Is ‘Spec Ops: The Line’ More Than A Military Shooter?
“To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.”
The military shooter genre has been oversaturated for as long as video games have been rendered in 3D environments. This is not a denigration of the genre itself, but rather a commentary on the overreliance of game design tropes to require the player to shoot their way through a story. Many games in this genre, like the annualized Call of Duty franchise, evoke moments of shock value purportedly under the auspice of provoking player contemplation, but these moments are few and far between. Most of the time, the shock value is the only thing that cuts through the experience, causing only the shock to be memorable, as too many shooters fall into identical patterns of gameplay. Spec Ops: The Line, however, is often regarded as a thought-provoking exception to that rule. Yet, I didn’t feel that way when I first finished the game.
In 2018, I argued for a few select examples of first-person shooter games that utilized their mechanics to help develop their storytelling. There are hundreds of games that anchor shooting guns as their primary mode of interacting with an environment or narrative, but few ask the player to reconsider their relationship to the core gameplay tropes of shooting waves of enemies before clearing an area to progress. Spec Ops: The Line is a third-person shooter that addresses several concerns raised in that article that I think are worth exploring in depth. Because although Spec Ops: The Line’s gameplay is mediocre and repetitive, robbing me of the initial sense of awe that people describe when referencing this game, the story’s moments of moral quandary stand above nearly any other installment in the shooter genre.
Time has not been kind to the graphics and mechanics that Spec Ops: The Line offers. For a 2012 game, the developers touted the revolutionary sand technology that helped dynamize and change shooting environments on the fly, embracing the idea of an almost supernatural sandstorm plaguing modern day Dubai. In execution, these setpieces comprise but a handful of spectacled transitions as glass implodes under heavy fire, causing an almost hourglass effect of environmental terrain shifting. Most of the time, however, the storm serves as a means to obfuscate the draw distance of the already washed out game. One would be completely forgiven for dismissing this game on its bland aesthetic alone, for the reason this game lingers within the consciousness of gamers is its narrative subversion despite the adherence to design tropes.
In Medias Res
When first booting up the game, you are placed in a helicopter firing a turret, tasked with gunning down enemy helicopters that are aggressively chasing you. It’s a common design motif of military shooters to throw an introductory bombastic set piece in medias res to inspire curiosity in the player and set expectations for the heights to come. This helicopter scene crescendos into a great crash where the helicopter explodes, tailspinning down until Captain Walker, the protagonist, loses consciousness.
One of the great debates of Spec Ops: The Line is whether the game is simply trying to hook the player’s attention with this opening helicopter scene, or whether it is a coded message that depicts Captain Walker’s death, rendering the remaining game a kind of hallucinatory purgatory riddled with mired flashbacks. Some people have theorized that Spec Ops: The Line is a pre-death sequence that flashes before Walker’s eyes, while others contest that the narrative sleight of hand exists purely to cause the player to question Walker’s perception of reality throughout the game. For, in a later iteration of this same helicopter sequence, Walker acknowledges out loud that something isn’t right – that he has done this before. Rather than a case of deja vu, or a wink to the player acknowledging this fourth wall break, it’s almost certain that Walker is experiencing his own death but for the second time alongside the player. If this repeated death experience is in fact the case, then the ending of Spec Ops: The Line can be explained away as entirely psychological with no basis in reality.
In my experience, I had none of these storytelling expectations about Walker’s reality in mind – and perhaps that’s the ideal way to experience this narrative. I accepted on face value that this helicopter mission was purely used as a hook to get the player interested in the story and didn’t question the narrative for several chapters. The moment that tipped me over the edge into realizing that Spec Ops: The Line was more than just another shooter involved aerial bombing. After already witnessing the atrocity of soldiers being burned alive under the oppressive flames of white phosphorous, Captain Walker proceeds to repay that violence an eye for an eye – and then some – with drone strikes of his own. You, the player, wipe out dozens of soldiers from above, looking through a screen in which Walker’s dull expression reflects back at you.
The debris clears, the enemy soldiers have been defeated, and Walker clears through the wreckage with his two companion soldiers. The defeated soldiers writhe around on the ground in torment, aching to put out the unquenchable flames of the white phosphorous, while others scream out for aid and mercy. It’s an agonizingly slow walk, knowing that these soldiers were once originally on your own side militarily, and from a purely humanitarian perspective, it presents a compelling case that these weapons should be internationally banned in warfare. What drives this moment home indelibly, however, is the emergence of Walker and his soldiers into what is then discovered to be a safe camp for local civilians who Walker thought he had been fighting to protect. A beam of light illuminates a flesh-exposed mother desperately cradling her child, both of whom have been killed by your actions as Walker.
The White Phosphorus Mission
There were subtle clues and hints leading up to this drone striking mission with white phosphorus, but there is no way to justify Walker’s actions as morally justified after this horrifying moment in the narrative. Until this point, Walker has been receiving orders from higher up, been communicating with his special operative squadmates, and articulating higher ideals the entire time. Unless the player went into this experience expecting subversion of narrative expectations, and furthermore the ultimately unreliable narrator that Captain Walker reveals himself to be, the game holds its cards so tight to its chest as to be imperceivable.
When the game explodes, however, everything that happens narratively starts to call itself into question. There is a mission, for example, where Walker confronts the murderous orders of Konrad – the main antagonist in Walker’s delusions – and the player has a choice of how to engage with a sniper scenario. Two men hang from a street sign, with multiple sniper beams trained on these men. Konrad tasks Walker with choosing which one to shoot and sacrifice. In reality, the player has a choice. Unfortunately, when I tried to run from this scenario I was shot dead. I refused to choose between these otherwise innocent people, so I trained my sights on the snipers themselves and took them out in quick succession, thereby freeing both of the potential victims from where they had been hanging.
Some moments of moral concern happen in cutscenes rather than through the players actions – a certain radio tower sequence comes to mind – and thus the more memorable moments emerge from player experimentation and choice. Another fantastic moment of that moral concern arises in a scenario where you are confronted with an angry mob of civilians who are righteously indignant at your behavior as soldiers. Your partner frantically asks for clearance to open fire on this crowd of civilians, thereby dispersing them so they can proceed towards their objective, and this agency is placed in the player’s hands.
Crowd Control
When confronted by this crowd, there was no way I was willing to consider shooting a crowd of innocent people. Tabling my moral considerations for a minute and imagining them as simple polygons, shooters have still trained me that shooting innocent people is something to be penalized – sometimes at the expense of restarting a mission. Regardless of this trained aversion, it was clear that Spec Ops: The Line wanted me to engage with this question of gunning down a crowd of innocent people. Quickly coming to the conclusion that I was not going to shoot anybody in order to progress this part of the story, I experimented with some alternative approaches to my partner frantically begging permission to open fire.
The first and most naive thing that I attempted as a way to avoid shooting through this crowd of innocent NPCs was to simply walk through them. Perhaps the Assassin’s Creed franchise conditioned me to weave my way through dense groups of people, but I was expecting there to be some way to non-violently force my way through the crowd. They quickly shoved Walker back and began throwing stones that chipped away at his health with rapidity. In that moment of heightened concern for his health bar, I panicked. Rather than pepper the crowd with bullets, I opted to melee one of the people in the crowd – an act of aggression but one that typically required two hits to kill an enemy in combat. As soon as I threw Walker’s elbow out, the entire crowd screamed and dispersed as if I had opened fire.
In reflecting on the way I reacted to the crowd’s presence, it was fundamentally different from the white phosphorous mission where I had no choice of how to handle the situation. Whereas there was a pre-rendered cutscene on the other end of the white phosphorus mission that was designed to make me feel horrible for what I had done, I hadn’t ultimately been given a choice – apart from quitting the game – of whether to do it. With this crowd situation, I genuinely did have a choice. What is remarkable about my reaction to hitting a crowd member is the later realization that I could have fired a warning shot up in the air, thereby causing no physical harm whatsoever. The pressure of worrying about my health caused me to stop considering alternative actions and instead tepidly opt into the violence that the game had so often given me permission to exhibit on its world.
Moments of Player Choice
One of the moments that I will never forget from Spec Ops: The Line arose from the result of a vehicular chase through downtown Dubai where Walker defends water tankers that ultimately crash and explode. Trapped under the weight of the flipped truck, a former ally character begs you to take his life through a mercy killing. As the resulting fire from the truck’s explosion creeps up towards his half-crushed body, the player is given control. This man is begging for a quick, painless death when he just effectively manipulated Walker into depriving thousands of people of their only water source in a desert – something that has the potential to cost countless innocent lives. At this moment, I chose to leave the man to burn alive, and was almost shocked at my own hardened stoicism and lack of remorse for allowing this horrible man to suffer a torturous fate. The game awards an achievement depending on what you choose here.
Spec Ops: The Line has a degree of confidence in the clues it leaves along the way. Reading interviews with the developers of the game will reveal deeper layers of Walker’s perception that get cast into doubt, such as scenes that transition by fading to black versus fading to white. It has been confirmed that scenes that have white transitions are explicitly Walker’s hallucinations rather than ostensible or plausibly realistic recounts of his actual special operations within Dubai. That confidence in storytelling is what lends such weight to the game’s final scenes where the player is presented with a choice of how to end their story as Walker.
After committing horrible war crimes and atrocities along the way, all seemingly in the name of justice and protecting innocent lives from rogue power-hungry armed forces, Spec Ops: The Line lays bare the deeply flawed and immoral path that led Captain Walker to this conclusion. Realizing that his mission has been almost completely hallucinated, that the orders he has been receiving have been coming from a dead man whose corpse we see in this scene, it becomes nearly impossible to accept Walker’s actions as in any way justified.
Deciding Konrad’s Fate
Whether you pull the trigger on Konrad, let him pull the trigger on you, or pull the trigger on yourself is entirely a reflection of how many moments of moral conflict and epistemological doubt have presented themselves to you along the way. In this final moment, I allowed Konrad to kill Walker, because I felt that he deserved to die – however metaphorically – and could not be reintegrated into society or the armed forces. You may choose to rebel and fight your way out of this situation, which has other branching consequences that are narratively significant. But the ending I received gave closure to the idea that this story mirrors an almost Shakespearean tragedy – albeit less well-written – in its overtones and dramatic irony.
Spec Ops: The Line is not a good video game. Its shooting mechanics are relentlessly monotonous, with an over-abundance of enemies populating its environments. More infuriatingly, these environments are usually repopulated as soon as they are cleared by waves of enemies, leading to an almost mindless cycle of timing headshots rather than developing a higher order strategy. Guns never carry the weight that a dedicated shooter ought to, and it became hard to develop any nuanced playstyle when weapons were so disposable and ammo types were so exclusive to areas and enemy variety. For a game that might generously be stretched to half a dozen hours in length, there is fundamentally no variation in the gameplay from start to finish, and thus the singular mechanic – cover-shooting – overstays its welcome entirely. Spec Ops: The Line could trim its combat sections by half and the story would carry all of the narrative weight that it aims for.
Does Spec Ops Have Lasting Power?
The only reason Spec Ops: The Line remains such a touchstone in the conversations about storytelling in gaming are the handful of moments that offer a delicate balance of forced perspective and moral choice. It is the kind of story that deserves a second passthrough almost immediately just to apply the game’s conclusion to the earlier breadcrumbs that appear in initial missions. But that second pass through the story might be better served on a YouTube cutscene movie than a proper slog back through the drudgery of shooting for hours at a time.
Returning to the concern I expressed years ago about the ludonarrative significance of shooters, Spec Ops: The Line offers nothing mechanically new to the genre whatsoever. What it does offer, however, is equally worthy of commendation years later, despite the ever-growing sophistication of storytelling in games as a medium. Though far from perfect, Spec Ops: The Line contends with the assumptions that players take for granted within game design and storytelling, challenging us all to think before acting with moral certitude.
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