You have to hand it to Polish studio, Destructive Creations – it set out to build a narrative of controversy and rebellion from the start, and it succeeded. In October 2014, the team released a ludicrous trailer for its isometric third-person shooter, Hatred. A gravel-voiced killer is pictured gathering an arsenal of weapons with which to embark on a murder spree, his motive a hate-filled contempt for society. “This is the time of vengeance and no life is worth saving,” he intones with an aggrandised misanthropy that doesn’t just sidle up to self-parody, but vaults the fence and charges in all guns blazing. And then we see in-game footage, and it’s basically Postal, a 1997 PC game in which the player controls an anonymous character on, yes, a psychopathic murder spree. That’s it. That’s what Hatred offers.

From there, the studio garnered a series of PR coups. Game sites rushed to reflect on the “controversy” of the trailer’s content; then the title was briefly removed from Steam Greenlight, essentially the peer review section of the world’s dominant PC games retail platform. Accusations of corporate censorship abounded, and later, Gabe Newell, chief executive of Steam developer Valve, publicly reinstated the title and apologised for its removal.

Now, Twitch, the world’s largest video game streaming platform, which allows players to share their screened experiences with a potential audience of over 50 million subscribers, has got involved. Earlier this week the service announced that users would not be allowed to broadcast content from games rated Adults Only (AO) by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), North America’s certification organisation for video games.

As Hatred was given an AO rating in January, and as the title is due for release on Steam on 1 June, it looks as though the ruling has been designed specifically to prevent people from streaming this particular title. AO ratings are, after all, extremely rare – only a handful of titles (including Manhunt 2, Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Director’s Cut and Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude Uncut and Uncensored) have been certified AO, and most of those more for sexual than violent content. Gratuitous violence usually edges into the Mature category.

An AO rating from the ESRB is usually commercial death for a video game. It means major US retailers won’t stock it and consoles like PlayStation and Xbox won’t allow it. But in the digital market, if the distribution platform is willing to stock it, it can garner a global audience. Which is what Hatred now has. When it was included on gaming community platform Steam Greenlight, it received 13,148 “yes” votes supporting its inclusion, a very high number for an unknown project.



But the galling thing about this game isn’t its content, which is ridiculously juvenile fantasy violence, but the ease with which Destructive Creations (even the studio name is a cheap gag), has been able to exploit the ongoing culture war between entrenched “hardcore” gamers and liberal critics. Witness the following oft-quoted statement from the studio website:



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.

It is so obviously laser-targeted at certain communities of gamers currently feeling marginalised and threatened as game developers broaden their horizons and explore new themes and audiences. It is the cynical appropriation and encapsulation of a million furious games forums comments about “social justice warriors” – feminists, white knights and beta males – ruining the industry by handwringing over sexist tropes and poor representation. Hatred presents itself as a cause, a flag to wave against the perceived over-politicisation of game content. Hatred is making a stand.

But a stand against what? Against a smattering of mainstream Triple A titles that have chosen to contextualise the violence they portray? A stand against small indie studios looking to explore the possibilities of games beyond the madding crowd of military shooters, sports sims and fantasy brawlers? A stand against cultural critics now examining games with the same lenses through which they have viewed movies and music for 50 years?

Hatred is not a rebellious game. It is an isometric third-person twin-stick shooter that adheres to the conventions of that ancient genre with obsequious rigidity. Its understanding of anarchy is a teenager’s bedroom delusion, a comedic supermarket sweep of deadbeat pulp horror cliches. It is the slasher film, the death metal band, of games – providing the same sort of production line viscerality to the kids who think Slipknot and the Saw movies are cool and transgressive. It is as dangerous and provocative as telling your mum you’ve brushed your teeth when you haven’t.

Of course, the rebellious kidults will find ways to stream themselves playing Hatred and laughingly stabbing passersby in the face; forums are already buzzing with alternative streaming platforms that don’t bar AO material. Perhaps Twitch should have just implemented a robust age-gate system – but then, of course, what it allows to be shown on its own platform is up to the company. It says it wants to create “a safe, welcoming, inclusive community” and feels that AO games – and perhaps Hatred in particular – have no place in that. It’s not censorship in any real sense of the word, although, as with Steam and its stranglehold on the PC gaming market, a case could be made that Twitch banishment amounts to a corporate restriction on creative freedom.

But really, Hatred is just a silly shooting game that seeks to tap dance between self-deprecating parody and pseudo-anarchic posturing so that it captures all sections, moods and arguing positions of its target demographic. Postal was here 18 years ago, Carmageddon before that, Death Race before that, all hoping to draw the same idolatrous response from the same sorts of alienated adolescents feeling frustrated, isolated and powerless at the world. Unlike Rockstar’s most controversial games, Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto, it has no obvious sense of cultural guile, no clear determination to explore the concept of player culpability. It’s just a game where you kill people. Being a games editor, it’s something I guess I have to think about, but unless you’re a tabloid writer with a very quiet news day, it doesn’t matter. As with the fury of its online proponents, we can let it slip away, like digital blood down a virtual drain.