Thank you, that does make sense.
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what a week for consolidation of power
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i have mixed feelings about parts of shenmue ii but watching a friend finish it recently reminded me that the last 3 hours are the greatest ending of any videogame in the history of the medium
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i kind of get the lynch comparison people make in regards to hotline but like… maybe only in the way that some of lynch’s visual concepts have just been disseminated throughout media in general.
there’s definitely influence in the visuals but the overall structure and tone reminded me a lot more of the dreamy sense of chronological dissociation that characterizes say like, Chantal Akerman’s narrative films or My Own Private Idaho, or especially of something like Confessions/Kokuhaku (really excellent/retraumatizing movie) which builds it’s thematic connective tissue through revisitation and gradual layering of contexts similar to what hotline 2 is doing. i honestly really can’t think of a feature film of lynch’s i’ve seen thus far that i thought was as focused as hotline 2 and i want to clarify i mean that more as criticism of him as a director than as praise of hotline 2.
(totally pointless aside but i really can’t stand a lot of what i’ve seen of lynch’s live action work. there are parts of twin peaks season 3 i like but for the most part i find that for a surrealist he swings for the cheap seats a LOT and the concepts he’s trying to play w/ come off as really banal the way his camera gawks at them, he actually directs really similarly to lloyd kaufman for my money lol. the only stuff hes produced that really feels like it has a pulse to me are like, The Angriest Dog In The World and Rabbits which i actually like a lot lol.)
the ikiki thing is interesting, i actually first heard about how hotline recapitulates his work through some post launch prototype stream the developers did on the shudder devolver channel where they talked about the energy ikiki’s games were trying to capture, i think i had heard of his work prior to that point but that was one of the first times i had seen like, a visual demonstration of his design ideas at the same time people were discussing them, it was a little cool to see that lede get unburied.
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I found Hotline Miami’s relationship with violence rather unusual in the space of videogames. HM1 obviously glamorizes violence but… it often asks the player why they enjoy it, after every level there’s this silent hangover period / walk of shame back to the car, and at the end the devs self insert to kind of mock the player for trying to retroactively find a plot justification for it. (And if you go through all the steps they offer a ludicrous anticlimactic explanation instead)
It was saying to me: videogames offer flimsy hypocritical justifications to let the player enjoy violence / power fantasies, which are inherently wrong, but it’s all very fun so why not indulge? It’s an extremely edgy message that I don’t really align with, but it doesn’t try to avoid making the player uncomfortable and it’s a stark contrast to the ubiquitous sanitized violence of most videogames
That’s also part of why HM2 was a disappointment, it doesn’t have much more new to say, it starts caring about its plot and characters A LOT and retreats to the convenient and very familiar message « enjoy the violence! but violence leads to more violence ». Made me think I read too much into the first game
Welp
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I mean, the aesthetic package can speak. The message doesn’t need to be especially novel or deep if it’s perfectly expressed through the mechanics, art, and sound. One of the ways that games work better at place-setting or a poem-like tone.
Even in longform – Team Ico games, in any slice, no matter how thin, express their entire narrative. Look at a screenshot of Shadow of the Colossus and you probably understand the plot.
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i registered an io account to see if it’s possible to transfer from steam to xbox and play hitman on gamepass and i think they’re mail bombing me now?
i’ve confirmed m8 piss off
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see, i kind of agree that the musing about violence sans context doesn’t really go anywhere, i’ve never really felt like that kind of explicit textualization of the audience’s psychology towards a game ends up being generative a lot of the time because on some level i feel like manipulating audience psychology is like, Inherent to how digital games work in the first place.
the thing that really gets me about both games as texts is how they play with the pursuit of catharsis and how the pursuit of that desire is easily manipulatable by forces outside of your immediate understanding. for me like, i don’t think the discussions of the violent acts of characters and by the extension the player are fascinating because of how they reflect on your relationship to the gameplay in an identitarian way, i think the real power of a lot of it isn’t what it gives immediate cause to think about (“do you like hurting other people” etc) and more what it’s trying to convince you you’re ignoring, i ended up feeling like the arc i had parallel with the game was less that i did bad things and then felt bad about it so much as like, the deeper in i walked trying to find The Meaning or The Ending in what i was doing, the more in the weeds i was getting over the minutiae of my own actions as an individual, when really the bigger thing i should’ve been paying attention to was right in front of my face but not a satisfying conclusion to the narrative I was trying to pursue as an actor.
something i really like about how the game handles the attempted military coup that serves as the background instigator of events is that it’s very difficult to understand it as this cathartic individualist narrative, it’s the result of the actions of many disconnected individuals working in concert as part of a systemic backdrop and that makes it really difficult for a lot of characters and even players to conceptualize or identify with it, and the power of it to me is how that lack of cathartic potential is specifically the thing that ALLOWS the coup to even take place because it causes everyone to sort of glaze over it as the material driving factor behind the exciting wave of murder furries.
some of the characters are even directly told about the coup or witness things that imply it and explicitly brush it aside because it doesn’t have much to do with whatever specific usually self-fulfilling thing they’re trying to accomplish as an individual. i’m really fascinated by how the characters are essentially doomed by their inability to see outside their own personal narrative where they get to Accomplish something or Avenge someone or achieve some kind of personal Release.
not to get grim but the way the characters’ belief in some valorous narrativization of their life’s arc allows them to be converted, a lot of the time consciously into acts of violence that often play into state power consolidation reminds me a lot of current day fascism in the west and how a lot of it’s cultural foundation is in constructing simple but cathartic aggrandizing narratives for people to live inside and define themselves by, and further how people in the west are socially trained to see the world and life through the lens of themselves as an individual with a Story, that ultimately making people a lot more susceptible to being emotionally manipulated by these kinds of Calls To Action than if they were thinking of the world around them as the result of many people acting according to their current material circumstances. i really appreciate the diorama of people’s lives colliding the game constructs for giving me that much to think about in watching it play out.
anyway ignore literally everything i just said it’s all bullshit my real hotline miami analysis is that jacket and girlfriend are this tweet
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ikiki’s response to HM was pretty amusing
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lmao the youtube poop screenshake is making me die
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i’m really tired of having this debate tbh because unless you basically say “anything you like is good” people get angry. and i hate it! cuz like, whatever, like what you wanna like, you’re not a “Bad Person” or whatever if you like something. but i obviously don’t agree about that particular thing.
anyway i don’t really agree with this as a way of evaluating art or whatever, especially in things that seem to desire to have a deeper meaning but fall short of it. which Hotline Miami falls into. it’s clearly trying to do something from calling upon all the inspirations that it’s calling upon, and it’s failing. the core gameplay loop is nice enough but it’s not that deep. i will give the aesthetics some credit for carrying the load esp vs. a lot of the game with bland aesthetics that are out there now, but there’s only so much before the appeal of that runs dry. just bc Hotline Miami looks good in retrospect compared to a lot of indie games with forgettable/samey aesthetics that all crib from the same inspirations doesn’t mean i think it’s better than i did then, it’s just not a great reflection of the state of where a lot of these games are at now to me.
so yeah points to Hotline Miami for having some novel inspirations and a reasonably fun core gameplay loop. but that was never what the debate was about anyway for me to begin with. it was more about interrogating what any of these big prestige indie releases mean and are trying to say, and do they live up to that? and in that sense Hotline Miami feels like a garbled mess of just random aesthetic signifiers. something that’s like grasping for the coolness or legitimacy of the media its inspired by without having much of any core to it beneath it. to a lot of games people, that’s enough for them. they take stuff on the surface for what it is and move on. to me, i think it’s not enough, and it can’t be enough. i want a work of art that actually “says” something coherent about something, especially if it is clearly trying to grasp at doing that in some way.
not trying to act like this argument is “resolved” or anything. i’m just tired of having to be worn down to basically saying “anything people like is good” when arguing about this stuff when i obviously don’t agree because anything else gets people angry. but being that person is exhausting, esp when you have to argue with the creators and fans who think you’re trying to ruin their fun and that you deserve any harassment you get.
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Putting aside Hotline Miami, I think there’s a lot of value in games and art that have simple, strong aesthetics, because if they’re cohesive enough they can reflect and express a lot of carried meaning. The social commentary that bunny pulls out didn’t speak to me through these games because it was redundant with similar political art that felt deeply personal to me.
All art is contingent on time and place and what the viewer has experienced before and some messages need to be spoken again and again through culture. I think there’s value in a redundant message being phrased to speak to a new audience.
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I always interpreted this as the rush of adrenaline contrasting the freshly made silence and nothing more. I never took this questioning as directed towards the fourth wall, I think the puking after the first mission is meant to signal that the audience is a separate entity from the character, even if you’re controlling them like a puppet. I always went into HM with the same impression of the developers that it’s a Robotron game and I’m getting Points
All of the questioning towards the player character felt like audience bait, like, no you’re not gonna get me to question why I’m playing this, sorry. Maybe the actual character with the mask and guns has regrets but not me I’m just here to shoot people, no remorse about it. kind of making myself immune to that lol
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Robotron with post-nut clarity
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carrying from that note, the reason why I disliked HM2 upon release is that the level design completely sucked ass
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Remembering when Suda made Travis Strikes Again and explicitly credited Hotline Miami for giving him creative inspiration to getting back into directing games. Felt as if Terrence Malick suddenly made a movie where the main characters spend the majority of the third act talking about how awesome The Revenant is and then spent the rest of his career trying to prey on Iñárritu’s audience’s middlebrow impulses
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TSA’s reverence for indies is one of the strangest thematic whiplashes I’ve experienced in any game. It’s like the spirit of indie is great but we homage the most hollow examples.
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It’s so annoying since the Coburn Elementary School thing in killer7 was emotionally resonant to me – a political plot that feels utterly impossible and moronic until you realize it actually happened in Asia a few decades earlier and was perpetrated by roughly the same groups of people, a gesture showing that the creator has a clear-eyed outlook on geopolitics/imperialism and righteous anger in his heart – and then HM1’s 50 Blessings ending comes off as the most vapid, empty retread of the same thing, the worst kind of a “true ending”, gesturing at big things without any conviction because of some completely misjudged pop value
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I liked HM1 (never played the second as I felt I had enough with the first), but the plot stuff just made me roll my eyes and really just ruined the atmosphere and mood the game had until that point. Besides, Marathon already did the “ever think why you enjoy this violence so much” thing years earlier and better, so it just seemed cliche by that point and I felt like the developers were trying too hard to make a statement but just fell on their faces.
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