Stealth Gameplay as Queer Power Reframing in Hitman
The following is the abstract for a conference paper:
This presentation examines the Hitman videogame series as seen through a queer theoretical lens, focusing in particular on the way sneaking and social stealth mechanics translate the social world in new ways, reframing the operations of global power and our social roles within the mechanisms of Empire.
While the premise of the Hitman videogame franchise hardly hints at a nuanced cultural critique, the game’s aura of political and cultural paranoia conceals a surprisingly sophisticated commentary on power, predation, and state blindness to or complicity in criminal violence. The series casts players as Agent 47, a genetically-enhanced assassin who infiltrates a series of sandbox environments to accomplish tasks, one of which is invariably murder. Agent 47’s targets are the world’s wealthiest power-players, figures whom we all understand to be above the law, committing acts of extreme savagery, greed, and exploitation. These villains are not only insulated from the mechanisms of state justice, but they also often have police and military violence at their disposal to use against the powerless: There is a perverse catharsis in engineering humiliating deaths that often exploit their egos, pettiness, and paranoia. Agent 47’s tabula rasa personality is part of the reason the games are so effective as cultural critiques: He sneaks through the world, in it but not of it. He is at once victim and apex predator, infinitely dangerous but without free will, traumatized by a youth that robbed him of his humanity and connection to human systems. Embodying his unique vantage allows for a queer engagement with the systems of power that highlights the injustice inherent in the systems that surround us. While the game thrums with ironic humor and exaggerated villainy, it also provides a frank examination of neoliberalism’s very real evils, offering players a power fantasy, however provisional, of recalibrating the scales of justice and reversing assumptions about whose lives are surplus.