Spec Ops: The Line - What we lost.

On January 30th, 2024, Yager Studio’s Spec-ops: The Line was delisted from digital retailers due to music licenses within the game expiring that year [3]. The game is still playable via Steam if you had purchased the game before the delisting, something I and no doubt dozens of other users are thankful for, but it does not soften the blow of losing easy access to one of the most poignant and interesting games of the past decade. It is not only an encapsulation and satire of gaming in the 2010s but also a critique of the pro-war, world police ideology that was born in a post-9/11 America, which stubbornly remains in the minds of some people to this day. It is an odd duck of a game, but one that used the medium of games to peel back the ugly reality of modern warfare and the misguided idea of realism and warfare that had been used as a selling point, and it was brave enough to place the player in truly uncomfortable situations only to then ask: do you feel like a hero?

COD is ‘real’; Spec-ops: The Line is honest.

Spec-ops: The Line was released in 2012 and was developed amid the modern warfare boom that followed the seventh generation of consoles, spearheaded by games like Battlefield 3 and 4, along with the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Trilogy. For about a decade or so, these games were inescapable, and there was one common theme: realism. By now, console hardware was making its final major technical push, with the main selling point of that push being able to render photorealistic graphics in real-time, making a play space that could be one-to-one with reality. This, in turn, led to a demand for games that would utilize this tech to its fullest extent, and users wanting games to be more ‘realistic;’ and realistic is in quotes back there because, in reality, consumers still wanted fantastical plots and characters but set in contemporary settings, but which never really address any major issue with that setting. This problem could have been excused if the vast majority of games released with this moniker weren’t chasing the Modern Warfare money wagon and making pro-war propaganda. While games like Modern Warfare did use their contemporary setting to explore themes of political corruption, the destructive nature of war, and the American military-industrial complex, their contemporaries didn’t put much thought into their settings beyond good guys good, bad guys bad, making the realism argument quite laughable in comparison. Now, enter Yager and Spec-ops: The Line, a title that began development back in the late 2000s. Having seen what the market was filled with and the mantra among consumers being realism, Yager decided to do something bold: they wanted to make a game about real war.

Yager peeled back the market’s insistence on realism and show consumers that realism isn’t just about accurate gun models and dirt brown buildings: it’s about dehumanization, misinformation, trauma, and the mental gymnastics people have to do to stay sane in life-or-death situations. Real war, especially contemporary war, is not cut and dry, something Yager brought in spades to the conversation. But what makes Spec-ops: The Line work so wonderfully is that it masquerades as nothing more than another 3rd person modern military shooter to draw people in before dropping the reality of the situation on them.

The game puts the player in the boots of Captain Walker as they lead his two-man Delta Force squad into Dubai following losing contact with the city after a massive sandstorm and to check in with US Colonel Konrad, who stayed behind in the city to provide relief to Dubai and evacuate the civilians. When the player arrives, however, they find that not only has the evacuation failed, but Konrad and his troops have gone rogue. They’ve taken over the city and are currently at war with a local CIA-backed resistance cell. So now Walker pushes himself and the player deeper into the ruins of Dubai in search of survivors and answers to why Konrad and his men went rogue and what happened in Dubai. The answer, however, is never clear. I’d only had the time to replay the first third or so of the game, but in that time, there were far more excuses from Walker given to keep his men and the player in line than actually answer the question at hand; with Walker shifting from one excuse to another to justify his actions. Always trying desperately to keep the narrative straight that he, and by extension, the player, are in the right, even when they are very much in the wrong.

Do you feel like a hero?

At the end of the opening credit crawl, there is a special guest credit filled in with your username, keying the audience into the idea that they are as much a part of what is about to happen as Walker is. Then, as the game goes on and Walker’s squad mates start asking valid questions like if they should be negotiating with the 33rd or trusting the CIA, Walker shuts them down by reinforcing that their squad are the ‘good guys.’ A pattern that repeats itself throughout the first third, as Walker keeps reassuring his squad and the player that they are in the right as things get more and more muddled and we go from fighting members of the Dubai resistance to members of the 33rd. This a pattern holds until chapter 9 when Walker and the player do something that can’t be reasoned away.

The objective of chapter 9 is to break through the outer defenses of Konrad's blockade so you can get deeper into the city. However, the wall is heavily fortified, so three men aren’t breaking past it without serious firepower. Luckily for Walker, he finds said firepower as the 33rd was issued White Phosphorus mortar shells before defecting. If you do not know what White Phosphorus is, it is a chemical weapon the US developed during WWII that spreads a thin, highly alkaline powder over an area and combusts when it makes contact with the water vapor in the air. The stuff was used throughout WWII, Vietnam, and the Cold War but saw a dramatic uptick in usage in 2004 during the Second Battle of Fallujah and the rest of the war in the Middle East. Despite his men's hesitation, Walker opts to use the shells to decimate the defenses at the wall and launches a targeting drone to relay positional data before shelling the wall into oblivion. The trick is you, the player, have to drop all the shells, like in other modern warfare games, but unlike those titles, the player has to then walk through the aftermath of the shelling and the sudden realization that you just bombed hundreds of civilians in the process, as the range finder had no distinction between hostile and non-combatant, only dots on a screen.

Turns out that Konrad and the 33rd were moving allied refugees into the part of the city he had a firmer control over to keep them safe from the CIA and the rebels, hence why the wall was so heavily fortified, and Walker, his squad, and you the player killed them all. This is not only one of the more harrowing points of the game but also the turning point from which the player’s viewpoint shifts. Until now, the game has used its framing and narrative to connect the player with Walker [1]. Walker is, by extension, a representation of the mindset most players have when going into a modern military shooter, that they are in the right no matter what happens; they are the heroes of this story. However, after the White Phosphorus scene concludes, everything flips when something snaps in Walker. He becomes fixated on finding Konrad, blames him for this whole mess, and punts responsibility for his atrocity onto Konrad. This not only starts what will become Walker’s eventual downward spiral as the story continues, but it's also when we, the players, are detached from Walker and given a more bird’s eye view of the events [1]. The player still controls Walker past this point, but their relationship with him is no longer a one-to-one embodiment of a mindset; it is now a window into the true extent of that line of thinking. We go from controlling Walker to being what remains of his slowly deteriorating rational mind as he and his squad push deeper and deeper into the madness of Dubai.

This is how Spec-Ops: The Line pushes its theming in a way only games can. I think of this moment as similar to the plot twist in the original Bioshock, where it is revealed that the player character is brainwashed and has to obey any order that starts with the trigger phrase “Would you kindly.” Both games play with the framing of the interactive medium by using the lack of meaningful choice in parts of the game to make a statement [1/2]. In Bioshock, the message is that free will is an illusion in games, and in Spec-Ops, it’s that your actions have consequences. The game forces the player to reflect on what they’ve done within the framework of the system they were provided, how they unquestionably went along with what the game told while believing that they, like Walker, were in the right [1]. You can argue that the game doesn’t work if the player isn’t in that headspace, but given the target market they were aiming at, I think the point still stands; that’s a much larger conversation that deserves its own paper. However, I would argue that even if you are not in that modern warfare mindset, Spec-Ops can still work for you because it gives players a chance to be better [1/2].

There is a moment, closer to the end of the game, that I remember when I first played, which got pointed out to me by Extra Credits. In one of the latter missions, one of your squad mates is taken hostage and hung by the irate locals, and to save him, you have to get past a crowd of unarmed but rioting civilians, and the game gives the player a choice unprompted: do they open fire on the group, or do they fire into the air to disperse the crowd. Both options get the same result but expose different things about the player at that moment with that choice [1]. These small, unprompted moments make Spec-Ops truly special, as the modus is on the player to recognize that there is another way out [1/2]. Because at the end of the day, Walker’s mission was to rescue the people of Dubai. There was another small moment that I encountered while replaying for this paper. In one mission, Walker is flaking a turret encampment in a refuge camp, and while I was pushing him up the flank and taking out enemies along the way, an unarmed woman runs out in front of him to get out of the crossfire and for a split second I thought she was another hostile and nearly blew her in half. I didn’t, and she ran off to find cover, but it made me reflect on how close I was to killing her by pure chance; it also made me wonder if I did kill her on my first playthrough and don’t remember doing it. The game systematically didn’t prompt me to think about any of this because, at the end of the day, the game is a third person cover shooter, and the player's only action is to shoot and not shoot. But that simple framing, that binary mechanical interaction, that Spec-Ops: The Line gets the player to think about what they are doing [1/2]. Because in a game like this and a situation like a war where the only options available to you are killed or be killed, how does the humanity of the situation get lost in the folds, and how can you keep calling yourself a hero when you only choose to kill [1].

Citations

[1] Flanagan, M., Nissanbaum, H. and Belman, J. (2014). Game Elements: The Language of Values in Values at Play. MIT Press.

[2] Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Chapter 3: Meaningful Play in Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press.

[3] Parrish, Ash. “Spec Ops: The Line Permanently Removed from Steam and Other Digital Stores.” The Verge, The Verge, 30 Jan. 2024, www.theverge.com/2024/1/30/24055807/spec-ops-the-line-delisting-licensing-2k.