Violence, Tone and Hitman

There is no hard heart needed in doing what you love.

A side effect of having no limiter valve on your emotions is coming to terms with just how violent your ideation can actually get. A naked id is a scary thing to live with, and part of learning to cope is understanding what is healthy engagement with ideas you really want to be careful with saying out loud, and what is unhealthy engagement with those ideas. You learn to understand that there's no absolute application of the much debated 'go hit a pillow' praxis, because differing strokes between differing folks can mean a degree of success that swings between 'I feel better' to considerably worse outcomes. Even still, bottling it up is not an option, because tendencies toward extreme and reactionary impulses don't go away if you ignore them, or just say 'oh, that's just who I am.' Malignancy lies that way, because pressure builds if you keep adding to it without release. Building an intelligent and thoughtful relationship with your emotions is a part of growing as a person, the act of maturing, regardless of what else you might have going on upstairs. Anger is an emotion, one we like to think is only negative, useless, meaningless.

Anger spurs more change than any emotion. Anyone that tells you to ignore it is going to stunt you. Unfollow your liberal schoolmates.

Happiness is beating a Texan senator unconscious and shoving him into a nerd closet.

Anger lies at the heart of 2016's Hitman. While it still pays lip service to the series' roots in 2000s edgelord depiction of amoral, ultra-high society intrigue, the game's a lot more activist than its poorly aged previous entries. The game's first true scenario takes place at a fashion show in Paris, where the targets are the money man behind the brand, doubling as an asset for the other target, his boss, a former supermodel turned private spymaster and information broker running an intel auction in the show's upstairs rooms. Immediately you are sent into the lap of luxury to a degree that most people will not often get to see up close, if ever, and it feels authentic to a degree that most games labour and strain to even get close to. It's a far cry from the ridiculous BDSM sex raves held in actual meat lockers and bloated Jabba-like monster men from the earlier games. More to the point, it lacks both the same excessive foreboding of the earlier games, as well as a real sense of tangible anger.

It sort of feels like a lighthearted comedy spy show, actually. Like Parker and Elliot are somewhere else on premises, casing the joint for their own job. The music is light and punchy, with sneaky strings and strong caper melodies, and the atmosphere is rich with little overheard conversations and jokes peppered everywhere. You're armed, but at the same time, the threat feels a lot more subdued- don't act out, you will not be flushed out.

This of course doesn't happen, because the game is called Hitman and not Fashionable Loitering, and death is certain. You sneak around and get lost in the levels, figure out all the ways things work and means of entry and exit, occasionally pick up a nosy tail and have to dome them to sleep with a well-thrown fire extinguisher. It's fine, most of these levels take place in nations with healthcare, and the one that's in Colorado is nothing but survivalist militia, so fuck all those guys anyway. You find yourself starting to understand what this game is telling you: that you are here to kill only a specific few targets, and that approaching this like you would any supersoldier action game is not only liable to get you killed and left at a disadvantage even if it doesn't, but it's also utterly unneeded. This is a game that is about being polite, about being low key, about obeying the local laws and customs in as far that you cause no trouble... at least, no trouble that isn't one way or another mandatory, regardless if you're polite about it or not.

In other words, this game isn't about unleashing your anger; it's a game about learning when to unleash your anger. Because this isn't Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell, there is no No-Kill run that is viable, you are the Hitman, Hit a damn Man. And if you're hesitant and didn't get enough information about just the sort of individuals you're after in this game, here's the fashion mogul, nose locked at an angle, pettily tut-tutting over ever detail and openly abusing his designer as he buzzes around like a well-dressed hornet with a bodyguard escort. Then upstairs, there's the resplendent and immaculate model-turned-nowhere woman, auctioning off identity data and security leaks to a room full of capitalists and nationalists, sipping champagne while acting as though she's above the concerns of any mortal being. What do you want to do to these people? If you had the ability, what would you do if you got someone like this, vulnerable and between your hands?

Do your part: Stop studio fraud indie rock before it starts.

The answer is for me is "drop a concert venue speaker on the head of the mogul by levering it off with a crowbar" and "drown Coco Numbers Station in her own toilet after serving her a Crystal & Rat Poison disguised as a bartender." The violence of these acts were not understated, either. It was actually really funny.

Hitman is a game that understands the tonality of violence, because it understands the context at which a person breathing their last as a gulp of toilet water during a fatal swirly is actually comedy, rather than a tragedy: it's because that person drowning is a predator of the vulnerable masses, and the drowning itself is being performed by a predator that preys primarily on massive assholes.

And if you think I'm reading too far in to the first mission, the one after that sends you after a legally distinct Martin Shkreli stand in. It allows you to blow him up with an antique cannon, fired from the seaside ruins on his palatial estate, as he practices his pathetic golf swing with the aid of a PGA tour champion. He was having trouble finding inspiration in his work, you see. His work creating a virus that is configurably lethal, based on genetic markers in the specified target(s).

Bogey.

Later, you kill a Swedish asshole taking shelter in an embassy. Just so he doesn't feel too attacked, a legally distinct Julian Assange is also there, to whine about how nobody takes him seriously any more, ever since the new guy showed up.

This is not a game about detonating bombs in city centers of far away places. It can be, because the game gives you a ton of options, it's down for basically anything you want to try to a surprising degree, up to and including just blowing shit up. It's definitely not No Russian, even if you can dump an automatic weapon into a crowd of bystanders. It's not even a game like Dishonored, a game that makes the crucial mistake of saying that there is no such thing as a fate worse than death and that killing is always a net negative, that there are conditions where it's morally better to sell people into slavery or damage their brains to the point where they're someone else. It's a game that is about playing the role of a scalpel, out for malignant growths with surrounding tissue that can be damaged in order to remove them, but better to leave enough so that the patient lives past your operation. 

Hitman puts you up against real monsters loose in our world, and asks you, what would you do with them. Any game can do this, hell, we've been asking this question long since before the medium existed. But the way it asks this question is what makes it unique. It doesn't do it with solemnity, like some sort of mil-prop game that slings around words like Tier One and High Value Target. It doesn't do it with the white knuckled, wide eyed "hey, you wanna see somethin' fucked up" smile that the older games did. It does it as a friend, asking you a hypothetical. It makes jokes with you, it makes the music bounce along as though you're on a caper, it casually reminds you of the very real thing this person that you just hypothetically might want to club unconscious with a prosthetic arm and feed into spinning a hay baler did recently that was beyond over the line. You know, just to get those creative juices flowing, get you to use your imagination in vetting your personal process and execution, in and of acquiring that prosthetic arm, applying it to a particularly egregious head and then sussing how you'd workflow getting a half-dead and drooling war criminal into a running industrial baler without being seen by his posse.

It wants you to know how funny dark comedy can be, when it's terminal violence happening to bad people. It wants to know what makes you laugh, when it comes to marginal people meeting a humiliating and/or messy end. It is a game that starts at 'bullet to chest in a bathroom stall' and quickly works its way through 'deploy biohazard suppressant powder on a target not wearing a containment suit' to 'knife to death with a circumcision scalpel while dressed as a plague doctor.' Because the people at IO Interactive understand that violence has a tone, Hitman is a game that is completely adroit showing you horrible things being done to horrible people, because it has the chops to turn the catharsis of killing an effigy of the Other Side in this class war from something that could easily seem like mindless self-indulgence at best, and an unhealthy means to work out aggression at worst, and instead spin it as something more about control and focus, further mitigated by the fact the brutality is funny and distant. Remember, tragedy is when you cut your finger shaving, comedy is watching some asshole fall into an open sewer and die.

Hitman lets you press a button to shove people over ledges. It's hilarious under the right circumstances.