Bret Easton Ellis

It is this feeling of participation in the unspeakably horrific that rises up at the end of every chapter of Hotline Miami, a video game that was released last October (developed by Dennaton Games and published by Devolver Digital.) Hotline Miami is frequently noted for its aesthetic parallels to the 2011 film Drive but I contend that it also has a more profound mechanical and philosophical debt to American Psycho. I bring up this particular parallel because it calls attention to two things that tend to be neglected in video game studies: that reading is itself a participatory act and that there are meta-procedural cultural contexts in which video games cannot help but exist… Continue Reading →