Spec-Ops: The Line (

2012

) ½

“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”

Modern Military Shooters: A Brief History (2007-2012)
The release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] was a watershed moment for shooters. Before then, the market had been dominated by sci-fi shooters like Half-Life 2 [2004] and Halo: Combat Evolved [2003] and realistic historical shooters, mostly set in World War 2. Indeed, up until this point The Call of Duty series itself had been stuck in more or less the same holding pattern it had been since it launched, trying with varying degrees of success to capture the feel of Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Band of Brothers. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] broke the series out of this rut, by taking the series into the present day with modern conflicts that felt more relevant to the prospective audience. The game's massive success would inspire much of the industry to follow suit and ensured that there would be a whole host of Modern Warfare clones, ranging from established series like Battlefield and Medal of Honor to upstarts like Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising [2009] and Rogue Warrior [2009]. Call of Duty sequels also began to roll off the assembly line at the rate of one a year, as publisher Activision began their usual process of milking a franchise to death. As a result, by 2012 the market was positively flooded with games that were either direct sequels to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] or games that were trying desperately to be Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007].

If you take each game on their own, then they come across as harmless enough. Contrary to popular belief, the games in the modern shooter sub-genre were seldom racist, sexist, or even pro-imperialistic. They were far too vapid to get across even those basic points. The enemies in modern warfare games were interchangeable, whether they were Middle-Eastern guerrillas, African militia, Russian soldiers, or rogue American special forces. The only difference between them is the character models (which most of the time you'll hardly ever see because everyone uses cover and prefers to fight with half a football field between themselves and their enemies) and their armaments. Hell, even the armaments were absurd as I plainly remember battling Russian soldiers in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] that were armed with Israeli made IWI Tavors. Indeed, it's the rare game in this sub-genre that aspires to a point more complex and philosophic than “bad men are bad” and “good men stop bad men.” About the extent of their philosophic underpinnings is the vague notion that bravery, comradely, and heroic sacrifice are admirable traits in a soldier. The fact that these games were regularly denounced as anything “-ist” or “-phobe” speaks more to the boredom of the critics stuck reviewing what was effectively the same game every few months rather than anything in the games themselves.

However, the moral simplicity of the modern shooters was in-and-of-itself rather troubling. War is never a story of good guys fighting bad guys. Even the most morally stark conflicts have a tremendous amount of ambiguous moments and figures. The average unit of any battle is, and has always been, a scared young man far from home; prone, in equal measure, to heroism or barbarity. To pretend, for the sake of a story or a game, that military conflicts are simple stories of good confronting evil is all well and good, but it becomes more frightening when people see so many of these simplified stories that they begin to mistake the fantasy for truth. To be fair, Modern shooters were no more likely to do this than the WWII shooters that preceded them. Games set in the historic period were less troubling to critics simply because of the sense of the historical distance they felt from the conflicts. World War 2 was also a less morally ambiguous conflict than most, with the Western allies being obvious good guys when compared with the Axis powers (the picture gets murkier when you consider the Soviets, and even without them it is nowhere near as clear cut as many believe, but the average player, or critic for that matter, is working with a limited understanding of history). Seeing the same kinds of stories being told about modern conflicts which are both more immediate and more morally ambiguous made many reviewers more nervous.

At the time, there was a vague feeling among commentators, that playing all these games could not possibly be good for the gamers marathoning them. That seeing so many simplified military stories of good and evil would turn the players into unthinking agents of American imperialism. I'm less concerned about video games being used as a vector for propaganda. The effects of fictional entertainment on people's attitudes are always dwarfed by the more insidious manipulation of biased media and state-backed misinformation campaigns. You can only take something so seriously when it openly professes to be nothing more than a pack of entertaining lies. The more serious concern I have for shooters circa 2012 is the sheer boring monotony of them all. Some were fun-enough time killers but few aspired to greatness, and almost none of them took any serious artistic risks. In most cases, their stories and writing were entirely pointless, just serving as an excuse for bombastic action. This is why Spec-Ops mattered when it released and why it continues to matter to this day. It's a modern military shooter that devotes all its efforts towards it's deep, a nuanced single-player campaign (the multiplayer is absolute garbage, totally unbalanced and buggy as hell). It sets itself apart from its peers with a unique take on the nature of warfare and a heavy focus on man's inhumanity towards his fellow man. Moreover, it manages all that while disguising itself cleverly as just another modern military shooter game, so the eventual revelation that it is anything but will hit that much harder.

Trojan Horse
Part of the charm of Sepc-Ops: The Line is the fact that it begins like any other modern military shooters. You take on the role of Captain Martin Walker, who is leading a small Delta Force team into the ruins of Dubai. A few months back Dubai was hit with a cataclysmic sandstorm that cut off all communication with the outside world. One Colonel John Konrad, commander of “The Damned” 33rd infantry regiment was trapped in the city along with all his men. Your mission is simple, make contact with the 33rd if they're still alive or find out what happened to them if they're not. Accompanying you are Sergeant Lugo, a wise-ass sniper who plays fast and loose with the rules and Lieutenant Adams a demolitions expert with a stick up his ass. So far, so boring. The mission and characters could have all been lifted wholesale from any other modern warfare shooter. The setting is a little more unique. It's still the same hellish desert that has been a staple of modern shooters, but the ruined city of Dubai is on its face a strange and unique location. In real life, Dubai is a modern mega city along the lines of New York City, though more decadent and absurd than even the most splendid neighborhoods of Manhattan. To see it laid to waste and turned into a hive of refugee camps and ruins gives Spec-Ops a vaguely post-apocalyptic feeling. Luxury hotels are lost beneath the shifting sands, swanky penthouse apartments are converted into war-ravaged sniper's nests, and deluxe shopping malls become makeshift internment camps. The more unique aspects of this setting though will be initially hidden from the player, as the first level takes place on the devastated highway leading into and out of the city (and should evoke more recent historical memories like the Highway of Death).

Likewise, the mechanics should be familiar to anyone who has played a 3rd person shooter anytime in the half-decade before Spec-Ops' release. You take control of Walker using a standard over-the-shoulder viewpoint. You shoot, aim, take cover, and crouch with all the normal buttons. The core gameplay is a series of cover-based shoot-outs where you avoid enemy fire by ducking behind a bit of wall or helpful object and then return fire or flank the bad guys. The game does offer some unique mechanics like the ability to order your squadmates to take certain actions (Lugo can be ordered to snipe distant enemies while Adams can flush out enemies in prepared positions with a grenade). This mechanic is almost entirely useless because if you're already targeting the enemy or position you want your men to attack, it's almost always easier to just do it yourself. Of marginally more utility is the way the game utilizes sand, enemies can be stunned or buried by exploiting certain environmental hazards and concussive grenades will kick up clouds of sand that stun enemy soldiers. Aside from that though, you could be playing any 3rd person cover-based shooter that has ever existed since Gears of War [2006] spawned the genre.

Now, it wouldn't do for an action game to open with three guys walking through the desert. So the game begins in media res with a thrilling helicopter chase sequence that ends in your helicopter crashing. Helicopters always crash at the start of war games, it happens so often that I'm amazed anyone uses the damn things anymore. Once the copter has crashed the game flashes back to Walker and his men hoofing it to Dubai along the ruined highway. This scene will become significant later on, as the nature of this crash becomes more apparent, but at the start of the game, it feels just like a hook to draw you into a conventional action-packed video game. I'll talk more about this crash later, but for now, let’s just let a cigar be a cigar and a helicopter crash be a helicopter crash.

From here the gameplay, story, characters, and setting all combine and foster a feeling of vague familiarity in the player. You are not surprised when the Delta force runs into hostile insurgents, or when they receive an emergency communication from some of Konrad's men who have been taken hostage by the militia. Every story beat is exactly as you would expect it, and you hardly even notice when Walker shifts the objectives of the mission from reconnaissance to search and rescue. It all feels natural because it's the same story you've heard before a hundred times. It makes sense that Walker would change the mission objectives to rescuing Americans once he found his fellow soldiers under attack. It seems fitting and heroic that he would rush to their aid, even when he's ignorant of the exact circumstances on the ground.

About the only thing which really makes Spec-Ops: The Line stand out from its competitors and contemporaries is the game’s art style. Most modern military shooters tried to achieve a level of realism by using a washed-out color palette that turns the whole world into a mess of grays and browns. It's one of the things I hate the most about the genre. Here we have graphics technology that previous generations of gamers would have killed for, and developers are using it to deliberately make games look like crap. Spec-Ops avoids this by having a rich and beautiful scenery, rich with colors and little details. If you crank up the graphics option to “vibrant” Spec-Ops becomes one of the most colorful games in its whole genre.

At this point, Spec-Ops: The Line has basically risen to the dizzying heights of a basically functional, cookie-cutter game. Were the entire thing just a repeat of the first few missions I’d probably rate it 2/5 or maybe a 2.5/5 if I was feeling generous. Though were this the only thing that Spec-Ops brought to the table, nobody would be writing about it eight years after its release. The appearance of mediocrity that Spec-Ops cloaks itself in during its first missions is shed slowly over the course of the game as the player descends further and further into the pit of horror that is post-sandstorm Dubai.

How Many Americans Have You Killed Today?
The camouflage of being just another modern military shooter is dropped, bit by bit, throughout the first few levels. The shit first hits the fan when Walker and his squad come upon a freshly dead American soldier and are attacked by a group of insurgents who think they are part of the damned 33rd. Negotiations break down rapidly, and Delta Force finds itself in an ongoing gun battle with the insurgent forces. At this point, the only thing setting Spec-Ops apart from its peers is it's more colorful backdrops, and it's decidedly more horrific take on realistic violence. Yet soon layers of ambiguity will be introduced as Walker and the squad learns that the insurgents are being led by Americans (later we'll learn that these men are CIA agents sent to cover up the whole disaster by eradicating any survivors, either from the civilians or from the Damned 33rd).

The mask slips further once Walker and his men come into contact with remnants of The Damned 33rd who mistake them for allies of the CIA and open fire. The first time I reached this point in the game, I froze up, unsure if I was supposed to shoot at these guys. For one thing, they were American soldiers and nominally on my side, and for another, the whole mission up to this point had been an attempt to rescue them. The initial impact of turning your weapons on American soldiers will doubtlessly have less impact on players who have not been conditioned by patriotic propaganda and media to view Americans as the de facto good guys. What makes it more difficult is the way you can constantly hear enemy chatter, and how much the voices of the soldiers your fighting sound like the words of your allies in other shooters. It's so easy to see yourself fighting side-by-side with the Damned 33rd, rather than against them, and it's something of a shock to realize that when you hear someone cry out “get that fucker” they are referring to you.

From the start, your moral high ground is tenuous at best. Sure, the Damned 33rd were the ones that opened fire on you first, but it is readily apparent that they are no roving band of psychos, but rather a group of professionals doing the best they can in a shitty situation. In the chaos following the sandstorm, it fell to the Damned 33rd to keep order and enforce some kind of system of laws and regulations. That they did so with barbaric violence is only natural given the dire situation. That they would grow to distrust outsiders is also pretty understandable given the fact that the last group of Americans to come to Dubai (the CIA) planned to kill everyone in the city. Moreover, the humanity of your foes is reinforced time and again, especially when you engage in a brief stealth section and listen to their conversations. They talk about inane mundanities like who gets the last piece of bubblegum, alongside sharing heartfelt wishes to be back home with their families. The hellish situation in post-storm Dubai has accustomed them to committing atrocities and made them suspicious of all outsiders, but they are still very much normal human beings with traits both admirable and merely annoying.

Still, at this point, the game has merely reached the level of moral ambiguity. There's no real way to tell if Walker's actions are justified or not. He's bucking the establish mission, but with every intention of helping the people trapped in Dubai. He's killing American soldiers, but despite their insistence that they're only trying to save lives these soldiers are acting more like local warlords than an arm of the US military. You could still make the case, at this point in the game, that Walker has made a few tough calls, but every one of his decisions has been ultimately justifiable. However, at the game's midpoint, Walker will cross the line completely when he runs into an enemy blockade and orders his men to shell it with white phosphorus (AKA Willy Pete). For those that don't know, white phosphorus is a nasty incendiary that causes horrific burns and immense suffering to people that get hit by it. The game makes sure that you're aware of just how unpleasant this stuff is because shortly before Walker orders its use, you walk through a battlefield where The Damned 33rd uses against a group of insurgents.

The scene mirrors the AC-130 Gunship scene from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] where the player takes control of distant gunship and rains down death on enemy combatants from afar. Visually, there is only one significant difference, the fact that you can see Walker's inscrutable reflection on the screen. The effect, like in Modern Warfare, is to pull the player back from the grisly work of killing and reduce combat to an exercise in shutting off all the lights. Just like in its predecessor, it is unnerving how easy it is to separate yourself from the violence unfolding below, and how easy it is to forget that each light is a human being. What comes after this though drives home the difference between Spec-Ops grim view of warfare and Modern Warfare's more heroic story. You walk through the ruined remains of the enemy camp, hearing the cries of the injured and dying, and surveying first-hand the horror you have inflicted on your fellow men. Even then a case could be made that Walker is still morally justified in his actions, after all, these men just used white phosphorus themselves, and the brutal logic of justice dictates that turnabout is fair play. Then you see, the room behind the gate where scores of civilians were cowering. In the chaotic firefight beforehand, the civilians were hit by white phosphorus and died horribly.

It's at this point that both the player and Walker will be unable to justify his actions either logically or morally. Walker has committed a worse atrocity than anything we've seen the insurgents or the Damned 33rd inflict on each other. Here his mind breaks down and to protect himself it creates a villain who is responsible for this horror: John Konrad, the commander of the Damned 33rd. He begins to receive transmissions from Konrad, but they are all in his head. In truth Konrad is already dead, he shot himself after his attempt to evacuate the city was met with a disaster that cost the lives of countless civilians and soldiers. Walker doesn't know that though, so he leads his squadron deeper into the city, in hopes of killing Konrad and saving himself in the process, blissfully unaware that both of these objectives are impossible.

Amazingly, things will get much, much worse from here. Walker and the rest of Delta link up with Riggs the last CIA agent operating in the city and assist him in his plan to cripple The Damned 33rd by stealing the city's water supply. When the mission goes awry, Riggs destroys the convoy of trucks carrying the water to prevent it from falling back into the hands of The Damned 33rd. This means that every man woman and child in Dubai is now left without water, and will almost certainly die unless an immediate evacuation can be mounted. Walker rushes to the tower of The Radioman, a reporter who was previously attached to the regiment and who now seems to be coordinating their actions through a powerful transmitter. This same transmitter is the only chance of organizing a mass evacuation before the entire population of Dubai succumbs to dehydration. Yet in the ensuing firefight, Walker, in a fit of rage destroys it, rendering the entire mission pointless. Every man, woman, and child in Dubai is now all but sure to die a slow, horrible death and it's all Walker's fault.

Throughout this section of the game, both Walker and the men under his command noticeably degrade into a state of madness and paranoia. At the start of the game when using the execute command, for instance, Walker dispatches the injured soldiers with cold, efficient brutality. He either shoots the victim with a quick double-tap to the head or snaps their neck with a quick blow. As the game progresses, and Walker descend further into both Dubai and his madness, the executions become increasingly sadistic. He smashes in the skulls of the fallen enemy soldiers or laughs as he unloads a whole clip into their brains. It honestly gets tough to watch at times, even for someone who consumes a regular diet of horror and war movies like me. When Walker gives orders to his men at the start of the game it's all cold professionalism, but as the game goes on he starts to order Lugo to “kill that fucker!” The horror of the situation facing Walker eventually becomes too much, and he begins to buckle under its pressure. The straining sanity is reflected not just in the mechanics but in the character models and especially in the acting. Nolan North, who plays Walker, gives an especially compelling performance of a man on (and eventually over) the edge of madness but the supporting cast is equally effective at conveying this atmosphere of dread. There is no weak link in the game's voice actors, all of them help paint a picture of increasing madness and desperation.

At this point in the game, we've caught up with the action-packed pre-credits sequence with Walker and his men escaping on a helicopter with enemies in hot pursuit. The only difference is this time, Walker makes a singular observation: “Wait didn't we already do this?” At first, it seems like an Easter egg, a smile and wink from the developers as they admit the unreality of their art form. Yet after this sequence, the game takes a decidedly surreal turn, giving rise to the idea that the game is really told in sequence. It’s hard to say exactly what happened when the helicopter crashed in the game’s opening, but it seems evident that nothing that has happened since then is what it seems. Walker was either killed outright at the opening, and his soul confined to some grim afterlife where he will be tormented for his sins, or he was knocked unconscious and his subconscious began to torment him in much the same way. By this point, Walker has killed hundreds of American soldiers and scores of innocent civilians directly and doomed thousands more to a slow and painful death. If Hell exists, Walker has more than earned his place there and I can think of few punishments more fitting than to be made to eternally relive the twisted path than lead him to his destruction.

Yet Walker's torment does not end when the cycle is completed, rather his suffering is only just beginning. From the crashed copter, Walker is plunged straight into a hellish landscape where he is welcomed by a spectral Konrad who welcomes him, not to Dubai as the game's script has been repeating constantly since the opening, but to Hell. From here the game becomes increasingly surreal. There are momentary flashes of a burning hellscape, with Konrad’s HQ looming in the background looking more like Barad-dûr than Burj Khalifa. Indeed, the city becomes more and more surreal and twisted the closer that Walker gets to Konrad’s HQ.

It’s there that Walker is confronted with the truth. There is Konrad, and there hasn’t been for some months. Konrad has already killed himself, and the foe that Walker was hunting down was inside his head the entire time. The only one to blame for all the horror and destruction is Walker himself. There is no escape, whether the player chooses to have Walker kill himself, peacefully leave the city, or die in a hail of gunfire the result is effectively the same. Walker is a casualty, a broken shell unable to live with what he’s done.

Your Choices (don't) Matter
Every so often Spec-Ops will present the player with a moral dilemma or choice that feels significant, but that will ultimately have no impact whatsoever on the game's story. The plot-significant decisions that Walker makes are beyond the ability of the player to interfere with in any meaningful way. You cannot choose to not use white phosphorous on the soldiers protecting the gate (and consequently save the noncombatants hiding behind their lines). Nor is there any action you can take that will save Lugo or Adams from their ultimate fate. There's never an option (short of shutting down your console and going out for a walk anyway) of aborting your foolhardy mission to Dubai. Walker cannot escape his fate. Yet you are allowed to decide whether to track down a CIA operative who may have valuable information or rescue a group of civilians who are about to be massacred. You can't save Lugo from the crowd of civilians that hangs him, but you can choose whether or not to massacre the noncombatants responsible afterward. You cannot prevent everyone from dying of thirst in Dubai, but you can choose to deliver a coup de grace to the dying CIA agent or watch silently as he burns to death. The big picture remains the same, but how you see yourself in it will doubtlessly change.

The effect is analogous to the experience of many real-life soldiers, nearly all of whom had little input into the war they are fighting or the general situation in which they find themselves. They did not declare war, or even have any real influence in the way that their country has chosen to fight it. Their role is to follow orders and accomplish their objectives to the best of their abilities. Yet soldiers are not machines who do exactly what they are told to do, nor should they be. How they react to circumstances beyond their control is a far better indicator of their individual character than the circumstances that they find themselves in. They often have agency in the small things, even some measure of control over the way they execute their commander's orders. Such moments give them a chance to maintain their humanity in even the most inhumane situations.

The player is alienated from Walker, because the character makes all the larger plot-influencing decisions without any input. At the same time though, they are drawn into the character by the smaller moment-to-moment decisions which they have control over. It's the person on the other end of the controller determining whether Walker will open fire on civilians, but it's a whole separate entity deciding to use white phosphorus on the enemy soldiers holding the gate. As Walker continues to press further and further into Dubai the less he seems to be reflecting the wishes of the player, many of whom would wish that he would give up on his mission already and head home. We become as much a subject to Walker's madness as the men under his command. Before long the player will cringe uncontrollably with each new cut-scene, wondering what sort of insanity this bastard will inflict on us next.

As one of the loading screens reads: “Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.” The real test for any individual is not that they live a life free from all hardship and adversity, such a life could only be gotten by blind luck. No, the real test is how each of us responds to the pressures that mount around us. This is the only silver lining around the utter bleakness of Spec-Ops storyline; a faint glimmer of humanity in all the darkness and misery. If Walker is in hell, as the game seems to imply, then these choices may represent his only chance at redemption. No man controls his circumstances, but everyone controls how you react to them.

Where's all this Violence Coming from? Is it the Video Games?
Some commentators have argued that Spec-Ops: The Line is a critique not just of the modern patriotic, violent military shooters but of violent video games in general. I find it hard to sympathize with this viewpoint, because if this is the case then Spec-Ops is not just absurd but flagrantly hypocritical. This game is way more violent than Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007], hell it's way more violent than Call of Duty: World at War [2008] which goes into about as much detail of the historical atrocities of WWII as any shooter I've seen (that it still falls short of how atrocious the real-life conflict was should tell you all you need to know). If the goal is to warn the audience about the dangers of violent video games, then it's more than a little hypocritical to package that message in a game that is not just violent but remarkably violent. If the developers really believed violent video games were dangerous in-and-of-themselves, I find it hard to accept they would make such a violent video game at all, let alone one as twisted as Spec-Ops: The Line.

The problem with many video game critics is that they have difficulty commenting on subjects outside their narrow area of specialization. They often lack sufficient knowledge of history, or politics, or human nature, and what knowledge they do possess is often warped by popular politics and easy slogans. So naturally, when they play through Spec Ops, they see it as a critique of their favorite past-time and interpret the plot as such. The game does serve as a meta-commentary on the player's desire to feel like a hero, which mirrors Walker's cognitive dissonance that protects him from the full horror of what he's done. We continue to play, assured that eventually, everything will turn out alright because that is how it usually works in these games. Slowly we realize that Walker, and by extension ourselves as the players, are the bad guy in the story.

But Walker is not the only one in the game operating under this delusion. The soldiers of The Damned 33rd are under the impression that the only way they can perform the heroic action of keeping the people of Dubai alive is by keeping the city under a strict lock-down and killing anyone who breaks their draconian rules. Take for instance the scene where Walker uses white phosphorus on the Damned 33rd stationed at the gate. One of the survivors of the blast is dazed and confused, muttering: “we were trying to help.” When Walker accepts the surrender of the remainder of the Damned 33rd, the sergeant in charge tells him “All the Colonel wanted was to keep people alive... Remember that.” In their minds, Konrad and his men were doing whatever it took to save what they could. They were blind to the fact they had become monsters in the process, much like Walker. Likewise, the CIA team in Dubai was operating under the assumption that they were the good guys, making the hard choices to preserve American power and prestige. No word of the disaster that befell Dubai could be allowed to reach the outside world, less it sparks resentment and backlash. To them, a few thousand doomed soldiers and civilians were a small price to pay if it buried the secret. Men of all stripes in Spec-Ops: The Line are prepared to commit horrors in the name of heroism, not just the player character.

I contend that the devs at Yager are doing this not to castigate the players for wanting a heroic fantasy (which is harmless and natural, especially for young men, IE the core demographic of video games) but rather to show us how easily this desire for a heroic fantasy can be exploited. How deep into the depths of Dubai do you go before you realized how fucked up the situation is getting? What horrific war crimes did you commit before you realized the lies that you were telling yourself? In real life, these myths about what is and isn't heroic are carefully cultivated by those in power. The whole system of American imperialism rests on a myth that holds that America has a responsibility to intervene abroad for the sake of the greater good. Young men are fed a steady diet of lies about how they will be heroes and saviors for their actions, and sent around the world to kill and die for the sake of a powerful elite. Nor is this a uniquely American or uniquely modern phenomenon. One does not need to study history very long or very deeply to realize that exceptions to this rule are few and far between. In all ages, and among all peoples young men dream of heroism and commit atrocities, all for the sake of a powerful few.

The problem is not that you the player wants to feel like a hero. This is in-and-of-itself a harmless or potentially even beneficial desire (as it can lead you to perform genuinely heroic deeds). Nor is there any harm in playing a video game to scratch this particular itch, as modern life often leaves us with few chances for heroism (though there are always plenty of chances to be merely virtuous). The problem is those that seek to cynically exploit this desire for their own ends. The game is a warning, not about video games, but about the world beyond the games. We would all do well to heed it.