Posted in: Comics, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh | Tagged: games, hitman

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh: Not Killing Them Softly

Published Mon, 04 Jun 2012 12:00:23 -0500

So last week, Square Enix/Eidos released a new trailer for HITMAN: ABSOLUTION and started a minor shitstorm.

Basically, the trailer shows a bunch of hyper-sexualised clothes-shedding women with guns wearing latex-fetish nun outfits approaching the hero's motel to kill him. If this had been a hitsquad of men, we would not have been treated to shots of their boobs or bums as the walked. This man is supposed to be the world's most lethal assassin, so instead of employing tactics such as taking up flanking positions to watch each other's blind spots, they simply walk right up to the front of the motel and fire a rocket at it. This of course gives him the chance to have seen them coming and left the building before they even got close, and circled around them to start murdering them from behind. We're treated to a montage of Agen 47 masterfully shooting, punching, stabbing, throat-slitting and generally killing these sex dolls in loving, fetishised slow motion as if this was a re-assertion of male supremacy over uppity hot women.

I can't be arsed to link to that trailer, since we're not a gaming news site that's obliged to run every promo that's out there. Besides, I find it utterly contemptible, so if you want to give it a butcher's, you can always google it yourself. If I link to the trailer, I've done exactly what the company's PR men wanted, which is to have as many people see it as possible and talk about it. That I'm talking about it here probably would give them the satisfaction of a job well done. Bloggers, gamers, even games developers (not of the HITMAN game, of course) and some commentators have reacted with the expected offense and outrage which triggered off the usual debates from trolls and idiots who claim equivalency in not seeing anything wrong with it, which were countered by arguments that the abuse of women and rape is still too widespread in society for a stupid video game trailer to use it for casual entertainment. Charlie Brooker was so angered that he declared on Twitter that it set the public perception of video games back 27 years and vowed he would never play the game, and if they sent him a copy he would bin it unopened.

One of my first thoughts when I saw the trailer was, "Are they trying to convince Frank Miller to buy this game? He hates video games!" Then more questions popped up in my head. The makers of the trailer and the games company probably think any attention is good publicity, though the question is why they still felt the need to get this kind of attention. The HITMAN franchise is already well-known amongst gamers and it's not like it needs any controversy to get their attention. The ones who like the games will likely already be pre-ordering it.

Are they trying to appeal the loins of 14 year-old boys with this trailer? In fact, did a 14-year-old boy write and have the final say over it? Considering that the majority of gamers are in fact grown men in their 20s and 30s, did the company think they were catering to that core group when it's an age group that should have outgrown this kind of silly imagery? They can't claim irony because there is no irony in the depictions of the women or the sexualized violence in the trailer.

The biggest surprise for me is that this kind of misogyny is still around in media and advertising in 2012. It's like it's still 1986. To me, this isn't just about video game culture but the general culture at large, particularly the culture that informs the advertising industry. After all, in the UK ad industry, they used to refer to advertisements that had two women talking about domestic products as the "two cunts in a kitchen" genre. For all I know, they still do. The media industry, like any other industry, still has giggling fratboys who think rape jokes at the water cooler are funny and this trailer is really just the latest high-profile manifestation of that mentality. It's the same old shit and unfortunately, that same old shit is still around when we might have hoped better.

The biggest deal about the trailer, for me, is the unpleasant feeling that the games company and the shitheads who made the trailer hold gamers and their prospective customers in such condescension and contempt. Do they really think so little of us? And if those latex nuns are in the actual game, that doesn't let the games developers off the hook either. Somehow, I don't think most adult men like to seen as misogynists who enjoy watching hot women get sexily murdered.

Now me, I'm a consumer. I don't ask for or get review copies of games. I prefer to vote with my wallet, and the trailer has killed what little interest I might have had in HITMAN: ABSOLUTION stone-dead.

Nun of my business at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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