While the Manhunt games inhibited quite a violent nature, there was still a reason for it, a goal to achieve. It included character motivations: the desire of survival in the most extreme of cases. While receiving heaps of controversy over its creation, the developers were still able to have it released, censorship aside, because it had that rationale, it had a reason for the violence that was being committed, albeit a superficial one.
Hatred, on the other hand, is not one such example. Hatred is a game being developed by Destructive Creations, that is due to be released sometime this year, but from just its announcement trailer alone, it has already been faced with extreme protest, the game itself already having undergone several bans and rating changes (as I believe, the game is still rated an AO for adults only). In this trailer, the lead character, a large tall man with long black hair, is depicted loading several weapons, proclaiming how he despises the world and all its inhabitants and seeks to destroy all of them. The trailer then continues on to show the man storming out of his house and proceeding to shoot every person in sight as it goes through a montage of helpless innocents being murdered by this one man (GamersPrey HD, 2014).
Unlike its counterpart, Manhunt appears to be less gratuitous by appearance and most of this is due in part to the motive. Hatred has no motive other than to kill for the sake of killing, reversing everything that games have attempted to change about the preconceptions thrown in their direction. Hatred has no intent but to offend or to appeal to that morbid curiosity that I mentioned in my last post, and by gaining the controversy and online media attention, it succeeded in just that. The game is almost a hyperbole in itself, the violence portrayed in such an extreme and incredulous degree that the tone is almost abandons the darker tones that games like Manhunt portrayed, to a more hyperactive and borderline humourous one.
Hatred was submitted to a program known as Steam Greenlight, where games made by lesser known companies attempt to get their project attention and votes for Steam to grant it a place in their long list of games to be sold to users. Upon submitting their game for approval, the game was hastily removed due to its content (Matulef, 2014). However, the game was to be reinstated due to the social outcry of some Steam users claiming it had a right to be made.
With such a heavy inclusion of violence being carried out through irrational and vague reasoning, it's easy to understand the want to remove the game from production and stop it from being exposed to players. Such violence only serves as a poor influence, but I feel the need to recall the article I linked in my first post, stating that aggressive attitudes are not caused by games, at least not primarily. Hatred's only real blight is that it muddies the waters that games have traversed in order to become recognized as a genuine art form and a basis for experiential learning through its graphic depictions of senseless murder.
Now do I feel that due to its design, it is eligible for removal? Absolutely not, and there's two reasons for this. One of the most important factors a budding medium must experience is controversy and progressing past that controversy in order to flourish and develop, just like their neighbouring mediums of film and literature had to do decades and centuries ago. Second, and most important of all, I feel that games are entitled to freedom of expression. Film and literature have both experienced controversy from some of their works, from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), now considered classics, but at the time were censored and heavily criticized for their content. Now I'm not placing Hatred on the same pedestal as these works, far from it, I only mean to stress that games deserve the same freedoms. This team went through the effort to create something to share with the world to experience, for better or for worse. The content is irrelevant in this respect, a work of art or a simple production from any medium deserves to be expressed because that is its purpose. Without a purpose, any film, novel, or game becomes lifeless and void of any real reason of being.
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