3/11/2023 0 Comments Spec ops the line the battleThe game was designed to have you do this. It’s also, forgive me, a little on the nose.Īs the game slow-zooms on the burnt husk of a mother holding her child (see why I couldn’t write about this in a high school zine?), it actually lessens my feeling of responsibility. It drives home a couple of the game’s theses: war is hell, and any videogame that paints war as anything but hell is doing it a gross disservice. In the white phosphorus scene, a drone-bombing segment culminates in the incineration of a bunker full of refugees. You, the player, go along with these ill-conceived plans because, for the most part, you have no choice. The main character, a shaved head with a gun and some combat boots, insists on carrying out a series of war crimes for the sake of the greater good. Spec Ops: The Line received a huge amount of attention shortly after release, when people realized that past the generic military-veneer lay a pretty scathing critique of modern military games. Spec Ops made me into a killer, and it didn’t care. But it was an incidental moment of gameplay, an accident in the heat of battle, that’s cemented itself in my brain half a decade later. Five years on, I remember the set-pieces of the game: the burning Burj Khalifa, the helicopter crash, the white phosphorus. This wasn’t a unique take, and, as I soon realized, it was also far too disturbing content for a high school activist publication. My angle was how it got in your head, the way the game made you the ‘just following orders’ protagonist as he burned civilians alive, killed American soldiers, and destroyed water supplies. Soon after it make its opening waves, I started writing a piece for a friend’s local zine about the game. It’s been five years since Spec Ops: The Line released. Jacob Geller analyses the lasting impact of Yager’s traumatic third-person shooter, Spec Ops: The Line.
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