The fun of HITMAN is that everyone but you is a robot. You are able to predict where people will be, what they are doing and how they will react. This is not the affordance of a limited system. The game would not be better if populated with dynamic, unpredictable entities. This predictability is what makes the game possible to play and the power it engenders makes the game fun.

This power is why the robots pretend to be people. When I outwit a person, it is because I am smart. When I outwit a robot, it is because it is stupid. It also allows the true pleasure of HITMAN; when the systems bleed back into the real world. It’s thrilling to come across a real person facing the wrong way in a dark corner and imagine the subdue prompt or to see a temptingly poisonable plate left alone. It is as though you have been granted an entirely new avenue of autonomy.

This is why the people in the game pretend to be robots. The player is the only autonomous entity in the level. Everyone else has a routine to stick to. This is the true promise of neoliberalism, not that everyone is free as that would be anarchy, but instead that you can be autonomous in a world where other people are not. To be managed at scale, the human must pretend to be machine, a creature of metrics and predictability and routine.

This alienation of labor is key to the game. It is the job of the bodyguard to stand outside the room where the meeting happens, not to notice that two people went in and only one has come out. It is this which results in the interesting dynamic where Agent 47 kills the exclusively wealthy and powerful while mostly dressed as the proletariat.

And yet, even those rich and powerful victims are trapped in loops of their own. Larger, more detailed loops than those of their employees, but still loops. The player is the only person in this world of robots pretending to be people pretending to be robots.