Spec Ops: The Line

I’ll be honest: I was having doubts about whether or not I should continue the gaming topic for this semester. After all, I’d already exhausted a lot of the really, really good games by the end. It was during this period of doubt, over the holiday break, that I got my hands on Spec Ops: The Line.

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Now this is more like it. A game I can actually be proud of and point to to say: See, gaming is growing up after all! Why, you may ask? Well, as we all probably know, some of the best-selling and most well known game series are based on the concept of modern war. You play the righteous Anglo-Americans fighting against either Russians, Arabs, or both to save the world. But is war really so cut and dried? Is this really the way to live a glorious life? Spec Ops confronts us with these idiosyncrasies in the cleverest, most brutally honest fashion.

In Spec Ops: The Line, you play as Captain Walker, leader of a three-man Delta Force team sent into a storm-shattered near future version of Dubai to look for survivors from “The Damned 33rd,” a decorated infantry batallion that volunteered to aid the evacuation effort and mysteriously vanished months ago. Needless to say, you do find survivors, but they only serve to draw you farther and farther down the path to your own degeneration.

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The situation in Dubai, in short, is a mess. Constant fighting flares up between rogue soldiers of the 33rd and armed civilian looters backed by several CIA operatives. The looters attack because they believe you’re the 33rd come to take them away, and the 33rd attack because they believe you’re CIA goons come to kill them. In short, you really don’t have a side, or an objective. It turns from wounded American soldiers under fire from looters, to trapped civilians, to simple vengeance, with the insane Colonel Conrad leading you farther and farther into the heart of darkness.

Despite the atrocities they’re forced to commit, and the utter mental deterioration they suffer, the men keep going further and further into the pit they’ve dug for themselves. The difficult choices they need to make, combined with the stress of combat and the dissonance of killing one’s own countrymen slowly wears on the conscience of each member of the team. They start to fall apart as a unit, held together only by the sheer necessity of survival. Why do all this, you may ask, when their only mission is to find survivors? Well, why do we play military shooters?

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This, I believe, is the question Spec Ops wishes to ask. It takes a look at everyone playing military games in which the objective is to slaughter virtual images of their fellow man by the dozens in the most efficient way possible, and asks “What are you really doing?” As the game progresses, one starts to ponder whether the messages Conrad has for Walker aren’t really directed to the player instead. He asks why we couldn’t just stop, go home, stop the killing and senseless violence. Could it be that a game just asked us why we’re playing it in the first place?

Spec Ops summarizes the whole military shooter genre in that sentiment. Perhaps it’s right, and all us gamers who enjoy military shooters are just trying to fill some void in our personal accomplishments with some kind of hyper-masculine hero fantasy, killing thousands and thousands of artificial simulations of our fellow man for personal satisfaction. Spec Ops sees all this and asks a truly provocative question: “Do you feel like a hero yet?”

4 thoughts on “Spec Ops: The Line

  1. Jeffrey Romano Post author

    Ya know, Pavara, that’s a bit of a stretch. Media has had violence in it ever since there existed the ability to write things down. The Iliad? Full of violence. Yet we never blame that for causing school shootings, do we? This same debate has occurred numerous times, just each time with a younger scapegoat with less establishment and ability to defend itself in the public scene. Furthermore, some Asian countries play more video games that we do. South Korea has video game stadiums, China has numerous internet cafes where people go to play games, which are only increasing in popularity. As Steve said before, violence is a human characteristic, the Freudian thanatos if you will, and violent media is both a partial contributing factor and a symptom of a society of violence.

    As to the claims about school shootings in general, there’s a certain confusion between correlation and causation that occurs here: because a shooter happened to play video games does not mean video games were the cause, no more than their musical preferences are the cause. Further, could it simply be that violent people look for outlets to express their violent emotions, and so turn to violent video games, as opposed to the other way around? If you feel like you have studies in social psychology to back up your claims, I’d love to hear them, but at present this seems just a tad bit ignorant.

  2. Pavara Ranatunga

    See? This is exactly why I am an opponent to the idea of video games, especially those that encourage violence and gore. I personally believe that there is a strong association between video game violence and actual “real life” violence. It is those people who are obsessed with such games that turn out to be the next gunmen for incidents such as Columbine, Virginia Tech, or even as recent as Sandy Hook Elementary.

    Also, I think it is safe to say that video games corrupt the brains of adolescents today. In today’s society, such games have been declared as “the best selling” or “the fastest selling”… And then we wonder why our fellow classmates in Asia score higher on standardized tests and get accepted into better higher institutions of learning….

  3. Patrick Yan

    There seems to be several connections between this game and Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. I’ve read several articles about the plot of the game, which follows very closely to the novel including the over all theme of leading a small team to rescue someone. Also, probably not by coincidence, the person the player has to rescue in the game is named Konrad, very close to Joseph Conrad’s own last name.

  4. Steven Stulock

    Excellent post, Jeff! I have heard quite a bit about this game, and I understand it has faced quite a bit of critical scrutiny. I, however, love the idea of it.
    I have never been too adamant about FPSs. Yes, I played my fair share of Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Medal of Honor, but I was always more of a strategy/tactical/RPG kind of gamer. But I don’t think the reasons I like Civilization V are all that dissimilar from the reasons that millions of people are addicted to Modern Warfare 3. I think we play games to feel powerful; to feel in-control. I enjoy controlling hundreds of thousands of simulated people…to have them build monuments, work in mines, or go to the front-line and kill their neighbors. Others like the feeling of power generated from putting an end to a heap of pixels shaped like a human being, or from driving a simulated two-ton hunk of metal at 200mph, or from singlehandedly leading a professional football team to the Super Bowl. Violence and manipulation are ingrained in the human psyche–a verdict that is even more prevalent in the United States than in most places around the world. Video games let us explore that dark side of our psychology with little to no consequence. But is is ignorant to believe that killing thousands of fake people has no effect on our minds. So, in examining the catharsis that video games provide to so many people today, we must ask ourselves, “at what cost?”

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