This accidental casualty, the soldiers would probably say, is just part of the job.Īnd unlike the white phosphorus, this truly was my fault. No one ever reflects on the woman he killed among the tents, the squad never finds out, the loading screens never throw it back in your face with pithy quotes. This murder though there was no consequence for this. He’s bruised, bloodied, and burned by the time he shambles into the conclusion. There are moments in Spec Ops: The Line that have concrete consequences for the protagonist. There’s a tweet from the aggressively political comedian Hari Kondabolu that I’ve thought about almost every day for the past several months. And yet, that’s the moment from Spec Ops: The Line that sticks with me. So when a scared woman in a hijab ran out from behind a tent and I instinctively pulled the trigger, it shouldn’t really have been a unique experience. It’s part of the language of violence videogames communicate in. What I’m saying is, I’ve killed my share of innocent bystanders. Open-world titles like GTA or inFAMOUS give you the option to massacre digital denizens of their respective cities. Modern Warfare 2’s controversial No Russian level had you mowing down people in line at an airport. I’ve played many games where shooting civilians is allowed, or even encouraged. Pinned down by gunfire and unable to move forward, I snuck around a corner and. Most of the population has already fled from the sounds gunfire, and now there’s just a deadly maze of ambushes from enemy combatants. Precious belongings from dozens of different families litter the ground. Soon after entering Dubai, there’s a battle amidst a tent city of sorts. Spec Ops actually gave me this gut-check hours earlier though, and it did so entirely without fanfare. It wants waves of guilt to wash over you as you contemplate what you’ve done. Spec Ops wants you to feel this moment in your gut. Honestly, I don’t think this is the case though. Maybe this is part of the game’s plan too since I was just following the orders of the gameplay, I was complicit in the slaughter of its digital citizens and yet don’t feel responsible for it, just as the hundreds of real-life soldiers who claimed they were ‘just following orders’ have said. If I, as a player, wasn’t able to do anything except this horrific act, it feels a little less horrific that I carried it out. The game was designed to have you do this. It’s also, forgive me, a little on the nose.Īs the game slow-zooms on the burnt husk of a mother holding her child (see why I couldn’t write about this in a high school zine?), it actually lessens my feeling of responsibility. It drives home a couple of the game’s theses: war is hell, and any videogame that paints war as anything but hell is doing it a gross disservice. In the white phosphorus scene, a drone-bombing segment culminates in the incineration of a bunker full of refugees. You, the player, go along with these ill-conceived plans because, for the most part, you have no choice. The main character, a shaved head with a gun and some combat boots, insists on carrying out a series of war crimes for the sake of the greater good. Spec Ops: The Line received a huge amount of attention shortly after release, when people realized that past the generic military-veneer lay a pretty scathing critique of modern military games. Spec Ops made me into a killer, and it didn’t care. But it was an incidental moment of gameplay, an accident in the heat of battle, that’s cemented itself in my brain half a decade later. Five years on, I remember the set-pieces of the game: the burning Burj Khalifa, the helicopter crash, the white phosphorus. This wasn’t a unique take, and, as I soon realized, it was also far too disturbing content for a high school activist publication. My angle was how it got in your head, the way the game made you the ‘just following orders’ protagonist as he burned civilians alive, killed American soldiers, and destroyed water supplies. Soon after it make its opening waves, I started writing a piece for a friend’s local zine about the game. It’s been five years since Spec Ops: The Line released. Jacob Geller analyses the lasting impact of Yager’s traumatic third-person shooter, Spec Ops: The Line.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |