New Indie Video Game Allows You to Play as a Mass Murdering Psychopath

For at least two generations we’ve seen a significant rise in the violent content of our entertainment. I think the real turning point happened with films like Arthur Penn’s [amazon text=Bonnie and Clyde&asin=B0010YVCI4], and Sam Peckinpah’s [amazon text=The Wild Bunch&asin=B0045HCJTO]. For the first time, the American public was exposed to films that not only told their stories from the perspective of outlaws and villains, but portrayed unprecedented levels of blood and violence. Gone were the days of black and white morality tales and bad guys dying bloodless deaths at the hands of the protagonist. A new era of entertainment had arrived, and it was dark, brooding, and bloody.

At the time this was considered a revolutionary act on the part of filmmakers. With the Vietnam War in full swing, they wanted to show the public what violence was really like. They needed to see that in the real world when someone is shot, they don’t just groan and keel over like they’re having a heart attack. Real violence is horrific, and it should make you wince even if the victim deserves it.

Unfortunately, what started as an attempt to portray reality quickly turned into just another cash grabbing gimmick. It turns out that violence is pretty addictive. We’re a species whose origins are mired in bloodshed. We’re built for fighting on a biological level, so seeing it portrayed in any form of entertainment hits all the right buttons in our brains.

So over the years this bloody entertainment has slowly but surely saturated every form of media from comic books, to TV shows and even the news (which I would argue is in fact, a form of entertainment) . And like any addiction, over time you need more and more of it if you want to scratch that itch. It’s got to be over the top. There needs to be decapitation, disembowelment, and fountains of blood. You have to keep pushing the limits.

Of course, this trend isn’t just found in movies, but video games as well. Every new leap forward in processing power and graphics, means there has to be more gore. Games like [amazon text=Doom&asin=B0002IBEJQ] (1993), which was a popular target for the media after the Columbine shooting, looks downright sterile compared to modern video games. The public’s backlash towards violent games continues to this day, and probably reached its peak with [amazon text=Grand Theft Auto&asin=B00D493JZ2], a game which allows you to rob and kill everyone from cops to prostitutes, if you’re so inclined.

But now it appears that video game violence is finally reaching its inevitable peak of vapid nihilism and senseless gore, with the release of a 3rd person shooting game by the name of Hatred. In it, you play a psychopathic killer who goes on a rampage to kill as many people as possible. And that’s pretty much it. Here’s the trailer for the game if you have a particularly strong stomach. Personally I can’t watch it more than once, and I was almost too embarrassed to include it in this article. It is definitely not appropriate for kids, and is extremely crude and violent, so you’ve been warned.

Granted, there are already plenty of games like this. It seems like almost every video game now involves the player taking the role of character who has to slaughter his way through thousands of opponents to achieve victory. What makes this different is that there isn’t a shred of context. We don’t know this character’s name, or why he has decided to kill everyone. He just hates the human race for no reason in particular. I’m not even sure if you can “win” this game in the traditional sense. Do you get points for killing people? What is the point?

The game only has one thing going for it. Honesty. In a recent interview with Vice, one of the developers of the game had this to say:

Are you worried that Hatred will be used by people who already dislike games as evidence that they’re all about senseless violence?

No, we are not worried, because there is no evidence that games are the cause of violence. Electronic games have existed on the market only for around 30 years in a commercial form. A huge amount of violence has already been shown in TV, movies and books, and I don’t think that games with a proper parental control can cause any harm. Violence has been present in human history since the beginning, and it has always had social, psychological, political or religious roots. It never came from computer games.

Your creative director has said that your game is more “honest” than other action games because it doesn’t pretend that it isn’t about killing. But isn’t the real difference that your game is built around indiscriminate slaughter, while other action games at least try to discourage it? You can kill civilians in Assassin’s Creed, for example, but you’re penalised for doing so.

Any killing game is about violence. It doesn’t matter if you try to justify it by a twist in the storyline, because you are still killing to reach a certain goal. Killing is always wrong. We show with Hatred how killing can be cruel; we did not justify anything about [it] – this is our honesty.

It doesn’t give any excuses. It doesn’t dress up the killing behind some kind of storyline or morality. You’re not killing these people because you need to save the world or to survive like in most games. You’re doing it because you can. It’s giving a certain segment of the video game community exactly what it wants. Just go out and kill a bunch of people.

And that’s the most frightening aspect of the game. For years, many of us were convinced that video games can cause violent tendencies in their players. But the truth is far worse, and can be seen in every other form of entertainment today. Most of us love violence, so long as it is within the comforts of our own homes and has no consequences for us in the real world. Movies and video games don’t cause violence. They’re violent because that’s exactly what we want. They wouldn’t be this way if we didn’t pay to experience it.

And for that reason, the developers of Hatred should win the gold medal in tragic irony. For all their efforts strip away the false morality that is found in most video games, and exists as nothing more than an excuse to kill a lot of digital people, all they’ve done is dress their product in another falsehood. This isn’t some political or philosophical statement on the nature of humanity. It’s a shameless cash grab designed to exploit our basest instincts. It’s nothing more than an appeal to our wallets, and the lizard part of our brain. Read the full interview and try to tell me otherwise.

Hatred is just another signpost on the road towards cultural oblivion. Acts of real world violence may have diminished significantly in modern times compared to our ancient ancestors, but the urge to kill hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just been channeled into harmless distractions like movies and video games.

It makes me wonder, when our society finally collapses under the weight of debt, bureaucracy, and war; when the lights finally go out and our population can no longer find an outlet for their increasingly violent tendencies with an endless stream of gory entertainment, will the true face of our fellow humans be revealed? Will the crazies take to the streets and into our homes?

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