Hatred is What Fox News Thinks Games Are

If you haven’t heard of Hatred, you certainly will. The next time a lone gunman in a trenchcoat goes into a school or a mall to kill as many innocent people as they can before they die, this is going to be the game that Fox News loudly talks about alongside old staple Manhunt. 

What is Hatred? It’s a mass-murder simulator. You play as a long-haired, trenchcoat clad dude (who looks like one of the members of Dethklok) who has decided that he wants to die violently and that the most effective way to do this is to kill as many screaming, innocent people as possible. 

Polish game developer Destructive Creations have created exactly the kind of game that the media thinks represents games as a whole. While GTA V and Saints Row and other open-world crime games allow you to go off the rails and kill civilians, in the case of Hatred this is the whole game. It was as if this game was created simply to be a point of moral outrage, to stimulate conversation about ethics. 

Destructive Creations writes on their website (after the half-hearted “don’t do this, it’s just a game” disclaimer): 

The question you may ask is: why do they do this? These days, when a lot of games are heading to be polite, colorful, politically correct and trying to be some kind of higher art, rather than just an entertainment – we wanted to create something against trends. Something different, something that could give the player a pure, gaming pleasure. Herecomes our game, which takes no prisoners and makes no excuses. We say ‘yes, it is a game about killing people’ and the only reason of the antagonist doing that sick stuff is his deep-rooted hatred. Player has to ask himself what can push any human being to mass-murder. 

The main character concludes his growly monologue saying “my genocide crusade begins here,” but what really comes to mind is the sheer amount of controversy that this game is going to stir up. The developers write that the game is about “pure, gaming pleasure” as if the only enjoyment one gets out of games would be from mass-murder. 

Whatever their reasoning, Hatred appears to be coming.