Yager Development: Because shooting dudes should… wait, who?

I had a wonderful time with Spec Ops: The Line, both because I have no problems at all with the fairly basic shooter formula it follows, and because I love Heart of Darkness. Like its primary influence, Spec Ops tells a story about the brutality of which humans are capable when stripped of any sense of restraint; when we are freed from consequence, or pushed to severe desperation. At the same time, it is an incredibly self-aware experience about the nature of violent games, which are themselves examples of scenarios of zero restraint: there are no consequences for actions taken in a video game, there are no lines a player must not cross.

SPOILERS: I wrote an article summarizing a key moral choice from the game, along the lines of a few other reviews I've written, but I found the article hollow and inadequate: although I could justify my course of action, it was far from decisive, and even my own pragmatic code suggested that quitting the game would be more "correct" than my course of action. The drive to stop playing altogether was something of a trend – Spec Ops, unlike any game I have ever played, actively hates the player and wants to make him or her quit.

It is, for example, impossible to proceed past the game's most outstanding "moral choice" moment without performing an staggeringly vile deed: dropping white phosphorus bombs (albeit unintentionally) on unarmed, innocent civilians. Arguably, this is not even a choice, which the impeccable dialogue of the scene seeks to highlight: after determining that the white phosphorus is the only way to bypass the mass of soldiers before them, Lugo objects: "There's always a choice," he says. "No… there's really not," is Walker's reply. Both are correct, in a sense: there is no way to progress through the game without using the white phosphorus, yet the player is only forced to perform the deed if he or she insists upon finishing the game.

At some point, most other players of the game disconnected from Walker and started to see him as a separate entity rather than an avatar of themselves. I, however, continued to identify with him, continued to try to rationalize my actions, and learned something about myself in the process. I told myself that survival and progress toward comparatively noble goals could justify all of my actions, from the white phosphorus, to the occasion when my itching trigger finger caused me to shoot and kill an innocent civilian who ran out from behind a corner in the middle of a firefight. I didn't mean to kill that person, and regretted it deeply, but I still kept playing because like Walker, I was driven to see the conflict through to its resolution, regardless of the cost.