Something I didn’t mention in my earlier comment, back on kevin’s post, is the value of the experience over the presentation.
You touch lightly on it here and it sparked a thought…
Basicly what I mean is that even if Hatred, or any other game for that matter, is overly violent just for being violent that would still not necessarily make it a one sided experience.
I am sorry, thats not really clear, let me try to rephrase. There is a value in experiencing something you yourself deem to cross your personal “line”. It’s about pushing your own emotional boundaries just to see how that makes you feel. I really think there are a lot of value there, both from a self reflecting point and a philosophical point.
There are lots of different ways to experience art and there is a lot of different directions one might take their own art, but one thing that a lot of artists and art critics usually agree on. Well not always, but very often, is that art is supposed to make you feel something. Something does not mean good, or sad or anything that maybe you would deem socially acceptable. It just means something, it can be anything really. And to me one of the biggest values with presenting art in an overly violent form as we assume Hatred will do, is that it’s pushing you out of your comfort zone, to a place where you will feel something different. Something you probably have never experienced and hopefully never will.
To come up with a couple of examples I would like to use the tv-series “Dexter” and IO Interactives “Kane & Lynch: Dead Man” from 2007.
I am not necessarily saying that these are compareable examples to “Hatred”, but both of these do something that I found extremely interesting in how I percieved what was presented. What they have in common is that they both try to make you identify and feel for someone you most likely would dislike or even hate in real life.
My personal experience with “Dexter” was very interesting to myself. I remember watching the first season and after the very first episode I had a really hard time going back to it. First off Dexter disgusted me, he scared me, and I wondered if I would be able to watch the rest of the series. I endured and what I found was that the more I watched it, the more I could identify with him even to the point that by the end of the series you are rooting for him. “Dexter” is special in the fact that they try to make Dexter himself into a hero. And to try to make it socially acceptable they wrote him as a character without morals, but with a code that makes sure that he only targets “evil” people. His code is continually tested and even broken, but by that point even we the viewers, or at least I, justified it.
“Kane & Lynch: Dead Men” was similar in that it had two main characters that were convicted murderers killing “good” people for their own gain. What “Kane & Lynch” did to make you identify with them was of course to give the characters a very “human” reason for doing what they did. In this case they were trying to save Kane’s daughter and this justifies it even to the point of being, at least somewhat widely, accepted in society today. Now “Kane & Lynch: Dead Men” was never a great game, but I have always defended it for this very fact. It made me feel something different and I found it very interesting to identify with someone I personally did not like at the start of the experience.
What the developers think “Hatred” will convey might be something entirely different, but that doesn’t really matter. Because if while playing hatred, if all you can feel is disgust and you never identify with the character, then that would be something new aswell. Something neither “Dexter” nor “Kane & Lynch” ultimately managed to do. And in the end the intentions of the developers doesn’t “really” matter in the big picture. Because art will always be a personal experience and different people will experience different things. Thats kind of the beauty about it.
Now this is becoming way too long. I just like to give out examples when I try to describe my personal feelings. Sorry for the wal of text. Just felt like chiming in.
No way. I love it! Wanna write for us? I’m only half kidding.
I agree, art is supposed to make us feel something, no matter what that feeling is. It should also make us think. And I have personally spent the better part of the last 24 hours defending this game’s right to exist as art, which, ironically, the people that are damning this are having a palpable reaction which is what art is, so they’ve already made this successful.
I’m also half-serious about writing for us. 😉
I might half-interested in that actually.
Depends how serious you are though 😛
And I guess what that entails.
No man. I’m serious. Follow me on Twitter @N2NOther and I’ll get you details.
It won’t be Tetris. That’s a soviet game made for brainwashing murica.