There is a violence to everyday living. It’s not a violence that’s always easy to see. After millions of years of evolution some members of our rapacious, horde-forming species - in part out of fear of other rapacious hordes - somehow managed to corral themselves within the confines of city walls. This can’t have been an easy transition - imagine trying to manage the behavior of even a small town’s worth of vicious, crafty, libidinous apes like us - and it did not come without the one-two punch of externally imposed violence, in the form of the law, and internal oppression, in the form of enforceable behavioral constraints - whether self-imposed or put in place by enforcers.The experiment, however mad, has turned out to be quite the success: cities, and the nation-states to which they’ve given birth, have flourished. However, as cities have grown larger, so too has the reservoir of repressed feelings, along with stricter and stricter self-regulation of behavior in the form of institutionalized education and vocational training for jobs that take hungry little primates and subject them to tedium, loneliness and profound alienation. All this, all while subject to powers - state, cultural and institutional - that lie far beyond their ken. Maybe, then, it should come as no surprise when individuals ‘snap.' We call them disgruntled, we call them deranged; we call it tragic, we call it stupid and pointless, and it is - but so, too, can be the experience of everyday life. And the one violence does not exist without the other.
This juxtaposition between the tedium of the everyday and the explosive violence of the alienated individuals lies at the heart of Hotline Miami, a game released in October of last year to appreciable critical fanfare. Hailed for its admixture of surreal retro-80’s audio-visuals, knuckle-whitening gameplay and more than a bit of what Alex DeLarge would have called ‘the old ultra-violence,’ it resurrects the genre not as a mummy, mute behind museum glass, but as a frightening, frenetic zombie stirred from an unquiet slumber by a potent cocktail of stimulants and hallucinogens. Its schizophrenic storytelling resembles Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with its anti-social, vigilante protagonist, and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive with its non-chronological progression, splitting perspectives and dream-like interludes. The stunning brutality of its gameplay is borrowed from the final of act of Refn’s Drive, which film is the game’s avowed primary source material.The player controls a socially isolated Miami apartment-dweller during the late 1980’s. Each day this unnamed protagonist - dubbed ‘Jacket’ by the game’s fans on account of his distinctive attire - wakes up and slogs out of his crummy bedroom into an equally crummy living room, where he finds his message machine sitting on a table next to his crummy couch. Each day he checks the machine, and each day the machine gives Jacket a directive, a seemingly innocuous request with an unsettling subtext - a babysitting job with ‘rascals’ in need of ‘discipline’ or a pest control job asking him to help out with ‘vermin problems’ - always with an address and the request that Jacket be ‘discreet.’ Each day he dutifully descends to street level, gets into his car (a DeLorean, what else?), and makes straight for the address indicated in the message. When he arrives at his destination he puts on one of his many rubber animal masks - sometimes it’s a rooster, sometimes a rabbit, sometimes a cruel-looking swine - breaks in and kills everyone he can find with any weapon he can lay his hands on. When he’s done, he gets back into his car and drives back home, though he always makes one more stop on the way - sometimes it’s at a convenience store, sometimes a pizza parlor, sometimes a video store, sometimes a bar - to grab a snack or a slice, a film or a drink. The bloody meat of the game always lies between slices of the wholly mundane.
The targets of Jacket’s murderous rampages are, invariably, an array of well-armed gangsters and criminal lowlifes - the worst kind of scum - as the newspaper clippings that accumulate in Jacket’s apartment day after day attest; yet the very fact that Jacket is collecting these clippings, records of his bloody-handed escapades, does little to assure one of his sanity, much less the ethical quality of his actions. Indeed, Jacket’s instability increases alongside his body count, and soon gruesome visions manifest even during the everyday interludes, spilled blood seeping like poison into the few spare oases that remain in his desolate existence. The events of the game as a whole are framed by hallucinatory interludes, highly reminiscent of the ‘Red Room’ sections of Twin Peaks and Fire, Walk With Me, where a tribunal of masked figures (in Jacket’s own masks, note) alternately interrogate and accost Jacket. They accuse him of amnesia, present him with riddles, and imply the guilt that must necessarily accompany the carnage he’s wrought. They are the keepers of his memory, the custodians of his shame.
The fractured plot - detailing the involutions of which would be both a spoiler and a headache - ends in the sewers, where leering custodial workers admit to making the ominous calls, directing the killings for their own amusement, as a way to combat boredom. If the masked figures are the punitive superego of the game, the custodial puppet masters are its sneering id, and both player and character are suspended in-between. Hotline Miami is a punishing game, one in which the slightest mistake leads to instant death, followed by a split-second resurrection, all too often ending in yet another swift death. This relentless repetition disciplines the player, much like the masked tribunal that berates Jacket. On the other hand, the underlying satisfaction of success - that grisly thrill of violence that underlies many video games - is embodied in the amoral custodials, for whom the violence in the game is just that: a game. Their satisfaction is that of the player, their motivations identical -- as is their sense of ethical culpability. Civilization bores and maddens the murderous monkey in us, and the United States of the 80’s is a true paragon of how burgeoning sensational (and sensationally violent) entertainment can be used to channel and contain the acrid cynicism and smoldering discontent of the era. The witchlit dimness of the arcade offered young people a phantasmagoria, giving them spectral enemies to mow down with spectral guns, an endless stream of virtual violence, all in the name of not getting bored, not becoming restless, not going crazy. That, and an endless stream of quarters.
Hotline Miami is about rage and helplessness, and the frighteningly violent reaction that is catalyzed when the two combine. It is the game of ‘snapping,’ of losing lucidity in neon repetition. While the game can and sometimes must be played methodically and with care, it’s ideal gameplay state is that of the psychotic break, the irrational, adrenal, maniacal assault. The teeth-clenching difficulty and jump-cut repetitions often push a player to the brink of frustration at the tedium of it, until finally they lash out in and at the game, which the game perversely rewards with extra points for "boldness" and the execution of "combos."
If this all seems disturbing, that’s because it is. Hotline Miami’s artfulness emerges from its bloody miasma, but - much like Spec Ops: The Line - can’t exist independent of it. The game gives this gruesome fantasy a traversable representation, an experience which is critical and thus - to my mind, at least - worthwhile. But this type of violence, this passage à l'acte of the alienated individual, is not the only violence of the everyday. Some such violences are much more subtle and systemic, and - just as Hotline Miami’s gameplay simulates its alluded mentality - that violence must be experienced and understood as such.
Lucas Pope’s latest game - Papers, Please - is incomplete as of this writing, still in the open beta phase of its production, but the game’s essential genius is already accessible. The game casts the player in the role of a border checkpoint guard in the fictional communist nation of Arstotzka, managing immigration through the partitioned city of Grestin, the eastern half of which was claimed after six years of open hostility with neighboring Kolechia. The player must navigate a growing web of rules and regulations, concerns and countermeasures, all in a climate of desperation and violence.
Described by its creator as a ‘dystopian document thriller’, Papers, Please is, on the level of gameplay, nothing like Hotline Miami. The game simulates the methodical grind of state bureaucracy, and rewards diligence, efficiency and thoroughness instead of reflexive, split-second thinking. While it is a game, and a challenging one at that, it would not be unfair to call it a ‘job simulator.’ Each day you read the newspaper, get up and walk to work, and do your job. Upon first playing, my feeling was that I ought to have gone to an orientation. I fumbled the rule book, mishandled the passports, got lost in information I often didn’t even need. I received two citations - without penalty, thankfully - but I processed so few applicants that I often went home with barely enough income to afford heat, food and shelter for my family.
The goal, then, is to process as many applicants as quickly and accurately as possible: enforce the rules, enforce them swiftly and without error, and then call up the next person in the line. Process enough people, and your family will be warm and well fed through the winter. If you dawdle or botch the job, your savings will dwindle and your family will sicken and starve. The incentive to do your job, and to do it well, is strong because the game enlists our sense of social and moral responsibility.So enlisted, that very sense is put to the test. Not only does the challenge of the job increase as numerous additional regulations and security concerns begin to populate your rule book, complicating your routine as soon as it’s been formed, but the player’s moral convictions are further tested in turn as circumstances develop and the border becomes more dangerous. Soon you are authorized - nay required - to perform searches, interrogations and arrests. Frequently situations that feel like moral exceptions - or ethical dilemmas - rear their heads, and the player must decide whether to enforce a rule or excuse an infraction, and the latter choice does not come without consequence. Each working day you get two citations without penalty. Each citation thereafter results in a fine, an expenditure your family can ill afford. Which cases are worthy of exception, in your eyes? For what values will you step out of line, and what are you really enforcing?
You will be asked to split up spouses, separate parents from children, turn away the transgendered because of a letter on piece of paper; you must scan and regulate bodies and behaviors, deciding values and valuations, all while you - yourself - are being regulated by the Ministry of Admissions, the people who call the shots and cut the checks. -I’m sorry ma’am, but this ticket isn’t valid. -Please, let me pass. My son is waiting. -Next. -You bastard. -Next, please. Deciding what matters, doing what is right, or doing what is safe, and deciding if there is a difference between the two. -There is a man behind me in the line. He’s following me. He’s going to hurt me. Please, don’t let him pass. Go ahead and tell yourself that this is just your job. Tell yourself that your family has to come first. Tell yourself that it’s what anyone else would do in your place. Finally, tell yourself it’s just a game. -I hope they pay you well for your obedience, dog.There is a violence to everyday living. It’s not a violence that’s always easy to see. It is worked into the fabric of our experience, going unglimpsed save in rare moments of perspective. Games, as framed experiences, provide the opportunity to realize such moments, to lay bare the sometime ugly truths of our day to day lives - or so I genuinely hope. Because this is the kind of alienation we do need: not alienation from the social universe, nor from any sense moral responsibility, but rather from the anesthetizing effects of routine and entertainment, habit and docility. Games can mystify, like phantasmagoria, but they can also reveal the mechanisms of complicity that subtly subdue and discreetly direct the very rage such regulation brings into being.____Phillip A. Lobo is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. His previous video game reviews for Open Letters can be found here.
