In Depth - Spec Ops: The Line

(SPOILERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.)

When Spec Ops: The Line starts it does absolutely nothing interesting. If you have played a war shooter in the last five years you know exactly what to expect. One small squad of soldiers who are likable enough to warrant your sympathies when one or more of them eventually dies. Because someone’s gonna die. Someone always dies. And that is the point of Spec Ops: The Line. 

This is war. Someone’s going to die. What Spec Ops doesn’t tell you is that above all else it is you the player that will die. 

Like I said, Spec Ops starts incredibly boring. Another bland macho military shooter in a sea full of better competition.  There is your generic Middle-Eastern setting. Your non-white enemy insurgents. One “by the books” squad commander, one funny guy and one black guy. To start off Spec Ops: The Line does nothing special at all. And that is the point to it. To lull you into this sense of bland sameness that you have seen a hundred times before. Spec Ops gets inside your head by whispering little reassurances. It makes you feel safe and, to tell the truth, bored. Sure there is an air of mystery about the opening chapters, especially when the enemy switches from non-white insurgents to fellow Americans. But everything plays out in the way you would expect it to. Your squads of brave Delta force operators only kill the Americans in self defense. Walker, Adams and Lugo were fired on first. The game makes that perfectly clear. Walker makes the call that they need to figure out what’s going on in Dubai before they take any official action. More self defense killing follows and nothing really interesting happens. 

This by the books formula of modern military shooter writing is perfectly encapsulated in one event. Delta has fought their way into the city looking to meet up with a CIA agent stationed in Dubai. They hope he can give them the answers their looking for. But, oh no, he’s dead and an ambush is waiting for them. It’s a videogame story telling cliché meant only to establish that the enemy is really evil and you should hate and kill more of them. The old bait-and-switch has been done in countless games before. What follows next is, you guessed it, a thrilling escape complete with an entire mini-army of troops for you to kill. There’s even a helicopter. During the escape Adams gets injured. Not significantly, but enough to impress upon the player that the stakes have been raised.  The entire bait-and-switch/escape sequence could have come straight from a Call of Duty game. By now the player feels completely familiar with the game, its story and the conventions of the genre. In other words, the player feels safe. 

Only now does Spec Ops: The Line start to do something interesting. It messes with the players mind.    

My sardonic tone in the above paragraphs may have led you to believe that Spec Ops isn’t fun. For that I apologize. The truth is actually the exact opposite. Spec Ops: The Line is extremely fun. It has cover system that doesn’t always work, but gunplay is tight. Squad commands work well and the experience of killing a group of entrenched soldiers by drowning them in sand is one that you will never forget. Spec Ops is fun. The escape described above is fun. It has a face pace and even though the twist was predictable, doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. I was sitting on the literal edge of my seat during the helicopter escape. And even though the second half of the game is full of memorable moments, it is this sequence that is most firmly implanted in my head. Why is that? Because it is at exactly this precise moment in the game that Spec Ops really starts to play games with the players mind. 

During the frantic running away from a helicopter launching missiles at the protagonists, a character by the name of The Radioman is taunting the player. He starts by playing the crescendo of Verdi Deis Irae by Guiseppe Verdi. Not your typical war shooter music. Compounded with that is the fact that The Radioman is singing along to it. Then he starts chatting in a frantic energy “Something’s about to happen”. The Radioman is on the edge of his seat in excitement and so too is the player. His in game dialogue copies what is going on inside the head of the player. “Something’s about to happen”. But with the game running at a frantic pace you barely have time to register what he’s saying, let alone realize that he was mimicking your thoughts; expressing your want for violence and action as more than just a game fantasy. You’re too busy playing the game to make a mental note, but subconsciously a little mark has been made. And that is just what Spec Ops: The Line wanted. The game has begun to mess with your mind. 

Go watch the scene. I’ll wait. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEDn-u-79-0

Another thing about Spec Ops: The Line is that it is known for its infamous white phosphorous sequence. Everyone talks of the emotional impact it had on them. Walking through the burning, dying remains of enemy troops is one of the most visceral experiences any videogame has ever offered. To top it off, you must walk into and face the burnt corpses of all the civilians caught in the cross fire. The moment climaxes in as the camera focuses on the burnt flesh of a mothers face as she holds her child. By far it is one of the most disturbing and sickening moments to ever to played. What makes it all the more impactful is that you the player are responsible for this horrific mass murder. Spec Ops was designed to have the white phosphorous mortar be your only viable option to continue playing. You, the player, are given the tools and the game waits there patiently for you to use them. Like most gamers, I didn’t think twice about picking up the weapon and started firing away. Odds are you probably didn’t either. So when the automated computerized firing screen comes up the player is ready to get their killing on. What happens next is what makes Spec Ops: The Line utterly unique and a revolution to the modern war shooter. 

The automated computerized mortar sequence is not unlike the AC-130 level from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. That game laid the ground work for the entire genre and any good competitor has a similar level. The mortar sequence plays out in such a similar fashion that it obviously must be Spec Ops answer to the illustrious level.  But Spec Ops had a different plan for the sequence. As the monitor screen for the mortar comes up you catch a momentary limps of Captain Walker’s reflection in the glass. The mortars fire off and soon the screen fills with white, the phosphorous burning them to death. And again you see Walker’s face reflected in the screen. But if you’re really looking beyond what you can plainly see, it’s not Walker’s face reflected in the burning bodies, it’s your own.  Just as the helicopter escape was able to reach into the player’s mind, so too does the mortar sequence. By showing Walker’s reflection as he looks into a screen full of dying people Spec Ops: The Line is mirroring your experience of playing the game. It subverts the fourth wall, reaches straight out and grabs you demanding that you face the horror of what you had just done. Not Captain Walker, not the developers, but you, the player. Spec Ops: The Line forces you to rethink everything you knew about shooters and asks the most dangerous question of all.   

“Do you feel like a hero yet?”

That is an actual quote from one of the games many fourth wall breaking loading screens. The latter half of the game loses most of the subtlety that the first half had built up. The game no longer whispers to you, it’s already inside your head. Now it just screams: “This is all your fault”. “How many Americans have you killed today?” “If you were a better person, you wouldn’t be here.”  Spec Ops breaks down the apathy towards violence and killing that other shooters have accustomed the player to. It directly addresses you and forces you to think about your actions. “The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?” Spec Ops uses a black sense of humor dripping with sarcasm to impart you with a feeling of guilt. “To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for the government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.”  If Spec Ops: The Line is meant to mean anything it’s that killing, no matter what medium, is never harmless. 

You, the player that began Spec Ops is no longer there by the end. I was deeply moved by what I had seen and experienced. It is a game designed around violence, delivering a real and impactful experience. It changes the player by reinventing the modern war shooter genre around them. It breaks all expectations and forces the player to confront the hard realities of a genre that profits off of killing people. In the end, Spec Ops: The Line kills you, the player, leaving someone new in your place. 

The final loading screen of the game said this to me and I honestly cannot tell if it’s sincere or not. 

“You are still a good person”.