One of the most popular video game formats today is the “third-person shooter” which follows a character over their shoulder while they blast away at anything in front of them with brutal force. Like many shooter-style video games, there is usually very little thought put into who the character is shooting and why. Because many games use this format, third-person shooter players quickly accept violence as necessary, justified, and enjoyable. In 2012, Yager Development released a game called Spec Ops: The Line that challenges these conventions. It used action game cliches to force the player to contemplate their agency in the violence from games, and by extension to question the ideologies that frequently support action games.
Most games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series, treat violence extremely casually. It seems to have no permanent effect on the game world or the psychology of the players. Usually games present situations where the violence is justified or lacks consequences. Players can mow down civilians and shoot policemen indiscriminately. The players are allowed to hide behind a mantra of “That’s just how you play the game.” Effectively, they present themselves as subject to the whims of developers and the mechanics of the game world. Spec Ops inverts this relationship.
Spec Ops begins as a conventional action game. The player is a soldier commanding his Special Forces squad through a Middle Eastern war zone in an attempt to find a U.S. soldier named Konrad who recently went rogue and took over the city of Dubai. At one point in the middle of the game, the Special Forces squad believes that Konrad is hiding in a camp underneath a skyscraper. Due to Konrad’s hostility, they decide to unleash a white phosphorus bomb on the enemy camp to subdue him. The player presses a button to launch the attack, but in the next cutscene the squad discovers that they were tricked by Konrad into bombing a camp full of innocent civilians. The squad is traumatised by the horror they cause, but the player’s character brushes it off, saying that the destruction was Konrad’s fault for tricking them. Spec Ops takes this argument in a meta direction.
Throughout the game, Konrad taunts the squad by saying that they could give up any time they wanted and prevent the deaths they keep causing. The squad never listens. Eventually, the game’s loading screens stop displaying helpful tips. They just ask the player if they “feel like a hero yet.” This undermines the entire foundation of shooter games. Spec Ops presents violence as horrifying. The squad often kills innocent or undeserving people by mistake. The destruction in the game is treated like a disaster and not a righteous conquest of foreign landscapes. Through Konrad, the game constantly dares players to simply stop playing and prevent more sadness and pain in the game world.
The white phosphorus attack would ordinarily be passed off as a manipulation of the antagonist or the game developers, but Spec Ops calls that whole line of thinking into question. Instead of treating the player like an ideological subject, it emphasizes the player’s godlike power over the game world. Each player has the agency to stop playing whenever they want. That makes every tragedy that occurs in Spec Ops their fault. Each friendly fire incident or war crime is committed by the player pressing a button with a vague prompt from the game. This basically means that the player has to choose to commit these crimes.
The game also utilizes a late plot twist to further its emphasis on the agency of game players. After all of the psychological stress of the game’s story, the protagonist learns that Konrad was a hallucination from the very beginning. Konrad’s plot twist emphasizes the player’s role in the atrocities committed in the game. The protagonist recognizes that they are the one responsible for the chaos in the story. The player simultaneously realizes that Konrad is a fictional character who had no true influence on their decision to keep playing the game. The player and the protagonist are forced to come to terms with their villainous role in the game world. Players come to understand just how horrifying the action in most video games would be if it actually happened.
Spec Ops: The Line forces video game players to reevaluate violence in video games. Instead of casually accepting violence, Spec Ops makes players realize how terrifying war can be. In Call of Duty, war is a romp. In Grand Theft Auto, killing civilians earns money for the player. In Spec Ops, these actions have severe consequences for the mental state of the characters and the setting of the game. The end result is a game that asks its audience to question the value system that made them enjoy violence in the first place.
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