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Choice in Games: Musing on Spec Ops: The Line
13 years ago
Warning: This journal contains massive spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line. If you have any intention of trying this game out I'd recommend doing so before reading this journal.
I just finished playing Spec Ops: The Line. I'd heard a lot of good things about it by people I respect, so I decided to give it a look. Being dirt cheap thanks to Steam's winter sale didn't hurt things either. The game's single player campaign is short but focused, delivering a powerful narrative but middle of the road game play. It's run of the mill cover based combat. Take the psionic bits out of Mass Effect and you've got a pretty similar system. Still, it gets the job done.
What really struck me were the choices in the game, particularly in hindsight after reading some negative reviews. To refresh everyone, there are a number of choices scattered throughout the game; save civilians or a mission critical CIA agent, shoot a dying man in the head or leave him to burn alive, use white phosphorus to clear out a large number of soldiers or not, and the final choice which I won't spoil. Now if the reviewers are to be believed only the final choice has any real impact on the story. No matter what you do the civilians die, shooting the trapped man or not doesn't change anything, and its impossible to get past the troops without using the phosphorus. No matter what these things happen, and the phosphorus incident is integral to the entire third act. Nothing you do can prevent it.
But that's not true. There is a way to stop those things from happening. The throws it in your face in the end. During the final confrontation with the Colonel he practically spells it out. "You could have stopped. You could of gone home." He wasn't talking to the character, he was talking to you, the player. The ultimate choice of Spec Ops: The Line, and of any game really, is the choice to play. You chose to keep going, you chose to kill US soldiers, you choose to deprive Dubai of its remaining water supply, you chose to lead your men to their deaths, it's always your choice. There's always a choice, stopping is always an option.
This is the first time I've ever seen a game take this meta route, where the moral high road is to not play. I've never seen a game that actively guilts its players for doing what it was created for. Spec Ops: The Line is the opposite of a Skinner Box, repeatedly punishing the player to see how much abuse they take before leaving. And before you say I'm reading too much into this, think back to the start of the mission. Walker's mission was to investigate Konrad's signal and then fall back. A simple recon mission. But the very first thing the team finds in Dubai is the source of the transmission. Walker and his Delta Operators complete their assigned mission within the first ten minutes of game play. The fact that the game continues and they push on is your choice. You keep playing. At any point you could turn the game off. Mission complete. Walker goes home, someone else comes in to clean things up with a bigger force. But no, you keep pushing on, and everyone dies. You want to play the hero, but in the end you are the villain.
Has anyone else played Spec Ops: The Line? What are your thoughts? Am I as nuts as Walker or am I making sense?
I just finished playing Spec Ops: The Line. I'd heard a lot of good things about it by people I respect, so I decided to give it a look. Being dirt cheap thanks to Steam's winter sale didn't hurt things either. The game's single player campaign is short but focused, delivering a powerful narrative but middle of the road game play. It's run of the mill cover based combat. Take the psionic bits out of Mass Effect and you've got a pretty similar system. Still, it gets the job done.
What really struck me were the choices in the game, particularly in hindsight after reading some negative reviews. To refresh everyone, there are a number of choices scattered throughout the game; save civilians or a mission critical CIA agent, shoot a dying man in the head or leave him to burn alive, use white phosphorus to clear out a large number of soldiers or not, and the final choice which I won't spoil. Now if the reviewers are to be believed only the final choice has any real impact on the story. No matter what you do the civilians die, shooting the trapped man or not doesn't change anything, and its impossible to get past the troops without using the phosphorus. No matter what these things happen, and the phosphorus incident is integral to the entire third act. Nothing you do can prevent it.
But that's not true. There is a way to stop those things from happening. The throws it in your face in the end. During the final confrontation with the Colonel he practically spells it out. "You could have stopped. You could of gone home." He wasn't talking to the character, he was talking to you, the player. The ultimate choice of Spec Ops: The Line, and of any game really, is the choice to play. You chose to keep going, you chose to kill US soldiers, you choose to deprive Dubai of its remaining water supply, you chose to lead your men to their deaths, it's always your choice. There's always a choice, stopping is always an option.
This is the first time I've ever seen a game take this meta route, where the moral high road is to not play. I've never seen a game that actively guilts its players for doing what it was created for. Spec Ops: The Line is the opposite of a Skinner Box, repeatedly punishing the player to see how much abuse they take before leaving. And before you say I'm reading too much into this, think back to the start of the mission. Walker's mission was to investigate Konrad's signal and then fall back. A simple recon mission. But the very first thing the team finds in Dubai is the source of the transmission. Walker and his Delta Operators complete their assigned mission within the first ten minutes of game play. The fact that the game continues and they push on is your choice. You keep playing. At any point you could turn the game off. Mission complete. Walker goes home, someone else comes in to clean things up with a bigger force. But no, you keep pushing on, and everyone dies. You want to play the hero, but in the end you are the villain.
Has anyone else played Spec Ops: The Line? What are your thoughts? Am I as nuts as Walker or am I making sense?
Shame it seems the only problem I keep having with narrative oriented experiences, that it didn't translate over into the game-play department. Though then again as for choices, in the segment there were choices you can actually make that the programmers actually thought the players would decide. Like with the two men that you had to choose to execute them, where instead you can kill the snipers, or the mob of civilians that tried to attack you, you can fire over their heads to scare them off, rather then killing them or running away.
They also show a side of war everyone doesn't like, the "hero". Much like Walker's view of Konrad at the beginning, is merely a man that believes he is doing the right thing and in the end, what of every well written villain you've seen in a narrative, a conflicting view that they believes they are doing the "Right" thing. The Marshal law in Dubai was the only peace the damned 33rd had before the CIA screwed it up by making the civilians riot.
There was no... moral high ground and such is the case of war.
Now going back on a narrative oriented experiences, it always seems the best one's I've played for in the story are actually the worst games/mods I had played to an engine. Planescape Torment, Earthbound, Bastion, Deus Ex(the conspiracy) and now Spec Ops: The Line
One thing that stuck out with me was that the game actually started to get to me the further along it went.
-BIG SPOILERS AHEAD-
Like the part where the mob lynches Lugo, I legitimately got infuriated, and when he didn't get back up from that something made my damn finger lay on the trigger at that crowd of civilians... I've honestly never seen a game with such a strong story that it could make me take actions I normally would never consider, ones that aren't even part of the game necessarily.