Spec Ops: The Line (2012)

WARNING: It's impossible to discuss Spec Ops: The Line without going into specific detail of the story. Be warned that this is almost nothing but spoilers. Enter at your own risk. 

First Person and Third Person Action shooters have a bit of a bad rep lately because of the repetitive nature of the Call of Duties and Battlefields of the market. The status quo is to oversimplify story and characters to justify the murder of people. It's kind of why zombie games are generally "safe" games: you get to kill stuff without thinking about it. To avoid making the player think about the fact that their "fun" is coming from the killing of people, they often do everything they can to dehumanize the enemies. Zombies, demons, monsters, Nazis. It's almost universal that in shooter games, you're not meant to think of the enemies as anything other than targets to destroy.

Spec Ops: The Line initially starts off this way - a third person shooter in which you get ambushed by what seems like a group of angry, militant Middle Eastern citizens. Very quickly, the game breaks from this norm and causes you as a player to suddenly reflect on what you're doing. Instead of killing hordes of presumably Muslim terrorists or brutal Russians, you find yourself being attacked by a unit of US soldiers that have defected.

Seemingly a minor detail, it is a huge change of pace that immediately makes you wonder how this game got published (especially while a game like Six Days in Fallujah faces constant criticism to the point of probably never seeing the light of day). Here, you play as US Delta force operator Captain Walker, leading a mission to rescue the 33rd Division, only to find that this unit has actually defected and taken control of the city. You spend your time reluctantly fighting off hordes of American troops. Certainly, this fact greatly impacts Walker's two team mates, Lugo and Adams, who slowly become more and more pissed off at their captain for dragging them into this mess in the first place by choosing to proceed into the city rather than stay put as ordered.

As you progress through the story, trying to find out what exactly has happened in the city and why the 33rd has defected and committed some of the atrocities they have for the sake of maintaining order, things begin to unravel. For the first few chapters of the game, it plays like an otherwise generic third person shooter, with the major difference being that you feel a bit uncomfortable fighting the enemy you are. Yet once you get to about the seventh chapter, the game just breaks wide open and punches you in the gut. After coming off as a rather linear game, it eventually provides you with a choice: you must decide whether to go with Adams to save civilians or let Lugo take a shot to save one CIA hostage who has information critical to the mission. This isn't just your usual "Paragon" or "Renegade" choice either. There really is no "right" answer. Choosing civilians seems like a very human thing to do, but at the same time, Lugo has a point that you need the CIA agent to complete the mission. Even more, while the choice doesn't ultimately impact the ending of the game, it does create a rift among your crew. Choose civilians and Lugo will argue and things get heated.

Shortly after though, you are presented with a situation in which you choose to use white phosphorous to attack a section of 33rd soldiers. Lugo objects, knowing how horrible that weapon is, but you are so outnumbered and overpowered, your hand is essentially forced. Right after, it's discovered that the 33rd was actually just providing shelter for civilians, and your phosphorous attacks have slaughtered many. In a moment rare in shooters, your team mates argue extremely heatedly while your character slowly takes in what he's done. The killing is seeping into his mind and he's starting to lose it. It's the first time in any video game that I can think of in which your characters in game seem to be affected by the killing you're doing. 

After a moment, Walker gathers himself and vows revenge on the 33rd, claiming they forced his hand. It's at this point though, if it weren't already evident, that this is not a game built around mindless action and killing. Not long after, you are contacted by the general of the 33rd, and he eventually forces you to execute either a Emirati civilian who stole water or a US soldier who was supposed to bring the Emirati in but killed his family in the process. It's the ultimate statement, really. We're so accustomed to think that the foreigners are "the enemy" and the US soldiers are "the heroes," we never remember that war (and people) are complex. 

Even more, you eventually find yourself working with someone who seems to be on your side, only to find out that he is trying to cover up everything that's happened. One of the elements I loved about the game is that while your characters are trying to figure out what's happened in Dubai, you as a player are trying to figure out who exactly is the good guy and who is the bad guy. The game is almost Game of Thrones-like in that it plays you based on your pre-established expectations of the medium. There are no pure villains or pure heroes in this game. No one is truly "the enemy." No one is truly "the hero" either. 

By the final third of the game, your crew is constantly at each others' throats and Captain Walker is hallucinating and becoming more volatile in his orders. Issuing orders at the beginning of the game, Walker states things like, "Focus fire on that target above!" By the third act, he's issuing orders by shouting, "I need him dead!" Everyone is beginning to lose their minds. 

Of course, the finale of the game is where it completely falls off the rails. Konrad, the perceived villain of the game, turns out to be nothing more than a projection in Walker's mind. Walker was so racked with guilt over everything that happened. He knew the entire time that if he had just stopped when ordered, rather than pursuing in an attempt to be a hero, none of that stuff would have happened. After the white phosphorous incident, his brain just goes bananas in an attempt to handle his guilt. In his mind, he created Konrad as a person who forced his hand and he made himself appear the hero. 

There are four possible "endings," depending on how one handles the finale and the epilogue. All of them just continue to punish you mentally. In one ending, you can kill yourself as your brain starts to truly take stock of the depressing reality. In another, you get rescued and a soldier asks you how you survived in which Walker responds, "Who said I did?" In an even less subtle ending, you get killed by the rescue patrol and you flash back to a previous encounter with Konrad in which he tells you that for men like them, there is no truly "going home" because there is a line they have to cross.

Clearly inspired by Heart of Darkness, the game is perhaps the only shooter that really pushes PTSD out in the fold. It also makes you question your motive for playing shooters. Almost every shooter out there exists for almost mindless entertainment purposes. It's a fantasy power trip. Every game, from Gears of War to Call of Duty to Mass Effect, is making you commit violent acts in order to be the hero. Spec Ops: The Line does not present war or violence as simple. It's complicated. And sometimes you do terrible things that you can't come back from. At the end of the game, the imaginary Konrad says what might be the most profound and poignant line uttered in any video game:

"The truth is...you are here because you wanted to feel like something you're not: a hero." 

Aesthetically, the game bases it in typical "modern shooter" territory. You go to the Middle East and fight in deserts. What's kind of cool is how you're always fighting on humongous sand dunes and skyscrapers. You always have a good view of the city. The soundtrack also mixes a pretty cool original score with real songs that kind of further messes up the sense of reality. The game clearly calls to mind Vietnam. It even uses Vietnam-era rock songs. The menu music is even Jimi Hendrix's rendition of the national anthem. 

Game play wise, it's not necessarily anything to write home about. It's a fairly standard third person, cover-based action shooter. Still, one can't ignore the connection between the game play and the narrative. The game plays a lot like a typical action shooter, throwing seemingly endless waves of future corpses your way. Yet the game always reminds you that you don't really want to be doing this. These are Americans, presumably with American families and American friends. At times, the game is even very challenging. They actually find a pretty interesting balance between wandering into that typical "violence is fun!" thing and the whole, "but I feel really guilty doing this..." 

There is an argument made by some gamers that linearity and too much focus on narrative turns games into basically just movies and harms "gaming" as a whole. Spec Ops: The Line, however, depicts exactly what gaming has to offer as a medium of interactive story telling. It's hard to call it fun, but that's not the point (in the same way that watching Band of Brothers isn't supposed to be entertaining the way that say, Flight of the Conchords is).

 It is linear. It is cinematic. But quite literally all of the emotion is built into the fact that you the player are controlling things.