Hitman: Perfectly Executed
Ed Smith
If games want to be considered important and mature, they need to get comfortable with violence. Hand-wringing and self-deprecation are the marks of a truly insecure and underdeveloped culture. You've only to look at comic book and superhero films, and their constant nods to the audience about how silly and implausible they are, to know that self-absorption makes for uninteresting entertainment. Grab violence by the horns and do it properly. Make it dramatic and frightening. Kill characters that matter and make their deaths resonate throughout the rest of the script. When Macbeth kills Banquo, it means something. When Sonny is machine-gunned in The Godfather, it changes everything else in the film. To make games appeal to more people, people who have art and literature other than games, violence must hold significance. Hitman might not be an overt flag in the ground. But its structure, which frames each kill as the result of careful decision making and slow, dramatic build-up, impresses a mentality which the makers of violent games ought to embrace more often. Unless via a hackneyed, demarcated key scene (the recurring moment, for example, when you must choose whether to save or “harvest” one of BioShock's Little Sisters) it isn't often that pulling the trigger of a gun, or swinging a sword, feels in games like a decision. In violent games, which are often classified by the physical actions performed by players—shooter, hack and slash, etc.—wounding and killing are simply what one does. On the contrary, Hitman insists that violence be committed specifically. Targets are given names. Optimum routes of ingress are made clear. Agent 47, the steely, immaculately groomed protagonist, is patently not the kind of man to do anything imprecisely. With individuals to kill and intricate ways to kill them (attach an explosive charge to a chandelier; wait for your target to deliver a speech, while standing under it) you are encouraged by Hitman to regard violence as a precious and elaborate act. The crowds of people you often encounter do not represent targets, just waiting to be chopped down with a rifle, à la Grand Theft Auto. Especially in the Paris, Marrakesh and Bangkok levels, which to some extent or another take place during a live show or a television broadcast, non-player characters appear as spectators. To your violent behaviour, they are an audience—whether they detect and try to stop you or scream and run away shocked when you deliver the final killing blow, the violence you commit in Hitman is significant to the people who witness it. It may not be narratively intense, but every kill in Hitman has a slow, dramatic build. Compared to other violent games, wherein you arrive in a mission and almost immediately begin shooting, it can take literally hours inside one of Hitman's missions before you commit your first murder. Trying and restarting, playing and re-loading engenders—in clumsy fashion, admittedly—an attention to exactness and detail. Perhaps a happy by-product of its fussy combat and stealth mechanics, despite the game's name, killing somebody in Hitman is a rare achievement. Rather than drawing our attention to violence with sentimentality and carpet-pull plot twists, Hitman coaxes us into thinking more about our killing by, quite literally, making us think more about our killing. After so many failed attempts at reaching our targets, the moment we finally put them down is bound to remain in our heads. Moreover, we approach those murders like scenes from a story. We elaborate, stage and execute them as if choreographing flourishes in a play. Hitman gives no moral lessons. But by framing violence as the crest of our actions, rather than our actions wholesale, and inviting us to perform it via a complex, artificial routine, it impresses the significance violence ought to hold in dramatic stories. Violence should be built up to. And to stress its importance and hold it in an audience's collective mind, it should be visually distinctive. Fetishistic attention to violence does not always equal an endorsement of—or dispassionate attitude toward—violence. You might laugh at some of the kills in Hitman or regale friends with your stories, as if telling a light anecdote, but that is nevertheless a more long-lasting reaction than the apathy and blitheness toward killing that is created in you by other violent games. If Hitman's structure were combined with a firmer, wordier story, one unafraid to make moral assertions, it might impress something more universal about murder and violence. The game as it stands is testimony to how violence is best framed in fiction, as a rare, poignant and memorable dramatic beat—and rare, poignant, memorable dramatic beats are all too uncommon in videogames.

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Ed Smith contributes to Vice, The Observer, Edge, Play Magazine, and Kill Screen. Find him on Twitter @mostsincerelyed.