We’re all used to a bit of tasteless violence in videogames. It happens all the time. We’re also used to attention-seeking trailers. The latest Hitman Absolution trailer, though, pairs gratuitous violence with sexualised imagery to create the most troubling piece of marketing material I think I’ve ever seen. It’s obviously designed to shock, but the effect isn’t thought-provoking or emotional – it leaves you feeling uncomfortable, mildly disgusted, and wondering what kind of warped conception Hitman’s marketing team has of what gamers want to see.

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If you’ve not seen Attack of the Nuns, it’s embedded below. Here’s a summary: Agent 47 strips off bloodstained clothing in a motel bathroom, redressing in his trademark crisp white shirt and red tie. Meanwhile, a group of women dressed as nuns marches from a schoolbus parked outside the motel. The camera focusses on their breasts, downturned faces, and high-heeled shoes, before focussing on the eyes of one of the women. They bring pistols, SMGs and a rocket launcher out from under their habits before stripping them off to reveal tightfitting, PVC-and-leather, bondage-reminiscent costume, heavy on the suspenders, crotch shots and sashaying walks. Agent 47, meanwhile, is putting clothes on, slipping a jacket over his shirt and pulling on his trademark black gloves.The barely-dressed nuns line up outside the motel and launch a rocket at it, kicking off an explicitly violent fight. Agent 47 strangles one of the women and punches her in the side of the head. He then shoots two more in the neck before another kicks him to the ground. When another tried to strangle him, he breaks her nose in slow motion. Another fights with him briefly before he hits he square in the face, batting another’s guns away before using the woman with the bloodied face as a human shield She absorbs bullets, and then Agent 47 shoots the final nun square in the forehead before she can fire a round at him. He then closes her dead eyes, and there’s a shot of him standing before a burning building. Intercut with all of this are slow-pans of his shining guns.This is difficult imagery. This would be difficult imagery even if it was tasteful. But it is not tasteful, it’s grotesque and tacky and actually quite dangerous. Let’s be clear here: the problem is not that Agent 47 is graphically murdering a group of women, though that’s pretty nasty. It’s that it fetishizes the violence and sexualises the women, drawing a clear line between sex and graphic violence that makes the trailer really distressing to watch, and leaves you questioning who the hell it’s designed to appeal to.Let’s break this down. The women in this trailer – let’s call them female assassins, for want of better information – are objectified from almost the first shot in which we see them. The typical innocence/sin imagery of a naughty nun is warped here to extreme proportions, providing a kind of obscene justification for the violence; as if, because they look like they do, they probably deserve to get taught a lesson, the slutty whores.It’s as if the marketing people figured out that showing Agent 47 brutalising a bunch of women would probably be a bit hard to stomach, so decided to dress them up as slutty nuns to… what, make it OK? What the hell? In the minds of the people behind this trailer, are we supposed to be more comfortable with watching these women being brutalised because they’re dressed like whores? What kind of message is that?What are you, the Straight Male Gamer to whom Hitman is primarily marketed, supposed to feel when you’re watching this trailer? Are you supposed to be turned on by the nuns, or the violence, or both? This is fetishizing violence – specifically, it’s fetishizing violence against women, which is just not a message you want to be associated with your video game.On top of all of that, it’s not remotely relevant to the game – Hitman is about a silent assassin, about plotting kills and assassinations and disappearing without a trace, not hand-to-hand fights and explosions. Even if, for some reason, none of this imagery bothers you, there’s no denying that it’s not representative of the game. It’s a grab for attention that misrepresents its source material. (Hitman Absolution looks great, by the way, and not remotely like anything in this trailer.)We’re always seeing sexualised women in video games. There’s also an established stereotype of the sexy ass-kicking femme fatale, clad in skintight clothing and experienced in dishing out death. You only need to look at any fighting or action game to find evidence of these rather depressing female character archetypes in action. But other games don’t fetishize their gruesome demise like this trailer does. They aren’t about how cool it looks to brutalise them.This isn’t the first time that Hitman’s marketing has courted this this uncomfortable synthesis of violence and sexualisation in search of attention, either. Remember these stomach-turning ads from Hitman: Blood Money, which were banned in several countries?Maybe you’re not grossly offended by this trailer. I wasn’t, the first time I saw it. The first time I saw it I just thought it was a bit gratuitous. But as soon as you think about it for more than a few minutes, it’s impossible to get away from the sheer moral and aesthetic unpleasantness of this imagery. There’s no context, no mitigating circumstances – this is violence-porn, put together to look cool. Is that what people think gamers find cool? Breaking the noses of women in suspenders in slow motion? This trailer panders to violence-worship and misogynistic desires that have nothing to do with the game, and that surely don’t exist in the minds of Hitman fans.Are we supposed to find this trailer appealing? If so, why? What is supposed to appeal to us about it – the violence, the sexy nuns, the slow-motion gun pans, the image of scantily clad women getting taught a brutal lesson? This isn’t cool. We shouldn’t shrug and accept this kind of marketing material as representative of what we, as gamers, want to see. Publishers need to stop these tactics. It’s not acceptable, and in the eyes of many, many people it does a lot more harm to Hitman Absolution’s image than good.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games team in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter