What Do You Think of the 'Hitman' Ad?

GamePolitics brings up a topic well worth discussion, the ad for Hitman currently making the rounds in gaming magazines. Their question is: Sexy or Sexist? From the article: "Her well-kept body lies on a bed of gold satin sheets; her pose is deliberately enticing -- until you realize there is a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. Then you notice the pool of blood spreading around her pillow. At at first glance, however, the blood seems to be just more accessorizing; it matches her lingerie and high heels. Regardless of your reaction to the photo, one thing is abundantly clear. The ad itself has nothing to do with the game its pimping. Nada. Zippo. Just visit the site for Hitman: Blood Money, and you'll see what I mean." What do you think?

Comments

Hmmm

[MyLongNickName]

It must be a good ad. It got lashdot and other news sites posting about it. Remember: "there is no such thing as bad publicity."

Sexy or Sexist?

[RonnyJ]

Their question is: Sexy or Sexist?

It's neither.

Re:Sexy or Sexist?

[arivanov]

Agree.

Nothing sexy in the picture for anyone but necrophiliacs.

On top of this, if you disregard the hole in the forehead, it is also quite tame from the ad/sex/sells/violence perspective. Just compare it to Dress To Kill ads from the Wallis campaign of the mid-90es. That is before even thinking of the Kronenburg advert that got banned by the ASA. That is also before even looking at the kind of ads perfumes are putting for EU market only (Opium with the Naked Sophie Dahl ad being just one example)). They selfcensor themselves and do not print them in American magazines so that they do not have to deal with the Bible Belt dwellers and other Evangelical Talebans.

Nothing to see here, move along...

I don't see what they mean

[mshurpik]

I went to Hitman.com and watched half of a trailer where a guy in a suit walks around looking like he's gonna shoot someone. Meanwhile, the ad in question is a person who was shot. Maybe I've been out of the gaming loop too long to understand why these things are not related.

Re:I don't see what they mean

[xwizbt]

You forgot to mention that no matter where he's walking and no matter who he's dressed as he's always moving at a painfully slow speed with his head tilted approximately 15 degrees to the left. If the bad guys just started shooting people who walked slowly with an off-centre head they'd have no more trouble with hitmen, I guarantee.

Re:I don't see what they mean

[DesireCampbell]

But you have to remember, it's a woman getting shot here. And that's a no-no.

Sure, you can have all the violence you want, if it's directed towards men. It's actually seen as 'better' if a woman is attacking men. Remember that Madonna music video where she and an old woman drove around and ran over men? It was three minutes of Y-chromosome roadkill. No one said shit about it. But if it had been a man running down a woman (even just once) it would've made the news.

I'm all for equal rights - and if you too think woman should be treated the same as men, do what I do: treat them the same as men.

Violence against woman is as violence against men - there is no difference. And if you think there is you're sexist.

hrm...

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

a game in which the player plays a hitman, someone who kills for money. An ad for this game feature someone killed execution style, with the words 'beautifly executed'...nope not related at all.

Re:hrm...

[BoomerSooner]

People like to be shocked and outraged first. For some reason Americans (and people in general, but it seems more uptight here) tend to get all worked up over things that don't matter. 1980's it was "Eat my shorts" (in retrospect was Bart Simpson that bad?) in the 1990's we had the outrage over South Park and their social commentary (continuing through to today) and now we have people freaking out about some hacked nude scene in GTA.

Who gives a fuck?

In a world with famine, disease, tyranny, rape, murder, etcetera, we have people concerned more with TV, Video games and their own righteousness, than with the actual suffering of others. If the Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, or whatever the fuck god[s] one believes in takes more comfort in his/her/it/their followers indignation at make believe situations than real ones, I would be quite shocked.

Focus on reality and there is no need for the acrimony toward fantasy land.

[/end rant]

Re:hrm...

[Henry V .009]

Russian television interviewed an old man a few years back. He had executed thousands of civilians during one of Stalins purges. One by one he shot them in the back of the head as they were brought to him.

The interviewer asked him "how could you kill all those people?"

He replied, "Well, there's a trick to it. You have to hold your elbow like this otherwise it gets sore."

Most of your neighbors have the potential to be concentration camp guards under the right circumstances. There is tremendous pleasure in murder and rape, and all that they really lack is the opportunity. It's only a thin veneer of civilization that separates us from our demons; the idea that that very civilization can be stripped away without consequence is the worst sort of idiocy.

Re:hrm...

[earthbound kid]

False dichotomy. We can stop wars, rapes, etc. in the world, while at the same time stopping disreputable art from poisoning the social sphere. Time is not so limited that doing one prevents doing the other. In fact, counter to your argument, most of those who object to such things in "fantasy land" do so out of fear that allowing base fantasies to be paraded in public will result in more suffering in the real world, once those fantasies affect people's minds.

Now, I do not, in fact, agree that a complicated hack to add nudity to GTA will result in an inevitable slide into moral anarchy, but I think that you have yet to show that getting upset at GTA prevents us from say, doing more to prevent domestic abuse. My fault with those who protest so loudly such things is that they have confused the symptoms with the disease. I submit that stopping all wars, poverty, tyranny, etc. is a task that is made difficult for the same reason that we human beings have a propensity to seek out violent or explicit imagery. The reason is that humans are naturally destructive, and must be trained well if they are to exhibit virtue towards others. As such, the time spent railing against these various artistic ills would be better spent by creating new ideals to inspire people to a life of virtue, and in so doing, hopefully make a positive impact against the ills that cause suffering in the world today. However, there is no reason, as such, that the endeavor must be delayed until those wasting their time on denouncing symptoms are made to direct their energies elsewhere. Rather, we can all begin both collectively and individually to model and practice virtue today instead of waiting for the tomorrow when our neighbors shall do likewise.

Re:hrm...

[goofyheadedpunk]

One of my hobbies happens to be ancient writings. More specifically, one of my hobbies happens to be the translation of personal writtings very akin to what we now call essays or diaries. I find it more than humorous that men have been noting the massive shift in behavior and values, with emphasis on this being a bad thing, since writing became cheap enough to be a viable method for recording one's thoughts.

Long term societies change though time and there's nothing that can be done about that. (Societies that do not change are stagnate, and tend to die out quickly.) None is any more justifiably worse than another, just different. Hell, I'm sure if I looked I'd find people in 1890 bemoaning the sad state of affairs as compared to their own childhood.

So, in closing, keep up the good work. It has a long, proud (myopic) tradition!

article?

[zdzichu]

Great, linking to article requiring registration. Link to ad in question would be much better.

It's just more "Shock Advertising"

[earthbound kid]

Danc at Lost Garden covered this pretty thoroughly a while back.

Shock advertising comes into play when someone always increases the viciousness of their ads in an attempt to compete in a market where the emotional rawness of your product is a major selling factor. Customers have two reactions. They can either leave gaming behind in disgust or they can learn to ignore the shock ads. Over time, the shock ads have increased in potency in order to reach an increasingly jaded, distrustful and hardcore audience.

Of course, non-gamers see gaming ads as well. They assume that the highly prevalent shock ads display the true nature of gaming. There are massive generation issues at work here, but gaming ads are structured in a way that deliberately and intentionally provokes an intense negative response from outsiders. A gamer would retort, "They are meant to be shocking, duh."

The result is the individual game does OK, but the market as a whole stagnates because normal people don't want to be associated with such violent games.

An appropriate quote:

[Chemisor]

From The Romantic Manifesto:

If one saw, in real life, a beautiful woman wearing an exquisite evening gown, with a cold sore on her lips, the blemish would mean nothing but a minor affliction and one would ignore it. But a painting of such a woman would be a corrupt, obscenely vicious attack on man, on beauty, on all values -- and one would experience a feeling of immense disgust and indignation at the artist. (There are also those who would feel something like approval and who would belong to the same moral category as the artist)

And on the purpose of such art:

Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purpose, since he must first define and then create his values -- a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will reshape the world and himself. Art gives him that image; it gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals.

I'll finish with a definition of art according to the author:

Art is a selective recreation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements.

Once you understand these things, seeing the purpose and the nature of the Hitman ad is trivial.

Doesn't Sell Me

[blueZhift]

I think the ad is a nice piece of art, artistic in the same way as the beautifully choreographed gunplay ballets in John Woo's Better Tomorrow action films. But, the crucial but, is that it doesn't make me want to go out and buy the game. Why? Because it drives home the point that Hitman is a violent, murderous game in too realistic a fashion. I know some people go for that, and I do like the occasional shooter, but this goes too far for my taste. Even if, the ingame situation doesn't not present such realism, the ad has instilled that idea in me and thus turned me off from the game. So in conclusion, I would say it's great art, but a bad ad because it may be turning chasing away potential customers.

Re:What do I think?

[Lord Kano]

if Hitman 2 utterly sucks I'll probably end up finishing it anyway.

This ad is for the FOURTH Hitman. Hitman 2 was out years ago.

LK

The Anti-Hitman Thing Annoys Me

[sesshomaru]

In the new issue of PC Gamer, they have the second AD in this series "Classically Executed" showing a chellist (a male chellist) sitting in a concert hall, the main indication that he's dead is the rope burn around his neck. You can view the image here "Classically Executed". (Oh, and another one with a male victim, Coldly Executed.) The whole gallery is here, Hitman Gallery.

In the Hitman games, you play a stealthy killer. Now, so far, I've only played part two (it's the one that is out for Gamecube). The point of the game is that you have a target, you get to the target a sneakily as possible, kill him/her and then sneak out again as sneakily as possible. In part two, you even have the option of knocking people out with cloroform if you need them out of the way and they aren't your target. In other words, unlike a lot of action games, where your goal is to rack up kills, you purpose is just to take out one target without anyone knowing you did it. (I found the second level of part two to be very tough, any pointers?) You get scored on this, the more sneakily efficient you are, the better you do. (In other words, heading in with guns blazing is a way to get a bad score.)

Anyway, the AD isn't intended to be sexist, indeed I think the argument against the AD that I'm seeing is that it should have been sexist.

I.e. if it was a male character, dead in some museum in front of some spectacular work of art and they used "Beautifully Executed," there would have been no controversy for this effective AD campaign. So, the problem is, the AD campaign was insufficiently sexist, not that it was too sexist. Or do people think anyone would have raised such controversy about the other two ADs?

Re:The Anti-Hitman Thing Annoys Me

[_pi-away]

It wasn't sexualized to me. A woman has been shot in her sleep, that's what I saw. At no point did I think about rape either before or after the killing. I don't even see it now that people say it; her clothes appear undisturbed and by all appearances there hasn't been a hand on her or the bed.

Quite frankly, the people who are seeing that in this picture are the ones who worry me.

Why this ad?

[Naradak]

I don't think this ad is nearly as bad as the other one I've seen: A cello player is sitting in a chair with his throat slit, and blood draining down his neck. "Classically executed."

Nobody would have talk about this if...

[Over00]

... if the woman was ugly. People like to get others attention by provoking non-sense debates.