Synthwave’s Memetic Aesthetic in Hotline Miami - Rowena Chodkowski

I

. “Banned in Australia”

A little over a decade ago, indie developer Dennaton Games released the world’s most unlikely “reality simulator,” Hotline Miami.  A visually striking pixelated bloodbath set to hypnotic, pulsing Synthwave music, the game quickly ignited public fears about the connection between violent games and acts of violence. Concern about the games resurfaced with its sequel, Hotline Miami: Wrong Number, banned in Australia in 2015.[i] In 2024, the game’s re-release on the Sony Playstation Network was quickly withdrawn from the Australian market.[ii] Yet after a decade of global availablity, Hotline Miami has yet to inspire a single documented act of copycat violence. Decades of longitudinal research studies have credibly shown no conclusive link between video games and violence.[iii] Why do these fears persist?

The peril of misleading social imitation, or mimesis, has existed since at least 380 BCE. In Book X of the Republic, Plato cautions about the danger of actors and the audience in the theater. Comic poets, drawing on the passions of the crowd, risk inflaming the inherent “naughtiness” in an undisciplined audience.[iv] Unregulated imitative, or mimetic, arts have the potential to destroy a society, and art maintains a duty to depict upstanding behavior.[v] Following Plato’s logic, Hotline Miami—simulating a violent fictionalized “reality”—must be a dangerous title. But video games, of course, do not provide a perfect reality. Drawing a parallel between Plato’s Republic and video games, McKenzie Wark notes that games reflect aspects of reality through the allegorithm, the allegory that emerges between what the game purports to represent and what is permissible within its programming.[vi]

II. Retro Reality Simulator and Memetic Aesthetics

Dennaton’s developers, in an extended interview, made clear that their authorial intent sees Hotline Miami not as a fun ultraviolent gangster fantasy, but as a “reality simulator.”[vii] What aspects of “reality” does Hotline Miami reflect in its allegorithm? There are a few clues. The game adopts a retrogaming style, emulating classic arcade games with a simplistic, low-fidelity, top-down, two-dimensional design. The gameplay is fast-paced and brutally difficult, but similarly minimalist: the player must quickly clear a level filled with enemies using simple mechanics—hit before being hit; kill before being killed. The storyline is equally sparse. As the mysterious, deranged protagonist known only as “Jacket,” gamers at the controls are allowed few, if any, story choices. They are bound to carry out the bloody orders of a mysterious masked gang, seemingly without reward. When one gangster asks Jacket “Do you like hurting people?”  he remains voiceless and passive in this scene, as he continues to do for the remainder of the non-violent levels of the game.

The final clue to Hotline Miami’s “reality simulator” comes from the game’s adoption of synthwave, a popular web aesthetic, as a major element of visual and sound design. Synthwave, like its more well-known cousin Vaporwave, is a “retrowave” audiovisual aesthetic which draws on elements that recall, if imperfectly, design conventions of the past. Synthwave, as the name suggests, relies heavily on pulsing electronic synthesizers with heavy beats to evoke ‘80’s dance music and the cinematic scoring of John Carpenter.[viii] Drawing on 80’s visuals, such as Tron and early consumer computer graphics, Synthwave alludes to a sense of virtual infinity in which any fantasy might be possible.  Repetitive and energetic, the music is often used by synthwave enjoyers to assist with focus and concentration, providing a background to the average workday or browsing session.

What makes Synthwave a particularly interesting choice is that no one person defines the genre: instead, the aesthetic has developed through a process of digital copying, iteration, and reproduction through memecultural communities. Alican Koc and I call this memetic aestheticization, the process through which loose assemblages of ideas and symbols circulate through a digital milieu, change through copying and iteration, and become legible to critique as cultural objects. These objects obtain meaning, we argue, because they touch on the lived experience and life-worlds of those who encounter them; they “stick” because of the feelings they evoke in their receivers.[ix] Synthwave draws on nostalgic elements which recall lived or unlived experiences of 80’s media to create a speculative nostalgia which imagines alternative futures and pasts, to open possibility in the face of what seems like today’s certain doom—climate change, political instability, and societal fracturing along ideological lines.[x]

III. Playing the Game or Getting Played?

Taken together, the allegorithm in Hotline Miami emerges through the hazy music of Sun Araw’s Horse Steppin or Coconuts’ Silver Lights. The player has no choice but to progress according to their orders; no clear desire or motivation, and an uncertain relationship to reality. The game is relentlessly difficult and designed for adults, requiring constant and instant respawning; the button to retry is mapped to “R”, directly adjacent to the W.A.S.D. used to navigate PC games. Fast-paced hypnotic music puts the player into a trance state of frenzied reaction, smashing their way through everyone and anything standing in their path just to get to the next chapter and do it again. All the while, they are reminded of what used to be or could have been, aestheticized through a visual scheme adopted from a popular, collective practice of yearning and reflecting on the past. If you’re sitting at your computer avoiding a work assignment with a playlist in the background, this might seem pretty familiar.

By invoking Synthwave’s memetic aesthetic, Hotline Miami connects the “sticky” felt elements of players’ lived or imagined, unlived experience of the 80’s to the relentless pace of life today. In an online context, this is a condition that Robert Hasan describes as “digitality,” in which people are required to sync their lives to an unstoppable and insatiable network of extraction and exploitation.[xi] Those who can remember the techno-optimist past and those who imagine it through the synthwave aesthetic are caught in the contrast between a digital future which could have existed and a present in which we are all, as Wark notes, “getting played.”

While Plato and Glaucon worried about the impacts of uncontrolled mimesis, Hotline Miami uses Synthwave’s memetic aesthetic to trouble the banal, normalized violence that emerges when roles aren’t questioned. If the fastest and most brutal route to power is a win—just like the fastest route to profit disregards social harms—then the total control of mimesis, or a lack of options beyond what the game permits—is just as dangerous.

In Book X, Plato describes art’s reflection of reality as an imperfect mirror. Hotline Miami’s memetic aesthetic warns that the mirror goes both ways. This “two-way mirror” is an example of why contemporary approaches to mimesis are diverging from more traditional uses of the term. Instead of focusing on representations of reality, newer approaches to mimesis look to the process as one of both being influenced and influencing.[xii] Mimesis as an embodied back-and-forth experience includes collective meaning-making and elements of individual experience to understand the influence of art on life, and life on art. After all, 380 BCE was a long time ago.

Postscript:

It’s important to note that Synthwave’s memetic aestheticization process has unfortunately caused the genre to be associated with alt-right ideologies; readers should note that the game was designed and released before the 2016 “Fashwave” phenomenon.[xiii] This development is especially disappointing as the game criticizes alt-right ideologies, described as as “ultra-nationalist,” as an unworthy excuse for nihilistic acts of bloodthirsty violence. The analysis in this article is based on the state of the genre when the game was released.

Bibliography

Dustin Bailey. “Devolver Responds to Hotline Miami 2’s Sudden Deletion from PS5s with a Single, Perfect Screenshot.” Games Radar, October 9, 2024. https://www.gamesradar.com/games/action/devolver-responds-to-hotline-miami-2s-sudden-deletion-from-australian-ps5s-with-a-single-perfect-screenshot/.

Ernest Rhys, ed. Plato’s Republic With an Introduction By Richard Garnett. Vol. 64. Everyman’s Library. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1906.

Garda, Maria B. “Nostalgia in Retro Game Design.” In Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: Defragging Game Studies, 7:13, 2014. http://www.digra.org/digital-library/forums/7-digra2013/.

Hann, Michael. “‘Fashwave’: Synth Music Co-Opted by the Far Right.” The Guardian, December 14, 2016, sec. Music. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/dec/14/fashwave-synth-music-co-opted-by-the-far-right.

Hassan, Robert. The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life. University of Westminster Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.16997/book44.

Hotline Miami Creators Break Down Its Design & Legacy. Youtube Video; MP4. Noclip Video Game Documentaries, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcgmmBEEHsk.

Lawtoo, Nidesh. Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation. Leuven (Belgium): Leuven University Press, 2022.

López-Fernández, Francisco J., Laura Mezquita, Paula Etkin, Mark D. Griffiths, Generós Ortet, and Manuel I. Ibáñez. “The Role of Violent Video Game Exposure, Personality, and Deviant Peers in Aggressive Behaviors Among Adolescents: A Two-Wave Longitudinal Study.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 24, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 32–40. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.0030.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Edited by Gabriel Rockhill. Bloomsbury Revelations edition. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Rowena Chodkowski and Alican Koc. “A Memetic Aesthetics Starter Pack: Meta-Mimetic Processes and ‘Thingification’ in Emergent Digital Aesthetics.” Preprint, 2024. https://www.academia.edu/127967263/A_Memetic_Aesthetics_Starter_Pack_Meta_Mimetic_Processes_and_Thingification_in_Emergent_Digital_Aesthetics.

Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Wetmore, Kevin J., ed. Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism and Innocence in the Series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc, 2018.

Zorine Te. “Hotline Miami 2 Banned in Australia [UPDATE].” Gamespot, January 15, 2015. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/hotline-miami-2-banned-in-australia-update/1100-6424654/.

References

[i]       Zorine Te, “Hotline Miami 2 Banned in Australia [UPDATE].”

[ii]      Dustin Bailey, “Devolver Responds to Hotline Miami 2’s Sudden Deletion from PS5s with a Single, Perfect Screenshot.”

[iii]     López-Fernández et al., “The Role of Violent Video Game Exposure, Personality, and Deviant Peers in Aggressive Behaviors Among Adolescents.”

[iv]    Ernest Rhys, Plato’s Republic With an Introduction By Richard Garnett, 64:332–34.

[v]     Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 8.

[vi]    Wark, Gamer Theory, 042.

[vii]   Hotline Miami Creators Break Down Its Design & Legacy.

[viii]  Wetmore, Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism and Innocence in the Series, 21.

[ix]    Rowena Chodkowski and Alican Koc, “A Memetic Aesthetics Starter Pack: Meta-Mimetic Processes and ‘Thingification’ in Emergent Digital Aesthetics.”

[x]     Garda, “Nostalgia in Retro Game Design.”

[xi]    Hassan, The Condition of Digitality.

[xii]   Lawtoo, Homo Mimeticus.

[xiii]  Hann, “‘Fashwave.’”