Spec Ops: The Line was one of the big surprises in video games, in that it's a war game in which the enemies are not people you feel good killing. The thing about action games is that they're supposed to satisfy through adrenaline, you're supposed to get a bit of a high from pulling the trigger and watching someone's head explode, or what have you. But Spec Ops, a modern military shooter, does away with that in the first few minutes. The first few enemies you find, and kill, well, as your squadmate Lugo says 'aren't these the people we're supposed to be rescuing?'Here's the deal. You arrive in a ruined Dubai, where massive sandstorms have essentially buried the city, and have left the survivors holed up in squalid conditions in ruined buildings. And those survivors
are working with the CIA to try to oust the 33rd army battallion led by John Konrad who have gone rogue in their role as army ambassadors. They stayed behind after an order to leave, in order to evacuate the city. But the evacuation got caught in a storm, and thousands of people died. The 33rd turned against itself, and the remaining civilians got caught up in the violence. Everyone starts fighting for their own interests, often against each other, over dwindling water, fuel, ammo, and shelter. The storms keep on rolling in. It gets awfully muddy.
But the muddiness is vital to understanding how the game works. The thing about the enemies that you kill, is that they're all people. They're all people who are doing their best in a terrible situation. As the sand rolls in, those who are left behind are thirsty, have no food or water, have no place to live, and they're getting increasingly desperate. And it's into this desepration that you, as a player, enter.
This is one of those incredibly rare situations in which you, as a player and as a player characeter, don't actually have any moral high ground in your decisions. None. Usually, the people you're used to fighing in these sorts of games are bad people. Even in relatively sympathetic games, they're people whose motivations you can understand, but they go about it through the wrong methods. But here, in Spec Ops, you're going through things the wrong way too! Almost all the way through the game, you end up making decisions that you have to make, because you'll die if you don't. And these decisions, whether they be burying survivors under suffocating sand, or killing civilians who turn their guns on you first, all these decisions are made with survival in mind. The other people have to die because they aren't you. And you can't all survive.
This turns the modern military shooter on its head, really, because usually the other people have to die because they aren't on your side, but in Spec Ops, all the enemies you kill are supposed to be people who are on your side. Refugee combattants, allied soldiers, and even the very unarmed civilians you were dispatched to save. Why do you end up killing these people? Because it's either them or you.
The entire game revolves around this problem , that you're trying to do your best to do the right thing, and yet doing the wrong thing time and time again. You're trying to rescue civilians, you're trying to only shoot 'bad people,' but all sorts of people are turning against you even though you're trying to talk them out of it. The best way to have moved forward would have been to have stopped, and left as soon as things got going. But if you keep playing, the body count will keep on going up, and it'll keep on being you who is making the bodies hit the floor.
This pushes you into a real situation that is a lot like a bizarre indie game called save the date, which is well worth playing if you haven't before. In both these games, it is incumbent on you to realize that the majority of other people will lose as long as you keep winning. If you can call it winning. Ultimately, any forward progress you make comes at a great and terrible price to those whom you should be saving. There isn't a good outcome for you, or the people you're working with, and if you genuinely want the people who you're supposed to save to do well, the best bet is to butt out, and call it even. Look for survivors, radio the cavalry, and go home, to quote Captain Walker in the first mission. But the more you keep going, the more you find that it's a big mess of people making bad decisions, and you're stuck in the middle of it.
Spec Ops: The Line is the game that comes the closest to really wrapping a game's head around the notion of original sin, or for the layman, the knowledge that everyone is just varying degrees of messed up. It's harder to see in other games. You're the hero, other people are disposable. Their deaths don't even flicker as a blip on your karma meter, really. And games like Fallout tell you that as long as you do more good stuff than bad stuff, then you're doing a good job. But Spec Ops, well, you as the playerhenchmen, goombas, koopas, the locust, the Helghast, aliens, whatever, are free to execute because they're not you.character aren't making decisions better than anyone else out there. Your decisions are frequently just as bad, if not worse. Konrad was responsible for the deaths of 1300 people, while you as a player character are guilty of at least a generous chunk of that yourself. It's a clear breakdown in games, in which you have been conditioned for a long time to believe that because you're the player, because you're the protagonist, all your actions are morally justified. Other people in the game, enemies,
Why do you kill enemies in games? That's a google question that has no answers. Sure, it'll tell you how to kill enemies, or what weapons to use on particular enemies but the existential question of why you kill enemies isn't covered. Usually, it's because they're standing in your way. Because they're not you. Sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're cartoonishly bad, and they have to be made that way so that you as a player can still feel okay about blasting them to bits. If they were people, just like you, it would be a lot harder to massacre them en masse.
Which is why Spec Ops, though a magnificent game, isn't fun. It's not fun becasuse step by step, you're making bad decisions, and as you make those bad decisions, they cling to you and make the rest of the game happen. Nothing would happen if you'd just leave, but since you don't, or can't, the game and so are everyone else's. Delta Squad, Colonel Konrad, the 33rd, the refugees, the CIA, they're all making bad choices, and you don't get to stand above it all. As bad as everyone else is, your decisions are equally bad, and equally reprehensible. And this is what sin is. You can see it in everyone else, but can you see it in you? The best part of the game is when the game opens up, and you see yourself for the first time as someone who is, in every way, making the same decisions as your enemies. The only difference is that you're you. That is literally the only thing setting you apart. And most of my time spent preaching on the law half of law and gospel, it's spent trying to get people to see that this law, this law of God, applies to them, as much as it does to other people. And this is so hard for individuals to figure out, almost impossible, until they wrap their heads around the idea that they are every bit as sinful as everyone else. Most of us don't see that until we have it pointed out to us in very particular ways.gets more and more difficult, and more and more dark as you go. And the darker it gets, the worse your decisions are,
Spec Ops, it's one big story along the same lines of what Nathan the prophet said to David, when telling him a parable about David himself, Bathsheba, and Uriah the Hittite. Nathan tells David the story about a poor man who had a sheep, whom he loved and cared for deeply, until a rich man came and took the sheep away, and ate it in a meal for his friends. And when David heard this, his anger burned hot, and said that the rich man deserved death, at which point, Nathan says one of the great lines of the whole Bible: 'YOU ARE THE MAN.'
David had stolen Uriah's wife. David had gotten Uriah killed. And after all that, David was living fat and happy, with his new wife in his big palace, assuming that everything was, and was always going to be, fine. He couldn't see his own problems until they were pointed out to him by a story, by a parable, by seeing that the standards of behavior he was expecting of everyone else, those weren't the standards that he was obeying. He had in mind how people should act, he could see how other people weren't meeting up to that, and then he had to see only through a story, through a narrative, that he wasn't doing what he thought everyone should be doing, or living the way he believed everyone should live.
Now, next week. we'll be getting into what you do with that information. When Walker, at the Gate, finally comes face to face with his own sin, what does he do with that information, and how is that an awful lot like what we do with that self same information?
See you next time,
PJ.
