Spec Ops: The Line came out not so long ago, and it received
some puzzling discussion. As a game, as
a shooter, it’s a queer construction: not terribly good at shooting, with
wonky, slightly off controls, messy mechanics, questionable level design and
terribly counterintuitive stealth. It’s
sloppy. Its opening scene is
nonsensical, largely disconnected from the rest of the game and, sure enough,
you’ll have to play through it a second time, after a number of terrible,
scarring events have unfolded. It forces
you to do terrible things, to kill the people you usually spend games
saving. Concepts of right and wrong, the
power fantasies that usually games usually manufacture, the reliable male-gaze
that normally preoccupies video games, all of these things are present in Spec
Ops. But they’re not in their usual
shape. The elements you’re familiar with
are twisted, slightly off in a manner that slowly, surely becomes monstrous. The structures of game, the structures gamers
are used to inhabiting, are flipped upon themselves, distorted.
If this description seems obtuse, some responsibility is
owed, at least in part, to the fullness and wholeness of the artifact that is
Spec Ops: The Line. Eliot, when asked to
summarize the ideas behind The Wasteland after reading it, simply read the poem
again. Such is the nature of an article
of this density. It’s easy to discuss
the qualities of Spec Ops: The Line, its incongruity and design flaws, its tedium
and at times snicker-worthy writing, the visceral, fun (if gummy) play behind
it all. But to actually explain what the
game does is far more difficult. It is,
at its heart, a game obsessed with building up an experience, an experience
which, in the end, resolves in its last moments based on choices you’ve made
throughout the game. The biggest choice,
the choice to play, that’s your too. But
once you’ve begun, your options are limited, and even the choices that you
appear to have control over, in the end, aren’t really yours to make.
And this experience isn’t entirely pleasant. You’ll die at times. You’ll have to kill people you don’t want
to. At one point the game forces you to
choose between using white phosphorous and no longer playing (arguably what the
developers want you to do). White
phosphorous, to those unfamiliar with the chemical substance, white phosphorous
is an incendiary chemical which has been employed since World War I as an agent
for generating screening smoke and an antipersonnel weapon due when applied
directly to unarmored targets. White
phosphorous is highly incendiary, igniting on contact with air, and the
legality of its use depends largely on who you ask (or how you ask, with
different Army field manuals and training guides providing different guidelines
for its application, though it is more or less universally considered
acceptable to employ white phosphorous as an agent for generating smoke
screens) but when applied to human beings, it effectively acts like napalm:
sticking to human flesh, causing terrible burns, burning with tremendous light
and heat for a brief period of time.
Spec Ops forces you to employ white phosphorous, through the
lens of a camera, and then walk through the charred bodies of your
victims. Some of the enemies (who are
American soldiers by the by) are still moving when you start to tromp through
the ruins of the encampment you cleared out with the help of your friend Willy
Pete. This is one of the few moments of
the game where no tactical choices can be made, no alternative strategies can
be selected. You can’t stealth your way
around using WP, or simply hunker down until the enemies die. I spent nearly two hours trying to do so,
using my allies sniping abilities after I ran out of ammo before, exhausted, I
finally dropped bombs on to screaming American troops below. At the end of the long walk through the
carnage that you’re forced to take, you find a ditch that used to be an
improvised holding cell, full of the charred corpses of civilians. It’s a jarring experience, one you’re forced
to look at, one that recurs again and again as the game progresses.
And its set inside of a city consumed by chaos, where the
allies you normally relate to, American troops, become your enemies along with “insurgents,”
the citizens of the place you’re exploring.
The line between friend and foe blurs and, in the end, your own efforts
to help the figures who, conventionally, would be there to restore order put
the entire city at risk and force you into a cascading series of bad decisions
that, in the end, leave you scarred, friendless and beset by visions of your
past, your present and your future that indict you for the acts you’ve
committed.
To call Spec Ops a game about PTSD is both oversimplifying
it as a game and giving short change to the resonance behind PTSD – PTSD sufferers
must cope with the resonance of their stresses in painfully ordinary
circumstances, attempting to normalize their lives after experiencing horrible,
mind shattering events. Spec Ops deals
with the origin of PTSD, forces you to run a psychological gauntlet and come
out the other side (possibly) but it never deals with the resounding effects of
the disorder. At least not
directly. And that’s where it becomes
possible to “read” Spec Ops in different ways, as a text. Are the experiences you have during the game echoes
of the stress you experience at the end of it?
Is the impetus to return to Dubai that originates the action of the game
real or imagined? The context is so
light, so flimsy, that in and of itself it comments on game design even as it
provides you with what could potentially be a serious case of cognitive
dissonance still effecting a character who travels from war to war, attempting
to distance himself from his emotions.
PTSD is complicated.
Spec Ops is complicated. The
relationship they have is extremely complicated. But Spec Ops, and the manner in which Spec
Ops operates as text, is distinct in that, unlike more conventional “game texts,”
it doesn’t rely entirely on player action in order to present players with the capacity
to develop “readings” of the game through play.
That element is still prominently featured, and without it Spec Ops
would be beyond a bore. But Spec Ops’
overt presentation of an unreliable narrator and a surreal and hyperreal
environment which often shifts and recasts itself without warning (and is only
revealed in part in a series of flashbacks at the end of the game which cast
doubt upon the entire experience) also allows players to forming “readings” of
explicit events in the tradition of unreliable postmodern texts. I’m not saying Spec Ops is presenting us with
writing that equals that of Hunter S. Thompson or Paul Auster, just that it
possesses a similar set of qualities with regard to narrative. Nothing in Spec Ops: The Line can be taken at
face value.
This in and of itself isn’t new to games. Horror games play on this kind of
unreliability quite frequently, and even the Batman: Arkham Asylum game
actually played with it a bit (to delightful effect). But a straight third person shooter like Spec
Ops, set in such a hypermasculine jingoistic context and advertised as a heroic
assertion of violence isn’t the sort of context where we usually expect to have
to question our own senses. We’re not
used to having to wonder if what we’re being told is true, about how and why
things are occurring as they are and exactly what’s going on. By the time you reach the opening scene of
the game again, it’s clear that something is very, very wrong with the game,
both from a conventional, moralistic perspective (you’re switching between
killing American soldiers and unarmed civilians) and from a sensory input
perspective: what you’re seeing isn’t real, or at least isn’t representative of
the whole reality.
By generating this questioning mindset, Spec Ops effectively
invites players to criticize the shooter genre and the role it normally asks
players to occupy: that of a heroic figure who resolves conflict and restores
some sort of status quo through the liberal application of violence. In the end, Spec Ops does not allow us to
generate any kind of status quo, even a twisted one. One way or another players are forced into a
terrible resolution of the action they’ve chosen to participate in. The only option, the only way to restore any
kind of status-quo at all to your experience, is to stop playing.
Which is, of course, always an option with any game. But it’s never quite so apparent as it is in
Spec Ops that this might be the right choice to make, that there’s something
fundamentally wrong about the mentality that shooters subconsciously and
overtly espouse about both conflict resolution and humanity. Spec Ops is merciless in its portrayal of
violence and shakes its head at conceits of heroic action. Even as you’re asked to identify with
characters who are, at their heart, fundamentally good people, you’re also
being asked to harm “good” people and help “bad” people, and the only choice
you ever really have in the matter, once you’ve decided to take up arms, is to
lay them down. Because no matter what
you choose to do in the game, it’s going to end badly. The only good decision, the only decision
that lets you salvage even a scrap of the world you apparently are meant to
hold dear, is to turn off the game and walk away. To lay down your sword and shield and leave the river behind you.
It’s not an easy choice to make, and once the game is done,
it’s too late: it has worked upon you and its violence has taken its
course. You can do your best to move on,
but you won’t ever whole again, and the images that Spec Ops presents you are
haunting, resonating specters of modern war.
Spec Ops isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a bold stroke for video games,
and its message is one worth hearing, one that cannot be readily paraphrased or
summarized without doing it disservice.
It isn’t necessarily an anti-war game, and it certainly isn’t a jingoistic
first person war-cry. It is, in large
part, what you make it.
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