Travel the world, meet interesting people, and kill them. It appears to be a compelling offer. In the past few years a breed of games has attained great popularity in which violence is no longer the knee-jerk reflex of the twitch shooter, but a carefully planned and deliberate action. Welcome to the world of the murder simulator.

Ideas of concealment and careful killing had been around for a reasonably long time in two-dimensional games, but it is only since the attainment of solid three-dimensional environments, along with improvements in character detail, that true murder simulators, with their gleeful arms-race of visual realism, have been possible. We would mark the first naturalistic milestones around the time of Goldeneye and Thief, both of which placed heavy emphasis on silenced or distance weapons, and the avoidance of discovery by enemies. It is then only a short and bloody hop to what is perhaps the pinnacle of the genre today: Hitman 2.

Readers may object that “murder simulator” is perhaps an excessively emotive and sensationalist term to apply to a highly accomplished and enjoyable piece of digital entertainment, but what description fits better? There is clearly a qualitative difference, a change in feel and emotion, between the fantasy wargames of something like Halo and Io’s exquisitely planned assassinations.

Hitman 2, indeed, cleverly dramatises the visceral payoff of increased naturalism in its own training level, where the player is taught how to use the game’s garrotting device, the fibre wire, on a scarecrow in the church grounds. Practising the movements required on this stuffed dummy is a purely mechanical exercise, but the first time the player does it “for real” - perhaps on the urinating guard outside the mob villa - something has changed. A bloody rush of power to the head, a feeling of accomplishment and smug oneupmanship: the guy never knew what was coming to him. Without the visual realism this would be merely a formal puzzle, like the disappointing VR missions in MGS Substance. In the world of Hitman 2, it becomes a kill.

Hitman 2 recognises that the sadistic pleasure to be had from killing as many enemies as possible is a valid way to enjoy the game; on the other hand, it holds out a carrot for those who wish to refine their skills and withhold their violence sufficiently to receive the Silent Assassin rating. And the player can wander along this axis - between the twin poles of kill-everything-that-moves and take-down-only-the-target - with relative freedom. Tactical decisions - such as whether you have time to anaesthetize a Russian civilian on the underground, or whether you need to knife him to death and steal his clothes before he alerts a patrolling infantryman - are made more interesting by the game’s reward structure.

In Splinter Cell, on the other hand, killing a certain number of civilians results in instant mission failure, and other missions are entirely designated no-kill zones. Though this does enforce proper exploitation of the game’s excellent hide-and-seek mechanics, a feeling of top-down arbitrariness to these rules is exacerbated by the bizarre volte-face of the second Chinese Embassy mission. When you are first there, killing is off-limits (though you can just about get away with shooting a dog), but second time around, for underjustified narrative reasons, suddenly everyone is rifle fodder.

Splinter Cell’s modes of careful killing - the stealthy grab, the pistol-whip and the body-dragging - are nicely engineered, but what the game really proves is that murder simulators depend just as much on environmental awareness as a repertoire of subtle violence. The light-shadow mechanic, developed and finessed from the days of Thief, can be compromised by the dubious AI - guards alerted by a single pistol ricochet can instantly develop the nightvision of cats and spot you in the darkest corner - but it provides ample opportunity for silently crowing “Ha! You don’t even know I’m here!” as a guard walks past within inches of your crouched form. (Let’s not wonder pedantically why the poor saps never notice the three lights shining out of your head.)

It is clear from this example, indeed, that murder simulators are primarily games that dramatise and make almost tangible a pleasurable feeling of informational superiority. The abysmal State of Emergency, for all its look-at-me-I’m-so-outrageous violence, is not a murder simulator, because there is no contextual engineering, no sense of rhythm and discovery. The same is true of its big brother, GTA3, or Vice City: killing people in these games always feels somewhat impersonal, both because it’s so easy and because the consequences can be neutralised.

A real murder simulator is about the primal, one-on-one encounter with a worthy foe, over whom you hold the trump card of information. You know you are there; he does not. But in order to luxuriate in such superiority, you have to believe at some level that those you are fooling are worth being fooled - that they have some minimum level of intelligence. This is where Splinter Cell’s illusion can regularly crumble: its AI is far inferior to the heart-pounding pack behaviour of searching guards in MGS2.

Hitman 2, however, goes further in the opportunity it affords really to test your informational superiority, by walking past enemies in full daylight protected by nothing more than an appropriate outfit. The game’s use of disguises is brilliantly conceived: particularly in the fact that they can be believably compromised by behaviour and proximity - the roadblock sentries in St Petersburg find nothing suspicious about you when they are reasonably far away and dressed like them, but get too close and they will notice that you are carrying a sniper rifle instead of one of their own standard-issue AK47s.

You might say that in a really good murder simulator the actual murder is the icing on the cake. Some levels in Hitman 2 can demand as much thought and imagination as a tactical sim like Rainbow Six, and however many people you choose to whack on the way to your goal, the final kill evinces not a mere psychopathic thrill but a serene sense of accomplishment. It’s time to bite off the end of a cigar and say with George Peppard: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

But then, of course, you watch the walls of your toolshed fill up with new toys, and probably you won’t be able to resist trying them out on a few unsuspecting guards in the next mission. Silent Assassin can wait: it’s time for a few more gratuitous murders. Remembering the furore over Hitman 2’s depiction of Sikhs and the game’s subsequent withdrawal for recoding, one is reminded that a naturalistic style always has political implications. And it remains to be seen for how much longer the ante of realism can be raised in the murder simulator before we begin to find it more distasteful than pleasurable.

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