‘violence without passion is pointless, it’s like fucking without coming’

Poor pigs get a lot of unfair prejudice hurled at them. In reality, most pigs are gentle, social creatures, smart enough to recognise their own reflections, playful and curious enough to engage with simple video games. All they’d need to do is learn how to form reactive angry opinions about those games, and they’d immediately be on par with 90 percent of YouTube comment sections. But in the western archetypal lexicon, the image of the pig has been distorted into one of slovenly filth and insatiable greed; a symbol of obesity, of wallowing, grime encrusted sloth, of abused authority and unbridled capitalistic avarice.

The opening quote, from the five part comic series Dennaton released as promotion for Hotline Miami 2, is snorted through a rubber swine mask by the character Martin Brown, midway through a brutally visceral rampage through a monochrome suburbia. It’s drenched in poignant Yungian characterisation as far as edgy quips that stabby dudes in pig masks might come out with, but it might as well serve as a wider design mantra for Hotline Miami itself. Through myriad levels that give the disorientating impression of partaking in mass slaughter inside a rubix cube held under a strobe light, bookended by narrative sections that laugh manically at any attempts to arrange those cubes’ colours into anything resembling coherency, Hotline Miami is awash with the sort of sweaty euphoria usually reserved for coming up from a double drop. From every piercing synth line, every guttural bass hook, Hotline Miami exudes passion. But it’s a chemical passion, fickle as mood, and when it dies out, only the comedown remains. It’s those moments, dripping in ambient static background noise, staggering across crimson stained carpets and macabre totems of dismembered, disembowelled and otherwise disturbingly still bodies, that the player is given time to collect their thoughts.

Much has been theorised, explored and espoused about the nature of the realisations a player might have during those rare, quiet moments, but it generally comes down to one of two conclusions: Either Hotline Miami succeeds as a meta-commentary on videogame violence, or it doesn’t. Either making the violence engaging and fun is a necessary step in drawing the player in enough to shock them when the curtain gets pulled back, or the enjoyment to be found in every digital murder negates any wider messages about violence the game may be attempting to make.

The Affective Fallacy states that emotional reactions to an artwork aren’t a useful tool in discussing that work’s essential value; that such value judgements rely on vague subjectivity, muddying critical language through reliance on individual interpretations. Like any means of communication, the language of criticism relies on shared systems of meanings, and if these meanings change according to personal reactions, then no consensus can be reached, and thus no conclusions about the true merit of a work can be extrapolated.

This is, of course, big hairy pig balls. The armchair philosopher in me tells me that it’s heavily based in flawed ontological assumptions that statements of value can even exist devoid of personal feeling, and the poet, musician and recreational drug user in me is pretty much baffled by the assertion that objective statements about art can ever be made when we all, like, experience reality so differently, man. But I feel it’s a mode of thinking that’s creeping into the way we talk about games. The rabid search for deeper commentary somewhere underneath the neon tinted waves of the first Hotline Miami, and the critical rejection of a sequel that many viewed as failing to build on this player inserted allegory in a way that satisfied, exemplifies the resurgence of the affective fallacy’s bastard offspring, albeit cloaked in the guise of a call for elevation of theme and message in violent videogames. Ironically, this completely overlooks that the most poignant delivery mechanism of Hotline Miami‘s message is the visceral thrill and disorientating comedown of the gameplay itself.

For all the critical focus on being asked if we ‘enjoy hurting people’, as if this was the primary thematic take away from the first title, I found that the most affective take away moments were, well, the take away’s themselves. The morbid mundanity of picking up a pizza with the same pair of hands that so recently clutched a bloodied meat cleaver did little to elucidate a hazy narrative, but it did serve to recontextualise our own emotional and physical reactions to gameplay itself. The pure act of engagement with this staccato rhythm of manic adrenaline rush to sickening gut punch gameplay loop should have been enough to serve as meaning. Yet the vast majority of discussion surrounding Hotline Miami chose to set the supposed themes against the actual experience of playing the game, as if one was a sort of get-out-of-accusations-of-adolescence-free card for the other; the ‘high art’ commentary on violent games themselves somehow excusing the ‘low art’ thrill of mutilating hundreds of tiny pixelated Russian gangsters. But the violence was fucking fun and the art style was fucking awesome and the soundtrack was fucking euphoric, and the narcotic trance created by the convergence of these elements was absolutely necessary to immerse and engage to invoke any sort of emotional resonance to begin with.

That so much critical focus was poured on the narrative contextualisation for gameplay was, I feel, not missed by Dennaton themselves. Let’s look at the motivations for the central characters in Hotline Miami 2; We have an actor in a film about the events of the first game, some copycat killers inspired by the events of the first game, a writer researching the events of the first game, and various acts of revenge for the events of the first game. Even as the story sections of Hotline Miami 2 served to contextualise the disjointed narrative of the original, shedding light on traditional storytelling mechanisms like plot and character motivation, they overwhelmingly acted as commentary on whether such mechanisms were relevant to begin with. Even genuine attempts by the characters to subvert the violence of the gameplay loop – like the reporter characters non-lethal playstyle – can only ever act as reaction to, and pastiche of, an already concretely established modus operandi of player engagement. If, whilst playing as the reporter, the player does choose to put down an incapacitated enemy for good, they are immediately locked in to a potentially endless cycle of head crushing, button mashing psychosis, as if in bloody catharsis for being forced to uphold the veneer of moral respectability. You can almost hear the developers saying: Look, this is what the game is about, and any attempts to rationalise it as further commentary on itself is just skirting over the issue. You were having fun, don’t pretend you weren’t. If you didn’t want to re-enact the murders, you wouldn’t be here for the sequel.

‘violence without passion is pointless, it’s like fucking without coming’

Thing is though, fucking without coming can still be pretty enjoyable. If you only fuck to come, you’re working towards a moment, and not allowing yourself to become swept up in the experience. It’s turning something nuanced and vibrant and real into something utilitarian, much like a critical perspective that dismisses the more intangible emotional qualities of art in favour of a concrete message, like a puritan closing their eyes and thinking of god, like a critic waiting for the violence to be over so they can get to the thematic justification for it. Hotline Miami Curbstomps the affective fallacy by having a gameplay loop that acts as its own message, and to find out what it all meant, you only have to ask yourself how it made you feel.