Dear Player: Hotline Miami and Low Res Death
I’m puking on the pavement beside my DeLorian. I’ve just killed. A lot. Of pixellated people. And I’m throwing up a lot of pixels after that last one in particular. I bashed in a homeless person’s face with his own baseball bat just because he was between me and my car - the narrowness of the alleyway was the only logic I paid attention to.
I’m really not sure what I’ve done, and I’m not even sure who “I” am in this context. Within minutes of entering the game a masked man tells me I should postpone knowing who I am: “with identity comes responsibility.” And a release from this is perhaps the game’s only gift to the player. That and a dedicated restart key.
This is Hotline Miami, an indie shooter clothed in the neon-fuelled bloodbaths and everyday monotony of a 1989 Miami hitman. But we’ve already run into trouble in our description. The game’s solution to ‘trouble’ would be death, and yet more killing, the same way the player solves every ontological issue. But that’s it – description of the game fails even at the basics, but it’s the basic nature of the game that causes the problem: the fighting, the killing, the death.
A window into the hidden psychosis of an aesthetic, the game draws heavily on the 2011 film Drive, and pushes the crisp, deadening banality of it to a psychotic extreme. For a game, it’s horrifically violent. For an 8-bit shooter, it’s so deranged as to become uncomparably unsettling. Its very audacity - its bold, unashamed rudimentary mechanics and graphics – heightens this slick shooter’s realism into a simultaneously unnerving and reassuring dance of death
Or maybe I should say ‘rave’. Jarring corridors of bold colour ooze pixels above a subtly strobing backdrop – like the atmosphere of the game at large, its spaces are discrete and delineated but fundamentally disorientating. While a conventional FPS would surround the player’s environment in a naturalistic but inaccessible skybox, here we see from above a whole level floating above a dizzying colour field of scintillating neon. At the level of the pixel too, the game retains a hallucinatory quality. I can barely make out the two flickering dots when I push my character’s thumbs into an opponent’s eyes but yet I know that is what’s happening. Our very attempts to squint belie the unresolvable nature of these impressions of pixels – the clarity and simplicity of everything in the game is on the same level, it seems more simulation than dissimulation. There are no sprites or icons for items, only the items themselves, while text and signs are inserted into the environment, and we learn to read the environment as an open book - eye-searingly so. We navigate with complete certainty; nothing is hidden from our free-roving birds-eye view – there is no HUD between us and our target.
For all that, it unsettles our mastery. From the beginning the line between user interface and narrative action is blurred – our tutorial addresses our character, insults him, but demands key-presses of him. Dialogue teaches him moves that are named only by mouse buttons. RMB to take an item, LMB to take a life. Moreover, while this is a character who eats, drives, rents movies and even loves, all we can do is choose between violence and silence. Bracketing the chapters of hyperviolence come scenes of banality – we consume a good at a retail outlet, or walk out of our slowly evolving apartment. We stumble through environments that hint at a wider life while trivialising all lived actions. We kill 30 people, then we rent a film.
We parse together our character’s life indirectly – without the capacity for meaningful interaction small changes in the environment take on a strange power. In a hundred pixels a fresh table cloth shows us that we’ve found a stable relationship – all the more haunting and evocative for being wordless [1]. Indeed, our own passivity in all contexts outside of mass-killing renders the game dream-like – more as if a reflection on the past than something played in the present. We walk in a daze through the accelerated trickle of memory – disparate moments missing time. We buy pizzas and wake up to empty boxes, we rent films but we see nothing except the top of a flickering and unreadable TV. The game’s self-reflexivity merely accentuates our lack of interaction, and for all its references and transparency we have less and less agency and comprehension of our own involvement in the process. In our room a SNES console lies on the floor, a reference to Hotline Miami’s 8-bit graphics, but it’s merely one of dozens of enticing but untouchable objects. With the basic principles of exploration and interaction laid out in blunt pixels, whole worlds seem to lie dead at our feet. This city is made of broken promises.
Unlike the action of self-reflexivity in a film, which highlights our own position as viewing subjects while accentuating our sight (expanding our perspective and imparting to us god-like gifts of awareness over ourselves and the medium), here the game's self-reflexivity separates viewer and medium without empowerment. It distinguishes observation and interaction in a way purely visual media cannot, it draws attention to our inability to master our environment by making us reflect on our limitations. While a film like Synecdoche in New York, Dogville or even The Truman Show presents us with powerless characters bound by fate, metaphors for the conditions of their art form, here we feel this character directly – we ourselves are trapped in this nightmare. Temporarily and willingly so, but more than academically, we are trapped in a cycle of ‘death’. Without the critical distance that usually accompanies a hermeneutics of suspicion as applied to other texts, here we live a paranoia we can see clearly but only from the inside.
This is in many ways the true horror story of the ‘addictive game’. So many shooters face the player with a horror plot of Martian hells or American zombies, but they contain within them a formal horror – the horror of repetition, of endless violence. Hotline Miami is an endless traumatic return where we continually face the consequences of our fatalistic actions in a disturbingly un-real world. ‘Press R to restart’. Every opponent is a bald clone barely human when seen from above, but an unmistakable corpse when killed, and though we spend the game missing huge stretches of time (helpfully indicated by the calendar date introducing every chapter) the bodies never disappear. To end a level we are forced every time to retrace our steps through the blood - and walk over every corpse but our own. Time itself is traumatic here – some events remain missing while others are re-experienced endlessly, we restart and restart, an amnesiac hitman who picks his masked identity at will yet never learns his own name. Deposited by a back-to-the-future DeLorean which only moves by analogy, through loading screens, we dance in gunfire to the ceaseless beat of 80s homage electronica. Our action, motivation and memory are the pure rendering of the game in all its haunting 80s origins – our missions the unexplained euphemisms of a disembodied phone, perhaps the voice of game logic itself. Nauseatingly we are confronted repeatedly with the player’s choice to kill.
This is a game whose self-reflexivity exposes us too to the ambivalent nature of the pixel itself – it sanitises everything and yet renders all interactions more gruesome. Pixels leave events clear cut, but barely legible and patently artificial, and it remains the inescapable basic unit of gore. Everything here is self-referentially mediated by the pixel – and that ‘everything’ is usually ‘death’. The pixel stands in both a metaphoric and metonymic relationship to death in Hotline Miami – the undifferentiated world bleeds pixels, while the pixels that cloud and estrange our view interfere in the affective encounter. In a hospital scene noise filters fill our screen when our character collapses with his near-death migraines – pixellation is synonymous with pain and the borderline of visibility. Both desensitising and violent, the pixel renegotiates the limits of representation and the cultural coding of affect in a society which reflects upon its own digitisation.
While in the latest commercial blockbusters smooth rendered characters offer an idealised mirror image to the viewer, a perfect imaginary identity of dominance and control, here the blocky and the jagged confront us with the fragmented and deathly in an identity that never comes into focus. Death, impossible to understand directly, here confronts us obliquely in the disturbing and raw meditations of a game obsessed with it. Constituting the Real in the post-digital age, the pixel embodies the meaningless and refuses consolidation, instead exploding in spleen. When we talk of ‘resolution’, the pixel ironically defies it.
The drifting silhouettes of palm trees in the loading screen are our only suggestion of an intimate and intelligible smooth-edged first person perspective, but we experience it in non-narrative time, the time of world-building. That is, until the moment in the game where the loading screen breaks into static. Returning from a hit we find our apartment – so eloquently and evocatively made a home over time – has been ransacked by a masked hitman indistinguishable from ourselves. We miss our pixels. He shoots us. We die. R to restart. But this time our body is still there and we are forced to confront mortality. Handy loading screen tips that once informed you to “vary your weapon use for increased points” now tell you “You have done enough”. Instead of “recklessness is rewarded” we read “You are alone now”.
In the ‘Final Chapter’, an unresolved ‘resolution’ of the plot, we draw a photograph from our jacket – the only record of meaning in a game of clone masks and indifferent pixels. This photograph is the only memory we have to hold on to in a narrative dogged by erasure and meaninglessness, the only moment of reflection in a game where experience is only ever traumatically repeated, hallucinated, never mastered, never remembered. This photograph is 4X5 pixels, illegible, and we let go of it on a balcony at the edge of the level. It flies out onto the neon winds.
Merlin Seller
--------------------------------------------------------------- [1] And all the more sexist and demeaning for the passivity of our stereotyped partner. In this and other moments, the crass gender inequality, hypermasculinity and stereotyping are blatant, though more often through lack of representation than as a central conceit. Nevertheless, a gender theory analysis does deserve its own essay – not least on the nature of the games omniscient scopophilic gaze and what the masculine observer’s relationship truly is to the pixellated nude. Suffice it here to say the game fails on the grounds of race and gender in line with the contemporary genre standards of the shooter.