Games and the bigger social picture

For those of you who follow debates and/or news about the video game industry, this will not come as a surprise. For those of you who don't sit down and strap in your seatbelts, because we'll be entering a war zone.

If you are not familiar with the game franchise Hitman, I'll sum it up in a few words. They are games where the player character is a bald-shaved, well-dressed assassin codenamed 47 who goes around killing people in a plethora of ways, since he gets paid to do that. Now, the Hitman franchise is getting a new game soon-ish, and this game got a new trailer just last week. I'm not gonna link the trailer here because this blog's supposed to not be adult content, but you can go search for it on Youtube if you wish, it's easy enough to find.

So, a game franchise that is about killing people got a new trailer, how is this special? Well, the trailer has caused something of a flame war on the internet after airing, because it's not just a trailer of a game where you kill people: it has 47 kick in the faces of a group of female assassins first disguised as nuns and soon disrobing to a rather more revealing get-up. If you still want to see the video, the new game's title is Hitman Absolution. You'll find it with that.

The trailer caused a huge public outcry for two reasons which snowballed quickly into one huge clusterfuck. The first reason was that the trailer depicts a very graphic kind of violence towards women. The Hitman series has always been about gruesome violence, so the violence itself is nothing new, but this is the first time that opponents that fight back have been female. The second reason revolved around how the lady assassins in the trailer are viewed: their choice of clothing has raised an outcry because people feel that the trailer objectifies women.

Personally I can see where both of these arguments are coming from, especially the latter: the choice of clothing seems rather ridiculous. The first reason, on the other hand, seems somewhat ridiculous: the women are actually depicted as combatants, not as helpless targets, which means that it's not chauvinistic, it's misogyny. (For reference, when someone has actually been bothered to voice outcries about the Hitman series before, not counting the first game, the usual argument has been chauvinism.)

While the argument itself has been blown out of proportions some ways back (there's a reason I've used terms such as flame war - the trolls are having a field day with this one), the reference frame of this discussion is, in my opinion, also good. It raises public awareness to the fact that games are a massive, influental media. It brings arguments and questions both moral and ambivalent to the doorstep of people who might never have thought of any of them.

Of course, for the denialists and haters this is one more reason to cry wolf and claim that games are the end of morality and whatnot. What I'm hoping for is that, after the flames go down a bit, people will be able to see that the field of games is atleast as varied as that of movies (for something on the other end of the scales, check a game called Dustforce to get you started) and that thus this kind of discussion is both needed and good for both the people making and using the game industry.