Changing the Game: Self-Reflexivity in Spec Ops: The Line

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’ 33^rd 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 33^rd 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).

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.

Losers Don’t Play Videogames, Heroes do!

I grew up in the 1980s, and having a ‘geek’ dad, I got to watch, read, and play all the things he was interested in, and luckily for me his hobbies are films, books, and computer and videogames.  He loved, and still does, the Blockbusters, and the heroes that come with them.  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Vanne-Damme and Sylvester Stallone regularly appeared on our screens, with their heroic achievements and superhuman ability to survive any peril.  I remember a lot of science fiction being released as mainstream film during this time, with The Terminator, Predator, Total Recall, and of course Blade Runner making their mark on my consciousness—indeed, it has been argued that in the 1980’s, science fiction film achieved a dominant position in terms of production, which given the amount of science fiction films I remember watching, seems reasonable.  All of these blockbusters, made for their box-office appeal were expensive to make, with a lot of special effects, and were designed to bring about maximum profit.  John Clute writes that the 1980s saw the beginning of a changing relationship between science fiction and the world, with that relationship becoming altered ‘almost out of all recognition’, through the intertextual nature of franchises such as Star Trek and as the content of science fiction films began to resemble the real world more (Clute 2003, 64-65).  This change contributed to the mainstreaming of Science fiction, and included the introduction of science fiction electronic gaming and the growing presence of science fiction in television.  This decade also saw a rise in the adolescent hero, a younger, broadly identifiable character, whose appeal did not rely on muscles and violence, but on his ability to use intellect and emotion to solve problems and resolve issues.  Coming from a wide range of economic and social backgrounds, these heroes, often seen as geeks, nerds, and even losers, use their skills as gamers and hackers to achieve their heroic status, which seemed to me a more plausible heroic type, and one I, as a child, could recognise.

                My dad, it turns out, made me into a gaming, sci-fi loving, 80’s film fan.  A lot of the films we watched, the games, we played, and the novels I borrowed from him, remain fixed in my memory as favourites.  Some of them still are, despite the years and the progression of technology that makes them look simple and cheaply made in comparison to contemporary examples, especially in terms of computer generated content.  In the first part of the 1980s, the inclusion of computer generated images, sequences, and animation into live action film was revolutionary.  Tron (Bridges 1982) was the first film to feature CGI to a great degree, and compared to contemporary examples, it looks—and I acknowledge the heresy—pretty crappy, as you can see!

The introduction of CGI in science fiction during the first part of the 1980s paved the way for many, many films, including another of my childhood favourites –The Last Starfighter (Guest 1984).  Computers and computer technology then, were being used to create the very stories that were commenting on their use in society, and on the people that used them.

 Historically, between 1977 and 1988, there is a clear pattern of film that concentrates on the relationship between adolescents or children and aliens.  The Last Starfighter,Flight of the Navigator,ET,  Explorers, and Space Camp all feature encounters between young people and alien life – which Lincoln Geraghty suggests  is because ‘the young are simply more open to wonder and therefore more able to accept the otherness of alien life forms’ (Geraghty 2009).  I would argue that films that engage with the use of videogames and computers, adhere to this same principle: the wonder and openness attributed to the youth of the protagonists and their acceptance of alien life, extends to the presence of computers and computer technology.  This technology, especially in the early and mid-1980’s was as alien as any other science fiction topic, despite its basic grounding in fact.  Films like  The Last Starfighter and

 WarGames (and of course, Tron,  D.A.R.Y.L, and Weird Science) were telling stories and exploring the potential for the use of computers and the perceived dangers of giving them too much power.  However, despite the science fiction themes of these films, computers were not science fiction, they were real.  Keith M Johnston writes that ‘for the first time, science fiction was coming into your house…the computers were real, the technology was real, and you could program your computer to do almost anything’ (Johnson 2011, 2) (including bringing Kelly LeBrock to life apparently), and computers were becoming part of everyday life—at least for some of us!

Whilst films were featuring young people, and using them as metaphors for openness and more accepting of new and alien experiences, there were other factors in the production and release of adolescent oriented film; Johnston says that ‘by the 1980’s, Hollywood had embraced demographic audience research, and studios were increasingly aware of the number of young male customers that were attracted to the new summer blockbuster’ (Johnston 2011, 100-101).  This resulted in a rash of films that explored the relationship adolescents or children have with and in the world, as well as with alien life: Stand by Me, and

The Goonies are two of the many instances that spring to mind.  The result of this focus was that in these films, ‘the 1980’s masculine hero was defined less by the action star than by young male characters that relied on empathy, emotion, and intelligence over aggression and violence’ (Johnston 2011, 100-101).  Despite the dominance of male heroes, I’m not going to discuss gender in this paper, apart from to acknowledge a discrepancy in the number of female heroes at this time, and to say that at the point I was watching them for the first time, I didn’t care that the heroes were male, they were first and foremost  gamers and geeks!

The Last Starfighter is one of the first films that sticks in my mind to feature a protagonist that I identified with (After of course, Luke Skywalker in Star Wars).

Alex Rogan is an average young man who dreams of escape from his life at the Starlite Starbrite trailer park.  The setting of the earthbound portions of The Last Starfighter in the trailer park establishes Alex’s social status, and his desire to leave and to make life better for himself.  Keith M Booker writes that  ‘Every detail [of the opening scenes] reinforces the dreariness of the working class roots of the residents of the trailer park.  Every tiny trailer looks rundown, with tiny front yards packed with kitschy lawn ornaments and banged up furniture.  The small dirt lane between the trailers is overrun with too many people crammed into such a tiny space’ (Booker 2012, 154).  The perception of imprisonment this creates is deliberate, as director Nick Castle explains.  The film, he says, was originally set in a suburban environment reminiscent of ET and Poltergeist, but he considered that this was ‘too derivative of these works’.  The setting was changed to foreground Alex being trapped in his economic situation and to allow audiences to feel sympathy for him and to empathise more with his desire to achieve the American Dream. 

Alex’s principle relaxation and escape is to play an arcade game— Starfighter.  In 1984, when the film was released, computers were not present in every home, or pocket, as they are today, and the Starfighter game, in its huge arcade casing, is situated outside the trailer park’s shop in a communal space.  Whilst the trailer park is seen as a space to escape from in economic terms, the communal nature of the park, nevertheless, is shown as a supportive and nourishing place, with Alex being part of a loving community.  When Alex has a perfect run through and completes the game, many of the park’s residents gather round him in this public arena; as well as supporting and encouraging him as he plays, the technology is so new and exciting that the residents want to be part of it—even vicariously. 

In using an arcade game that involves an intergalactic rebellion, The Last Starfighter draws parallels with another popular film and the wish fulfilment of its central protagonist; as Howard Hughes explains in The Outer Limits: The Filmgoers Guide to The Great Science-Fiction Films  ‘In the wake of Star Wars’ mega-success, every kid wanted to be a star pilot and take on the Empire.  The Last Starfighter was a tale of such wish-fulfilment, offering hope to those who spent their entire lives playing videogames’ (Hughes 2014, 124).  Although I have not actually been in space and fought aliens, I have been playing computer and videogames since I was about 7, and have been there hundreds, maybe thousands of times over the years, and killed untold aliens in the process, so this is a childhood fantasy I recognise!

Films that featured videogames and computer technology were not universally optimistic, and whilst The Last Starfighter was offering its teenage viewers hope for a better, brighter, future, WarGames (Broderick 1983) following Tron’s example, was promoting a more cautious approach to computers and technology, whilst at the same time suggesting that hacking and hackers were a good thing.  

In WarGames, David Lightman, ‘a computer geek, before most people really knew what a computer geek was’ (Johnson 2011, 1), accidently hacks into a state-of-the-art government computer system instead of a videogame development company, and nearly starts World War Three when he begins a computer simulation called Global Thermonuclear War.  The Government assume that the simulation is a real event and starts taking real measures to counter the perceived threat.  Unable to terminate the program, David has to teach the artificially intelligent computer humanity just as the simulation he began reaches its apex, bringing with it the realisation that there is no winner in war.  At the time, the film gave a fairly accurate representation of how a hacker accessed a remote system, placing a telephone receiver onto a cradle and dialling a number and in using this depiction, just like Tron before it, WarGames romanticised hackers and hacking, seeming to condone breaking into computers and stealing or changing information, something that has subsequently touched most people’s lives detrimentally.  25 years after the film’s release Wired magazine stated that WarGames was ‘the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture’ and ‘minted the nerd hero’ (Brown 2008).  Rather than the contemporarily perceived hacker as a destructive force, David Lightmann is as a good character, part of the phreaker culture that studied how telecommunications work, and that considers that all information should be freely available, a movement that has gone on to include Hactivism.  The film simultaneously implies that hacking is a good thing then, and yet questions the widespread use of computers and the potential for them to go wrong if machines are given too much autonomous power.  The ramifications of these films was culturally immense, just like Alex’s brother at the end of The Last Starfighter who is inspired to play videogames, a generation of children and young adults ‘started programming, building games, and basically geeking out’ (Johnson 2011, 2) as our computing interests were acknowledged, explored, and even accepted through the films we were watching.

Whilst WarGames offers us a hero that is similar to Alex in The Last Starfighter, an adolescent, game playing male, the film is doing something substantially different in terms of theme and the exploration of computers  and gaming.  Unlike the Starfighter game, which is a training simulation, the machine in WarGames is a sentient intelligence, which has been given the power and ability to simulate and enact war.  It is presented as a childlike individual in the film, one who must be taught that winning is not everything.  The unsuspecting David triggers one of these simulations, which fools the military into thinking war is about to break out, and it is he that convinces the machine to end the simulation and teaches it that there is no winner in war, making him the hero, despite the fact it was he who started it!  Where The Last Starfighter offers a positive image of technology as a means to escape and to achieve the American Dream, WarGames instead questions the wisdom in giving computers too much power and control, as well as reinforcing the age old message that war is universally lost, no matter who wins.

30 years on, and the science fiction themes that the two films offer have in some respects become fact.  The Starfighter game, an intergalactic military simulation that tests Alex’s skill has gone on to become reality in the form of an international military training programme, Virtual Battlespace 2, which offers ‘semi-immersive, experiential learning opportunities to familiarize and train soldiers in various tactical scenarios and environments’ (Rundle 2012) and is used by many countries across the world, including the UK and the US.  Hacking is not the romantic pursuit that WarGames portrays, but instead is part of everyday life, with news stories reporting the infiltration of multinational businesses such as Playstation, and more than 10 million attempts to infiltrate the Pentagon every day (Bender 2014).  Hacking organisations are common and include the network Anonymous, a collective of unnamed individuals, which use ‘collaborative hacktivism’ to take action against what it perceives to be ‘corporate interests controlling the internet and silencing the people’s right to share information’ (Tsotsis 2010).

The films exploring computers such as WarGames and The Last Starfighter offer two opposing views of computers and technology.  The Last Starfighter shows the potential for  computers as a positive influence, and WarGames is a ‘cautionary tale about the futility of war and the dangers associated with giving computers too much control over our lives’ (Johnson 2011, 2), they all nevertheless were exploring the technology that was being brought into our homes, and our daily lives.  The protagonists in these films are not the muscle bound heroes of the big blockbusters, but a more recognisable, more identifiable hero to the children and young adults that were using computers and playing videogames, and while these films were empowering and entrusting their protagonists in the 1980s with ‘the huge responsibility of representing earth, and defending it from hostile others’ (Geraghty 2009, Ch4, p2), such as aliens or computers, or even from humanity itself, they were also offering us the hope that this technology could bring about our salvation, both economically and socially.  More than that though, these films intimated that the people using computers, programming them, and playing them were heroes, not losers.

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