Age of the Geek

"Hatred" isn't even worth hating
 
     Two shooting games were recently released.
     One is Nintendo’s “Splatoon,” a game where you play a humanoid squid child in a series of perpetual paintball battles against other humanoid squid children. It’s a lot of fun.
     The other is “Hatred,” a game where you play an unrepentant mass shooter out to cause as much human misery as possible.
     Guess which one has received more attention.
     By all accounts, “Hatred” is an utterly unremarkable twin stick shooter. Graphically, it’s pretty enough but nothing to write home about. From a gameplay standpoint, none of its mechanics particularly stand out. Mechanically there are dozens of games out there that do the same thing it does, but with zombies or geometric shapes rather than people.
     It’s just not that interesting a game.
     What is interesting is how the industry has reacted to it.
     When “Hatred” was announced back in October, Valve initially refused to distribute the game on Steam based purely on the announcement trailer. This move sparked a controversy all its own, until Valve owner Gabe Newell overturned the decision and apologized to the developer. Ironically, Valve’s attempt to shut the game out of the PC market all but ensured it would sell far more copies than it would rightfully deserve.
     In January, “Hatred” received an “Adults Only” rating from the ESRB, making it the third game in history to receive an AO rating based purely on violent content. An interesting decision considering games with far more graphic violence have gotten through with a less serious “Mature” rating.
     Finally, days before the gaming media received their review copies, Twitch.tv adjusted their streaming policy, banning any AO rated game, in a transparent move to prevent the streaming of “Hatred” on its service. This is in spite of the fact that Twitch already has age-gates to keep underage users away from mature content. (Not that Twitch would ever go through the trouble of verifying a users actual age.)
     All of this would probably cause one to think that “Hatred” is possessed by some kind of supernatural entity. That it’s filled with such graphic violence and gore that it would drive mad any mind that wasn’t already deranged. A game that appeals to only the deepest and darkest fantasies.
     The reality, and this may be the most entertaining thing about the game, is that the violence isn’t even that bad. Even the over-the-top premise that inspired this mass pushback is barely worthy of note.
     Yes, you play a murderous sociopath out for the blood of the innocent, but you’ll find nothing in “Hatred” that you can’t find in other socially acceptable games. Mass slaughter of innocent civilians? The “Rampage” franchise is all about cartoony monsters causing as much Godzilla-like destruction as possible. Graphic violence? The gore in “Hatred” is downright subdued compared to “Mortal Kombat.” Were the enemies Nazis or other “bad guys,” nobody would blink an eye. Playing as an unrepentant killer? That’s hardly a big deal considering games like “Assassin’s Creed” and “Grand Theft Auto” are among the industry’s biggest franchises.
     The only time any of these games even flirted with an AO rating was when “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” left a sexually explicit mini-game buried in the game’s code. Because running over people with stolen cars is fine, so long as the criminal is celibate.
     The ironic part is that all of this outrage is a response to what amounts to little more than a handful of cheesy lines of dialogue in between stages. Once the game actually begins, there isn’t much to distinguish it from any other game of its kind.
     I’d almost call it a bait-and-switch.
     All of the handwringing over this game and it barely delivers on its own premise. From what I’ve seen, the game isn’t horrifying or shocking. It’s mostly just boring.
     It seems that, more than anything else, “Hatred” has been a test for the video game industry. And the industry failed.
     In a world where “The Human Centipede” can be watched on Netflix, the video game industry has completely overreacted to a game that should have quietly passed into obscurity.
     Of course, it’s entirely likely that this was by design. Thanks to the Streisand Effect, the developers of “Hatred” will make a tidy profit from all the additional publicity the game has received from people shouting from the rooftops about how nobody should be exposed to it. That you’re reading about the game in this column shows how effective a tactic it is.
     And thanks to this success, it’s all but guaranteed that somebody else will try the same thing, pushing the boundary even further. The campaign to shut this game down has only facilitated more of its kind.
     If the gaming industry wants to present itself as a mature medium, it needs to stop trying to shut down these kind of games and learn to just accept them and direct their attention to more deserving titles. Like “Splatoon.”
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is neither a squid nor a kid, but enjoys “Splatoon” nonetheless.