'Hatred' trailer: Why this trailer frustrates me

Here's the trailer link. It's extremely violent. It's only a minute thirty or so, but it's very, very disturbing. Make sure little eyes and ears are far away.

Destructive Creations is a new developer, and this is their first game. They're using Unreal Engine 4, which is about the only thing I can say they've presented about their game I actually like. My gut reaction to this trailer was a deep feeling of sadness--at first, for the innocent characters being mercilessly slaughtered on screen. Second, that someone in the game industry saw fit to take many, many steps backward. The dark, edgy tone combined with the senseless murder reeks of a game trying too hard to make controversy without enough of a serious message to back it up.

This trailer, to be fair, did make me think. Of course, I was thinking about why I had such a strong negative reaction to it, and why I would never, ever buy or recommend this game. But it might be a valid argument to say I'm somewhat hypocritical for not wanting this game. After all, I've played many games that do some of the same things the trailer depicts. I've played dark toned games, I've played violent games where the violence itself was senseless, graphic, and brutal, I've played games where you were the villain and slaughtered innocent people. I've played games that were all three of those combined. So why does Hatred stick in my craw so darn much?

Let's see what the developers had to say about their game. I've bolded certain portions for emphasis, because they make it clear they had no idea what they wanted to do with this concept from the beginning.

"Hatred is an isometric shooter with disturbing atmosphere of mass killing, where player takes the role of a cold blood antagonist, who is full of hatred for humanity. It's a horror, but here YOU are the villain. Wander the outskirts of New York State, seek for victims on seven free-roam levels. Fight against law enforcement and take a journey into the antagonist's hateful mind. Gather equipment of the dead ‘human shields’ to spread Armageddon upon society. Destroy everything on your way of hunt and fight back when it's disturbed...

...just don't try this at home and don't take it too seriously, it's just a game. :)

The question you may ask is: why do they do this? These days, when a lot of games are heading to be polite, colorful, politically correct and trying to be some kind of higher art, rather than just an entertainment – we wanted to create something against trends. Something different, something that could give the player a pure, gaming pleasure. Herecomes our game, which takes no prisoners and makes no excuses. We say ‘yes, it is a game about killing people’ and the only reason of the antagonist doing that sick stuff is his deep-rooted hatred. Player has to ask himself what can push any human being to mass-murder. We provoke this question using new Unreal Engine 4, pushing its physics (or rather PhysX) systems to the limits and trying to make the visuals as good as possible. It's not a simple task, because of the game's non-linear structure and a lot of characters on the screen. But here at Destructive Creations, we are an experienced team and we know how to handle the challenge!"

Once this contradiction we saw in the trailer is enumerated, Hatred's primary problem suddenly becomes clear--the creators, and by extension the creation both suffer from cognitive dissonance. In simpler terms, they want to have their cake and eat it, too. 

Are we supposed to be relaxing and having fun blowing away a bunch of sprites without empathizing with them, or are we supposed to be going on a dark, serious journey through the mind of a disturbed individual? If it's the former, why make the characters cry and beg for their lives in carefully rendered detail--why try to stoke any empathy with them at all? Make them cartoonish sprites (Hotline Miami), make them say amusing things when they die (Saints Row 4), make it multiplayer so there's a sense that the character we're "killing" is just an avatar of a real person who isn't actually affected in any serious way. The bottom line is, keep reinforcing to the player that this is just a game, via the mechanics and tone of the game itself. When you're having the kind of fun these games are supposed to offer (it's called 'abnegation,' where you lose yourself in a simple, monotonous, but nevertheless entertaining activity to allow your brain to rest), heavy concepts should be shown the door.

But if instead, we're supposed to ask ourselves what can push any human being to mass-murder, then purposefully fun (remember: "pure, gaming pleasure") abnegative gameplay isn't the right tool for the job. Instead, the gameplay and settings could either be varied, allowing for many different opportunities to build on the character (see The Last of Us and Tomb Raider, which include differing gameplay elements and dynamic characters--a great combination!) or could be a purposefully boring slog (Spec Ops: The Line, or, on the more obscure indie side of things, Bunnies vs. Bunnies. I'm not kidding about that last one--it's a dead serious game about genocide. It's quite brilliant in execution. If you're up for that kind of experience, give it a shot) that forces the player to think about why someone would do something like that.

From both the trailer and the statement of the developers, Hatred is a game without any real direction.  Unlike many bad games that suffer from bad publisher practices, poor optimzation, bad writing--this game's entire concept was flawed from the beginning. I think it's fair to say not only is Hatred unlikely to be good, It's impossible for it to be good--it's taken two very separate directions at once.

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As a final side note, I'm incredibly confused that they seem to think games trying to become some kind of higher art is a bad thing, or something that ought to have a counterculture--like there needs to be something to bring games back from the precipice of snobbiness. First, making a fun, engaging game is an art form--there's a reason Chess or Shogi or Go have been around so long, and those have no narrative to speak of. They simply have deep and fascinating game mechanics. Second, why *wouldn't* you want it to become a higher art? I honestly hope and believe that someday we'll have video games that have the same mythic quality as the Iliad, the same mystique as the Mona Lisa, or the same grandeur as Notre Dame. I don't think it's foolish, immature, or shortsighted to think that won't be out of reach for humankind. I can't say there are video games like that now, but that says nothing about the genre itself--video games are only, by the most generous estimations, 67 years old. Think about that. How many other art forms--not in the general sense of art genres like romanticism or modernism, but literally entire new ways of expression--like music or sculpting or painting--are only that old? It has a lot of room to grow. That art form has grown, and not just because of technology--because of a growing heritage of games to build on. To demonstrate, here's a game about love. and here's a game about loneliness. In both games, everything is a square. (Okay, so Love has some lines and a circle at times, as well.)