Self-reflexivity
is a known feature of many media forms, with film and literature turning their
gaze inwards in numerous texts, and such self-reflexivity is frequently
connected with the postmodern text, a theoretical structure with which videogames
are also associated, through their ability to subvert traditional ideas about
the distinction between reality and simulation or image, for example. Some videogame releases of recent years
attempt to address cultural concerns connected with gaming; Bioshock uses the game’s structure and
narrative to consider notions of free will as a gamer; Deus Ex: Human Revolution offers a consideration of the uses of
computer and internet technology to collect potentially sensitive, or private,
information, and Heavy Rain uses the
medium to offer an examination of the prevalence of violence within the medium,
through reinstating violence as a destructive and shocking part of gaming,
rather than a norm. This is taken
further in the 2012 game Spec Ops: The
Line (Yager 2012), which explicitly explores the morality of violence in
videogames using the tropes of the first person shooter genres to subvert
player expectations and, furthermore, uses the visual and ludic elements of
other games as pastiche to do so.
Spec Ops is a loose adaptation of both Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the canonical Apocalypse Now (Coppola). The game offers a personal exploration of the
decisions made by the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker (and the player), as
he makes his way through a speculative version of Dubai, which has been
destroyed and left communicatively in darkness by a series of sandstorms, in
search of the ‘Damned’ 33rd Battalion and their commanding officer
Konrad who have gone missing after being left to protect the survivors of the
storms. The game makes explicit
similarities between Walker and the protagonists of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse
Now, placing his actions in dialogue with the actions of the protagonists
of those earlier works. At first, Spec Ops appears to be a clone of games
like the Call of Duty franchise,
achieved through using the same tropes and ludic strategies of that franchise
as the basis for questioning those games portrayal of a violent occupation as a
legitimate and normal part of the ludic experience of these games, but the
intertextual relationship the game has with other games in the shooter genre,
as well as the texts upon which the game draws from, signals more than simply a
direct cloning of these other texts, but uses these texts as the basis by which
it critiques itself and the medium.
The game opens with the player
controlling Walker as he enters Dubai, under orders to carry out reconnaissance
to locate the 33rd Battalion and their commanding officer John
Konrad. Upon finding the bodies of
American soldiers, Walker disobeys his original orders for reconnaissance and
instead decides that the team will enter Dubai to search for survivors,
beginning the game. In most narratives,
this disobedience is justified, with subsequent events proving that the
original rubric is flawed, and so the player assumes this to be the case. Once gameplay begins, there is a familiar:
aim, fire, load, repeat. However, where many
games use this as a method of empowerment, as Michael Hartman suggests, offering
repeated sequences that require the player to ‘wantonly execute people,
zombies, head crabs or splicers, which satiates some limitless desire for
players to empower themselves while playing’ (Hartman 2012), Spec Ops uses instead ludonarrative
dissonance to subvert these usual empowerment fantasies, seen in the repetitive
fight sequences, in which wave after wave of enemies have to be destroyed,
their numbers swollen to absurd levels,
and are placed on the screen in a way that allows the player to destroy
them without the need for much gaming skill.
Here, the ludic enjoyment and empowerment provided by the fight sequence
is destabilised and questioned through the sheer volume of enemies that appear
in opposition to the protagonist and his crew of two. Ludonarrative dissonance is also used to
subvert ludic progression. Typically,
videogames require the player to learn skills and offers a reward system for
the successful implementation of those skills, such as better weaponry after
killing an end of level boss. As the
player controls the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker deeper into the ruined
city of Dubai, she begins to perceive that the reward for the successful
implementation of ludic skills is, in fact, a punishment: the games tone
becomes darker, and she is treated to a series of scenes of escalating
brutality as the protagonist degrades both physically and mentally on the
screen in front of her. The
ludonarrative dissonance and the negative reward the player is given for
progression culminates in one of the most disturbing scenes in the game, which
the player is presented with a scene familiar to players of Call of Duty
4. In the Call of Duty mission, Death from Above (and it cannot pass
unnoticed that the name of this mission is the same as the slogan printed on
the front of the helicopter Colonel Kilgore uses in Apocalypse Now, further emphasising the intertextual relationship
between the different texts), the player takes the role of a gunner in an
aircraft, providing support for the main characters of the game (including the
protagonist, Soap McTavish) as they make their way through hostile territory
for extraction. The mission calls for
the player to target white ‘hotspots’, areas of enemy militia and armament to
allow the ground crew to reach the extraction point, with an achievement for
killing 5 or more enemies with one shot, thus highlighting the games objective
of killing as many people as possible (after all, Call of Duty 4, as with the other games in the FPS genre are shooting games and require the player to
shoot enemies).
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| Call of Duty 4: Death From Above mission |
For the player of Spec
Ops who has previously completed this or similar missions in other games,
the rubric seems clear: target the white areas with weaponry and eliminate as
many enemies as possible. However, the
game critiques this, using a munition—white phosphorus—that has been hotly
debated after it was revealed that the US military employed this weapon in 2004
whist fighting in Falluja, Iraq (Reynolds 2005) as the primary method of attack
in this scene. This munition is used in
warfare as a obscurant and will allow the protagonist and his team to pass this
encampment unscathed. Sergeant Lugo
challenges Walkers use of the munition, citing its harmful effects and offering
a moral counterpoint to Walkers determination, but is overruled; this section
of the game is completed via an aerial view of the landscape, and closely
resembles Call of Duty 4 in its
design, as does the gaming strategy.
However, unlike Call of Duty,
once the section has been completed, the player must guide Walker and his team
through this encampment, where she witnesses the consequence of using this
weapon. White phosphorous, as well as
providing cover for the movement of troops, has a number of other effects, such
as severe injuries, including being able to penetrate clothing and to burn
directly through skin and bone. The
smoke is toxic and can cause severe lung irritation if it is inhaled. It is also incendiary, and fragments of the
phosphorus get stuck to the skin as it explodes—and will continue to burn until
fully consumed, or deprived of oxygen.
(Forensic Architecture 2009).
 |
| Spec Ops: The Line |
After the smoke has cleared—literally, the players
reward is revealed. Usually for
performing such feats, progressing through narrative as well as ludic elements
of the game, but here again, those expectations are disrupted, leaving the
player shocked as she sees that Walker has fired on civilians, and that she was
controlling him at the time. The
cut-scene that follows the white phosphorus scene depicts Walkers path through
burned corpses, lingering on a dead woman clutching a child to her, their
mouths open in agony. The players
response to these images—and the realisation that she condoned this by carrying
out the attack—mirrors that of Lugo and Lieutenant Adams who argue in the
background of the scene, their confusion and self-disgust evident. This part of the game aroused strong emotions
in testing, with players having to leave the room and to compose themselves after
seeing the mother and child images (Dyer 2012).
Game writer, Walt Williams considers this to be a moment in the game
that aims to offer the player an insight into the psyche of the protagonist,
saying ‘if you were actually a soldier in that situation, you would have to
make that very conscious choice of trying to move on and accept what you had
done’ (Dyer 2012) and explicitly asks the player to make a similar decision:
‘is this actually a game that I want to finish playing? And if I do, I have to
accept what just happened and choose to keep playing this game’ (Dyer 2012).
 |
| White Phosphorus |
This scene, in particular, seeks to highlight, and to
subvert, player expectations, forcing her to reconsider her actions—and her
acceptance of those actions—even in a virtual context. Spec
Ops offers the player a commentary on choice in the game, despite its
strict linear structure; there are repeated pieces of dialogue that feature
Walker telling other characters that there is no choice in the actions he is
taking, such as when Walker is challenged by Lugo about the use of white
phosphorus. At each point in the game
where there are actions that are immoral, or which the player is uncomfortable
with, the player is offered a choice: to quit playing. In continuing to play the game, much like
Walker continuing into Dubai, she makes a choice, and each time does, the game
rewards her with more death, more destruction, more discomfort, and complicity
in Walkers actions. Even the loading
screens of the game question the role the player takes in the game. Usually, loading screens offer the player
hints and tips to aid in the successful completion of that game. However, Spec
Ops once again subverts this trope, and instead offers captions such as ‘It
takes a strong man to deny what’s in front of him’, ‘Do you feel like a hero
yet’, ‘You are still a good person’, ‘How many Americans have you killed
today’, and ‘To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is
heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless’.
Each of these screen captions serves two purposes, to remind the player
of the psychological events related to the characters, and to question her role
in the game. Tellingly, each of the
quotes suggest that the player is implicit in the violence Walker inflicts
during the game, asking her if she feels like a hero as she controls Walkers
actions. ‘To kill for entertainment is
harmless’ suggests that the player’s actions are harmless; however, these
actions are not referred to as virtual: the player is not told that she is playing,
she is told that she is killing, a word
whose connotations are predominantly negative.
Brendan Keogh considers the loading screens to be part of Walker’s
subconscious, an attempt to justify his actions (Keogh 2012, Loc 176 of 2850),
reflecting the decisions Walker makes for himself and his team and how these
change the way the trio interact with each other, and with subsequent events as
the team penetrate deeper into Dubai; Walker becomes less professional in his
tone and manner, and his behaviour becomes more erratic and brutal and the group
dynamic is lost. His physical appearance
changes along with his mental deterioration; his skin is burned and eroded by
the sand and the violence he encounters and initiates is reflected in this
physical change. The game does more than
this, however, it challenges the player’s assumptions about her own behaviour
whilst playing Spec Ops and similarly
structured games. The game, then,
directly addresses the player and asks whether this hyperbolically violent game
arouses feelings of enjoyments, and furthermore whether she considers the
killing she engages in to be harmless.
As Mitch Dyer of IGN comments after playing Spec Ops the game tries to engage the player with a number of
questions: ‘What is it you were wanting to feel when you chose to sit down and
play a military shooter? What did you think you were at the beginning of this
game? Why did you think it was okay to keep going and to keep doing these
things?’ as Walker commits more and more atrocities, disobeying the commands of
his superior officers to further his own aim of finding the missing Konrad.
 |
| Loading Screen |
Ultimately, the game asks the
player whether the only way to win Spec
Ops: The Line is to turn it off, to refuse to engage with Walker and his
team; to actively question her role in games such as Call of Duty, Black Ops, and Spec
Ops, and further asks her if playing these games make her complicit in the
violence the various protagonists inflict throughout the games. Spec
Ops does not attempt to either justify or condemn the violence it presents,
but through the hyperbolic gameplay asks the player to consider this for
herself, and whether turning off the game constitutes a legitimate gameplay
strategy. In being able to do this, Spec Ops: The Line in turn asks
questions that encompass the medium of the videogame, questioning its own
actions, drawing attention to its artifice, and offering the player the ability
to do the same.
Videogames, through interactivity that renders the
player a quasi-author, are particularly well placed to interrogate intersections
between real-world and virtual-world ethics in a variety of ways. As I have shown, for Spec Ops: The Line, this takes the form of individual morality and
decision-making. Videogames also
challenge the ethics of gaming meta-textually. Indeed, Spec Ops not only considers the fictional ethics of hyperbolical
virtual situations, but also reflects on the ethics of gaming itself, whether
or even if gamers are free to choose the actions they perform, or of mainstream
videogames’ normalizing of risk-taking and violence.
There has been much debate over
whether videogames increase real world violence or whether they have an
opposite effect, offering a virtual and safe outlet for violent propensities
This paper has been less concerned about the likelihood of players of actually
killing themselves or others in the real world than the ways in which
videogames engage consumers ethically. Whether the haptic participation of
players in ethical and unethical fictional events is more or less likely to
lead them to similar actions in the real world is not within the scope of my
research. My conclusion, however, is this physical participation allows for a
more engaged interrogation of ethical values than traditional media do. Bob Rehak notes that ‘the disavowal necessary
to gameplay is like the ‘yes, that’s what I see’ of successful cinematic
structure, but goes further: ‘yes, that’s what I do’ (Rehak 2003, 121). The ability of the videogame to allow players
to explore virtual ethical situations, carrying out physical actions in a
physically safe real-world context, allowing them to do, and at the same time to consider the ethical and/or moral
weight of these actions more intensively displays a maturity of the medium, as
well as of videogame designers and players who interact with these games.
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