took a break from the board because i got distracted by school. i still had time to play video games on occasion though. this is what i thought of two of those games. i also posted it on metafilter, but i wondered if anyone here would be interested in it. spoilers throughout.
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Games of the Year: Dishonored and Hotline Miami
Learning to Kill
I've recently been playing two games that are quite different upon first glance, and surprisingly similar with deeper inspection.
Dishonored is a big-budget title in a style that appears to be going out of fashion. A large, gorgeously detailed narrative where player choice is taken in to account. It's a fully realized three dimensional world that manages to blend narrative and gameplay in a way that is seldom seen with major studio titles. Dishonored isn't without its flaws, and I'll discuss those in time, but it's one of the best game experiences I've had in recent memory. It costs sixty dollars and comes from a pedigree of the best designers currently working in the industry.
The other game is Hotline Miami. Hotline is a throw-back both in terms of graphical style and setting. It's a two dimensional, 16 bit nightmare, with pixelated blood and jagged neon environments. The narrative is subtle, but powerful. Your choices in this game are how you kill, not whether or not you choose to. Just reading the description would normally make me dislike Hotline, and symbolize a lot of what I hate about the indie game 'scene'. In spite of this it's one of the best game experiences I've had in recent memory. It costs ten bucks and comes from an independent studio which has mostly produced free-ware one-shots.
So, on one hand, a brilliant, if flawed, continuation of the sort of games that I've loved for as long as I've been playing games. If I had to write down my dream game, it would likely be a bullet point list of Dishonored's major features. On the other hand, an insidiously good game which, by all rights, could be presented in a flash window on Kongregate. I didn't expect to love Hotline, and my feelings with it aren't easily classified as love, but it's one of the most arresting games I've played in a long while.
Once you get past the core mechanics, the narrative structure, the choice element, and the graphical representation the games have a striking number of similarities.
Corvo and Jacket Guy are both (mostly) that awkward combination of named protagonist and silent protagonist, not so different from Mario or Sonic. The player isn't exactly creating their own character, and the characters that they are projected in to are blank slates. Did Corvo love the empress? What sort of man is he? What is his history before he started butchering (or sedating) half the city of Dunwall? No real answers, beyond what the player provides through their choices, roleplays themselves, or receives subtle hints about through in-game texts.
How about Jacket Guy? What is his relationship to the girlfriend character? Is he murdering hundreds of Russians for money, fun, compulsion, insanity, or brainwashing? The game actively defies answering any of these questions because its perspective is unreliable. Even in Jacket Guy's sanest moments the game-space swirls vertiginously and hallucinations crop up routinely. So, similarity one: unknowable characters that the player commandeers to act out satisfyling visceral murders. That brings me to similarity two...
Killing is fun. True, you can play Dishonored as a pacifist (or, more likely, as a serial assaultant), and true, Hotline goes out of its way to make you squirm as you cave heads and create cavities where no cavity existed before, but that doesn't change the fact that I hurt a lot of people and had fun doing it in both games. In fact, I'd say it goes deeper: violence becomes a sort of puzzle. Both games pit a squishy main character against a hostile environment. Corvo will probably die if you try to medal-of-honor you way through the city square. Jacket Guy is just as vulnerable as any other character in the game, and it becomes necessary to think your way through any given situation. I think this is exactly why the violence in the games is fun. There are any number of ways to get through a problem in either game, and the act of devising a solution makes you feel ownership. When you blink to the top of a street-light, possess a town guard to send him through a gate of light, rewire the device to target your enemies, and then lure the remainder of the regiment to an ashy death you feel good, because that solution is uniquely yours. When you hit your stride with the soundtrack of Hotline (truly one of the best parts of the game, as an aside) smash the first two heads you come across, throw your bat at a gunman, stomp his face in, steal his gun, and turn around just in time to catch the remaining two guards with a well timed blast it feels good because first, you've probably died a lot to get to that point of perfection, and second because you've surmounted the odds with your wits and beaten the game with its own tricks. In addition to this both games (mostly Dishonored, but to a lesser extent Hotline) give you ownership over your blank-slate sociopath by way of limited RPG elements - you begin to appreciate not only what Blink or the tiger mask do, but how best to use them. You slowly gain mastership over a harsh and unforgiving system, especially as you replay levels to get those ever-tempting achievements. This is where the title of the essay comes from: both games are structured so that, in playing them, you learn to kill. You become better and better, getting incremental set-backs and rewards, and it feels good. But, in both games, the visceral thrill of spilling blood isn't given to you easily, that brings me to similarity three...
Zero Shades of Grey
Both games are cognizant of real-world morality, although the way that they approach morality is starkly different. Dishonored takes a very literal approach. Dishonored uses what is easily the strongest character in the game: the city of Dunwall. In the game's logic, the more corpses you create the more meat rats have to feast upon, and therefore the more readily they can breed and spread. The more you sow chaos by killing guards and providing sustenance for the plague the more chaotic your surroundings will become. This is a great idea, in theory, but in execution it falls short. Unfortunately this comes down to being not much more than the sort of good/bad dichotomy that makes me hate the Mass Effect series (choice 1: 'Yes, I'll save you from that robot', choice 2: 'Yes, I'll save you from that robot... for a price!'). In effect the difference is realized in the ending as you get the good one or the bad one depending on how much virtual blood you chose to spill. The game succeeds in making you think about your actions, and then fails to deliver on this promise.
Hotline, instead, offers you no such choice, but does remind you about what you're 'doing' in the game-space. At each act break you're interrogated by the phantoms in your head. The owl mask asks you, 'Do you like hurting people?' You realize, as your adrenaline pumps and your brutallity matches the beat of the dance music, that the answer is 'indeed I do!' The game mocks conventions of the genre. The secret ending is a funny little bit of nose thumbing at achievement hunting and secret finding (ironically something that Dishonored does well in a very straight-faced way). As the reality that you've been given a god's eye view to begins to break down, corpses talk to you, and they remind you that, for the good guy, you're not really that good. You kill because that's what you do in this sort of game, and you feel rewarded with increasing mastery, but the game never lets you feel entirely comfortable with what you’re doing. Unfortunately, since there is no option in the matter, this is as hollow as Dishonored's false choice.
'We're-revelling-in-violence-but-wait-maybe-that's-not-good' isn't exactly a novel narrative device, and you have to look no further than the obvious inspiration of Drive to find it. The homicidal misogyny of Patrick Bateman, the unflinching cruelty of Rorschach, and the gleeful slaughter of the boys in Funny Games (to name but a few of many) have commented on this phenomenon, and I would argue more effectively in each case.
This isn't to say that either game is a failure, since they are both excellent from a mechanical standpoint (that is to say they're both really fucking fun), but instead it's to suggest the following:
We're at a strange moment in the very brief history of video games. You can't go very far in any critical discussion of games without running in to the themes that both Dishonored and Hotline raise: can games be more than shallow and adolescent thrill rides? what else can we do in games except give a bloody power fantasy to the player? and is it even worth putting this much thought in to a pass-time? I can't claim to answer any of these questions. I have half-formed opinions on all of them, but I think that, as Ian Bogost suggests, what we're seeing is a period where games are becoming 'domesticated'. Just as movies were turned in to sitcoms, political ads, training films, high art and any number of the other devices we put motion pictures to today, we're seeing games begin to struggle through this same awkward adolescence. This brings me to my fourth similarity, something that both games do incredibly well...
A Tale of Two Cities
Aside from novel (if stunted) attempts at narrative maturity, and amazing gameplay mechanics the two games excel in another crucial way: atmosphere. Dunwall is amazing. Games like Skyrim try to present a living, breathing world by offering you a theme-park sized 'country', and their attempts look foolish compared to the fully realized world of whalers, weepers, tenements, mansions, masquerade balls, and squalor. The art assets, the modeling, the music, and the environmental design are beautifully realized. This is a place with history which feels as if it existed before you pressed start, and will exist after you delete it from your harddrive.
In a similar sense Hotline is able to represent a neon-tinged bizarro-Miami that is nothing short of amazing. The visceral blood splatters, the disorienting camera shifts, the strange tension between having godlike powers of killing and always being a single mistep from death. Hotline is a trip inside of a character’s mind that rivals the best sort of movies without falling back on eye-rolling mimickry of movies: set pieces where stuff explodes and everyone tells you how awesome you are. Ultimately it's a flawed experience, but it's still quite the ride.
Both games fully realize something that is ironically underused in game design: creation of a narrative through the act of play. Both of these experiences could be nothing BUT games - they are darkly beautiful embodied experiences where the player drives the action and is subsumed by the reality that has been crafted for them. The games are more than an idle test of reflexes, or a barely interactive mockery of a movie, instead they are a conversation with the game designers. That brings me to my final point...
In most books and movies the creator(s) tell you a story and you react to it. In a video game the designers set up any number of paths, and then let you engage in a strange post-modern sort of performance art where you create your own narrative. This is something that both of these games do well, and in doing so include my final similarity: very literal embodiments of the game designers…
If you're a homicidal asshole, then what does that make them?
Hotline has the janitor characters: stand-ins for the Dennaton design team. The voice on the answering machine is likely these two, and it represents a nice metaphor for the game designer. Here are these enemies. Kill them. Move on to the next level. The game asks you not only to question what sort of person willingly kills and enjoys it, but also what sort of person (or people) sets up a situation that requires this. You don't have a choice (beyond opting out of the game) to kill or not, but they had very real choices in what sort of game they designed.
In a similar fashion Dishonored has the character of the Outsider: a god of death and destruction who gives you the power to kill, and then checks in every so often to give you feedback on what you've done. Are you using his powers? Are you going for the abilities that let you incapacitate rather than kill? As you seek out the tokens that let you become a supernatural agent of death the Outsider will pop up to let you know (in the unfortunately awkward fashion of a man reading a checklist) his opinion on your actions.
In including the designer-character these are both games that are aware of themselves in some fashion. This is handled with varying levels of success, but it's an interesting feature, especially as it’ss repeated in both.
In short, Dishonhored and Hotline both succeed and fail in the same way. They both create amazing experiences where the player feels the narrative unfold through their actions. They both attempt a preachy morality tale which ultimately wrests control from the player to make a tired point. Still, that failure aside, they require attention beyond the typical 'pretty fun, good controls, 8.5' review. They force both players and designers to question what this medium is capable of, how it fails, and how it may be possible to move forward.
Gaming World Forums
I wrote a long-ass thing about Dishonored and Hotline Miami