By Samantha “Kitten” McComb
So, a pretty good deal of time after the dust has settled from all the proclaimed critical thought levied at Spec Ops: The Line, I’ve finally sat down and played through it. I’ve been an avid player of this generation’s first and third-person shooters. So long as the mechanics are more or less… sufficient, I’ll be willing to give most shooters a shot once the price is right and consume them as the popcorn entertainment that they typically are. I told myself pretty early on that Spec Ops looked like it was worth about $15, and, as things would have it, that’s about what I paid for it, and about what I still think it’s worth.
Although Spec Ops didn’t sell particularly well, it was talked to death about in gaming circles, usually in hyperbolically positive ways. Strictly speaking in terms of its mechanics, it’s generally agreed upon to be a little dated and somewhere from mediocre or kinda bad to pretty good. Personally? I’ll be willing to agree with that, even weighing in on the “pretty good” side of the scales. It’s definitely rough around the edges and feels like it came out of 2007/8, but I’m okay with that.
So, yeah, its mechanics are alright (and so are its aesthetics, which is where I generally find an intersection with the people who enjoy its narrative), but what about the part people love to praise, what about the narrative? Well, let’s get to that. I’m going to list points that people often hold the game up on (i.e. things I do not believe), then deconstruct them one at a time to keep this a more digestible format. We’ve already had an e-book pop up on discussion of just this one game, so I think I’d benefit from pacing this.
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1. Spec Ops: The Line’s attempt at a subversive narrative manages to succeed at making the player question why they play military shooters.
One of the biggest things that Spec Ops is often hailed for is how it uses the player’s preconceived notion of what a military shooter is like to turn that notion on its head and chastize the player – not the protagonist of the game, but you, the player – for trying to enjoy playing war hero. The first and most blatant attempt of this is when the game has you use white phosphorus (if you’re not familiar with it, look it up, the US Military – recently and in the real world – has used it as a pretty nasty chemical weapon with some serious ethical ramifications) against your enemies.
This segment is painfully hamfisted, as it forces you to keep bombing until every enemy vehicle on the camera appears destroyed and every enemy looks dead or dying. This includes a Humvee parked right next to a weirdly dense grouping of people clearly not wielding firearms. Once you’ve accomplished raining (a very near literal) hell, you walk through the aftermath of what you’ve just done and witness the horror you have unleashed. Eventually, you come into the area near that aforementioned Humvee, which turns out to be a tent full of – you guessed it – now scorched civilians.
At this point in the game, you have already previously run through an area that was just bombed with white phosphorus and been disgusted at what it did. To top it off, just before using it, yourself, one of your subordinates argues with you not to and then begs, “there’s always a choice.” Which is pretty funny, because by the game’s rules, there’s not. The sequence is unavoidable and the game forces you to bomb the area that will kill the civilians before it allows you to continue.
Right in the center of this group of mutilated civilians is what remains of a mother who was gripping her child in her final moments – perfectly positioned with the lighting juuuust right to make extra careful you definitely know you should feel especially bad and also that this is a super brilliant symbolism of innocence lost, of culpability for what you’ve done. From here on, your character’s mental state begins a very obvious downfall as other characters accuse him (but are often equally speaking to you, the player) of things being his fault.
By the time you reach the near-end of the game, the loading screen is even belting messages at you like “This is all your fault,” and “To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your country is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.” The very end of the game has the protagonist confronting his white whale, the enemy commander, in a scene which is an embarrassingly trite pastiche of the endings of Fight Club and Apocalypse Now.
The big bad, Konrad (get it? Just like the Heart of Darkness writer, but with a K? Didja get it, huh, huh?) tries to indict you (not only Walker, our protagonist, but you, the player) for daring to want to enjoy playing hero in an escapist power fantasy. The HUGE REVEAL is that you’ve been delusionally imagining an already-dead man as the villain to justify your insane pursuit and that you’re the real bad guy for having never just left Dubai.
This has been described as “eye-opening” to many, but I’ve not seen a single person having something resembling intelligent discussion on the game who wasn’t already of the opinion that military shooters are ridiculous or awful… just some people who think the genre is not self-aware of that ridiculousness (which, to be fair, happens pretty often). What I HAVE seen is people participating in a hugely pseudo-intellectual circle jerk about how they’ve always been right and Spec Ops confirms it.
This piece of shit game is actually so patronizing that it assumes whoever is playing it is too stupid to have ever asked themselves why they enjoy ethically ambiguous media in a military setting. And people love this because they love to believe shooter fans are the slack-jawed filth of our precious gaming culture who will never stop to think about things like their beloved Call of Duty having bad people that do bad things.
Well, at least when Call of Duty has a section where you murder innocent civilians, it warns you about it and allows you to skip it (See: Modern Warfare 2*). Despite its completely insane plot that both celebrates and condemns the life of soldiers, it holds that shred of respect for you that Spec Ops denies. And that’s because Spec Ops isn’t a story about its characters, it’s a story about how you’re a horrible, monstrous idiot for indulging in a fantasy world where you take control of someone that shoots people. It’s a story about how you’ve never considered the ethical implications of pretend murder’s potential effect to desensitize and dehumanize someone, specifically you.
The game is in fact so far indulged in indicting the player of how they consume media that the lead writer has come out as saying that one of the endings is just “turning the game off.” That’s right, this game is allegedly brilliant specifically because it treats its player like a moron and thinks that it so edgy that the proper reaction to playing it is to stop, sit in a corner, and think of what you’ve done. If you think a game being this deliberately condescending – this deliberately scornful and patronizing – of its player is a good thing, maybe you really do need to sit in that corner.
As a transwoman that plays these games, I find it nearly impossible to identify with the bro-dude protagonists, the nationalism, the jingoism and the misogyny, but I play them because I enjoy shooter mechanics and because I enjoy violent fantasy. I’ve stopped and thought about it – and no, I’m not super special or thoughtful. Yeah, shooter stories often embody and espouse some horrible ideals and characters, but at least they do not patronize me in believing I cannot figure this out on my own as Spec Ops so eagerly does.
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2. The game accurately portrays PTSD and does a good job of portraying the horrors of living with this condition.
I have seen a shocking number of people defend the strengths of Spec Ops’ narrative in that it goes in-depth as to how PTSD affects someone. If you think that PTSD manifests in the way this game portrays it, I feel very sorry for you and very angry that this game has contributed to yet another person’s horribly skewed understanding of a very serious and very damaging mental illness.
Post traumatic stress disorder does not make you hallucinate scary, teleporting, armored men in hallways, it does not manifest itself as a radio that only you can hear that people around you will not openly question, it does not leave the one experiencing it in anything resembling a composed state of mind. I do not personally suffer from PTSD and absolutely do not claim to speak for those who do, but I suffer from severe panic disorder and experience some really horrible panic attacks (an important symptom of PTSD), and I know what it is like to have my fight or flight go completely haywire. It is terrifying and immediately apparent to anyone around me that I am not in my right mind.
Spec Ops is yet another game that uses mental illness as a bizarre, uncontrollable super-power. It is one that drives the protagonist to accomplish his incredible feats and manifests in completely unbelievable ways that serve in no way to educate the player of the illness. It only exists as an inorganic, transparent tool for the writer to use for whatever purpose he deems fit. It is used to excuse deceiving the player via convenient hallucinations, to stress how edgy the story is, to have cool scenes with flashing lights or symbolic pillars of flame.
This game does nothing but marginalize people suffering from PTSD into being even more poorly understood than they already are and somehow does not realize that it is very transparent about it. This isn’t just bad writing, this kind of schlocky trash hurts people when it is believed to be realistic empathetic, which it very unfortunately is.
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3. Player choice is effectively used as a narrative tool in such a way that it encourages player introspection.
Despite the 100% forced usage of white phosphorus on civilians, Spec Ops occasionally tries to give the player the illusion of choice by letting them choose between two options (although the very end of the game, after the choice for getting the first ending or not, you are given a whopping three options at once for endings 2-4). Where it fails in making this usage of player choice meaningful is that none of these choices have any impact lasting more than the immediate consequence followed by making them.
To illustrate, let me bring up an example: At one point in the game, an ally of yours with valuable information is being interrogated by an enemy. You are given the choice of opening fire in an attempt to save him, or you can let him die to rescue two civilians and stealthily avoid combat altogether. Both actions result in him dying, and the following cutscene where your subordinates bicker is exactly the same either way, aaaaand your choice is never again mentioned during the plot and the ultimate consequence of either choice is exactly the same.
At another point, you are instructed by your delusion-conceived radio pal upon approaching two hanging (but alive) men to shoot either the one on the left or the one on the right. Both of them have multiple snipers scoped in on them, but you can only save one, and they have both committed a crime! The choice here is not which to save, but rather if you follow Konrad’s orders to kill or not. Alternative to killing one of them, you can fight the snipers in the area (which results in both hanging criminals dying in a scripted and unavoidable sequence).
Later on during a flashback to that scene (right after the big reveal that your PTSD super power has been causing you to go crazy in exclusively plot-convenient ways), it is revealed both hanging men were both already corpses, there were no snipers, and that your squad mates had no idea what was going on.
This is yet another moment where the game bullshits you about your hallucinations. So, what if you shot and killed those snipers, were your buddies playing along perfectly to your delusion, somehow? I mean, they took cover and shot at them, too, even responding (without question) to your orders to shoot them with you and acting as if you were really under attack by visible enemies. And, if you simply shoot one of the hanging corpses, the snipers just ignore you and you walk through the valley unharmed. The game’s narratives has no rules, it only has a purpose: to humiliate and degrade you because you dared to try to enjoy a shooting game.
Even further diminishing the importance of these choices is that the game rewards you with an achievement for doing all of them, which naturally encourages the player to take even less responsibility for what they’ve done and just try all the choices to “see what happens.” At the same time that it encourages you to feel the weight of your choice, it fails to give you consequences to it and suggests you try it out both ways just to see what happens rather than actually come to any decision aside from “which do I want to see first?”
At this point, one might stop to consider these choices intentionally being non-choices, as to be some sort of meta commentary on the futility of “doing the right thing” when you’ve already damned yourself… But if they’re non-choices, how are you, as a player, supposed to feel guilty for them? This game’s overwhelmingly dominant theme is player guilt, but how can one feel that when the only choice you are making is to continue playing the game? The only guilt you should be feeling is if you fell for this asinine shame ploy.
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4. Mechanics in Spec Ops deliberately copy other games from the genre as to cleverly point out how unrealistic and ridiculous they are – i.e. ludonarrative dissonance is intentionally used as to prove a point.
For those of you not familiar with ludonarrative dissonance, it essentially means when the game’s mechanics mesh poorly with the game’s overall narrative. An example of this would be any shooter with regenerating health – you can literally be shot infinite times, but get shot once in a scripted cutscene and that character is dead forever. Remember when you went “why can’t I just use a phoenix down on Aeris?” That’s what I’m talking about.
Spec Ops has many things a lot of shooters have – regenerating health, slo-mo activations for sicknasty headshots, achievements for killing many things, restriction to always carrying two weapons, obvious enemy spawn points, et cetera. You probably knew most of these things, but what you didn’t know is that some people (perhaps the Spec Ops devs themselves, although I hope not) argue that when Spec Ops does it, it’s ironic and meaningful.
People exist that literally believe that its many turret segments, lengthy, scripted firefights, and explosive barrels are there because they totally point out how dumb that stuff is, man. Like, they create a dissonance between you, the player, and this hell you’ve been put in, dude. It’s deep. They point it out, somehow, by copying exactly how they are used in what they are attempting to deconstruct. I guess.
Have you ever met a racist that uses the n-word and tells you that it’s okay, he’s joking around, and, like, totally defeating racism by acting joke-racist? Maybe you’ve come across a person that uses “tranny” in jokes where transpeople are the butt of the joke, and then explains that the real joke is that they don’t mean it?
Spec Ops: The Line acts as a criticism of shooter mechanics and narrative roughly as effectively as those people succeed at criticizing bigotry (i.e. their embracing of what they’re doing under the belief it’s ironic is actively contributing to making things worse). It succeeds not as a parody, not as a satire, not as any sort of criticism, but rather as a cynical imitator. History will look at it as not the game that finally made gaming culture think about its indulgence, but as the disgusting video game where you were forced – without an option other than turning the game off, and almost unwittingly tricked – to use a cruel and unusual weapon on civilians including children.
And the worst part? Spec Ops takes pride in its 100% transparency as to guilt being its intention when it does this. It makes you do something awful and then goes “yeah, wow, big hero, huh?” It outright bullies you and thinks it’s hot shit for it, and it is congratulated for doing it because it might bully some people harmlessly enjoying popcorn entertainment into going “oh gosh, maybe I’m a bad person.”
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In summary,
Spec Ops: The Line is a game that serves to patronize and belittle you, the player, for believing modern shooters are harmless fun and make you question why you enjoy them.
This deconstruction I’ve written is a review that serves to patronize and belittle you, the reader, for believing Spec Ops’ narrative was critically relevant and make you question why you enjoyed it.
Some of you, at this point, might be willing to dismiss what I have said as aggressive, rude, or manipulative, but if you think I’m being any worse than the game was to you, fuck you.
* In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, there is a mission where you commit a terrorist attack on an airport and kill dozens of innocents (though the game at least leaves children out) as part of some convoluted plot to gain the terrorist’s trust (you end up killed and an American corpse at the scene ignites WW3 between the US and Russia). The game warns you at the start of the game and when you reach that point in the story (that’s twice) that you may skip it entirely without penalty, as if to say “hey, we did something in really bad taste, you may want to skip this.” There is no reward – in-game, achievement, or otherwise – for playing it. This mission is disgusting and its story justification is ludicrous, but it has the common decency to not only warn you about it, but not force you to or even suggest you should play it.