Spec Ops: The Line- The Year's Most Groundbreaking Game Was Also It's Most Overlooked.

The latest attempts to use gaming as a scapegoat for senseless human violence came when tabloids noted the Dark Knight Rises shooting that took place in Aurora a few months ago was perpetrated by someone with a ‘supposed interest in videogames’. The fact that this kind of surreptitious choice of accusatory phrasing still exists in modern media says a lot about how gaming, or more importantly peoples opinion of it, has progressed over the years (hint: not so much).
More recent puritanical hi jinx saw the torch and pitchfork crowd hunt for the Connecticut elementary school shooter on Facebook and found someone whose activities included *gasp* playing Call Of Duty and *dramatic gasp* Mass Effect, lucky they had the wrong guy, or our beloved industry would be in the cross-hairs again.

It’s been decades since Carmack and Romero sparked worldwide controversy with their seminal shooters Wolfenstien 3D, Doom and Quake, games that pushed the public’s hot buttons as much as they revolutionised the medium. As virtual worlds continue to evolve and become closer to reality and the media buzzards continue to circle, should developers be more responsible for their creations and who/what they are likely to influence?

Yager development’s Spec Ops: The Line breaks new ground in it’s depiction of violence and offers a subversion of the established narrative and thematic tropes of military shooters and action games as a whole.

The game sees a small squad of Delta Force operatives as they investigate a missing battalion in Dubai after the city has been devastated by a series of catastrophic sandstorms.
They attempt to rescue any civilians still trapped in the city, as well as hunting down the 33rd infantry and their rogue commander, John Konrad.
As they descend deeper into the chaos caused by the storms and the their own soldiers, their spirits and their souls are tested to breaking point.

A thinly veiled re-telling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, Spec Ops is the polar opposite of the gung ho war porn that has been dominating charts for the past few years. It’s a gruelling descent into the hellish theatre of war, punctuated by moments of intense horror.
Moral choices have become the norm in any story driven game worth it’s salt these days, it’s a mechanic that’s fast becoming trite, but here your decisions make little difference to the stories ultimate outcome, they are in place to force the player into questioning their own role in the atrocities unfolding. While the set pieces may at times seem blunt and ill handled, they are never without impact.
One moment about mid point through the campaign sees main protagonist Walker command his men to rain white phosphorous down on the enemy soldiers, a moment of glorious destruction that echoes the ’death from above’ overwatch missions in the Call Of Duty series. This moment of catharsis is abruptly cut short when it transpires that a large number of civilians are burned along with the rogue US troops. It’s a horrifying sequence that epitomises the stories main objective; explosive conflict often comes at a grave cost.
As the campaign reaches it’s climax and Walker’s squad close in on the ‘villain’, they steal the cities water supply in an attempt to illicit a response from Konrad, thereby condemning the remaining survivors of Dubai to die of thirst. The game takes a traditional mission structure and turns it on it’s head by making the player regret their actions even as the main character, fragile and unhinged by this point, bays for the blood of the antagonist. It doesn’t really matter how awesome it is to destroy a skyscraper with a helicopter, or how much your avatar screams with joy, your still massacring US troops with complete countenance.

Spec Ops isn’t the first game that has toyed with traditional narrative in an attempt bring a maturity to the brainless action. This generation in particular has produced some key innovations in adult storytelling, like the ‘harvest or save’ choices in Bioshock or the renegade/paragon mechanic of Mass Effect. It‘s by no means a new phenomena, but it‘s come along in leaps and bounds in recent years.
Military shooters in particular have juxtaposed graphic imagery of violence with it’s consequences as an exercise in justification, none more so than the billion selling franchise, Call Of Duty. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare kills off it’s main character in a nuclear blast and has the player control them as they slowly expire. Infinity Ward’s follow-up Modern Warfare 2 had the now infamous ‘No Russian’, which sees a group of terrorists execute an airport full of unarmed civilians, putting you behind the eyes of one of the terrorists (we later find that you were controlling an undercover agent, but that doesn't lessen the overall impact). These are undoubtedly groundbreaking events in modern gaming, yet when a child is caught in a dirty bomb explosion as her father films her with a digital camera during Modern Warfare 3’s campaign, this depiction of the consequence instantly became trite and rather than helping to push the medium forward, it became some sort of macabre gimmick.

That’s always the danger with any entertainment product, especially a videogame; how far is too far? And is it worth trying to push the boundaries if you’re just going to go too far again. For an example, one need look no further than Hollywood’s torture porn sub genre, a bargain bin full of gratuitous schlock fests made possible thanks to the groundwork laid by the Saw films.
What Spec Ops: The Line does right is never making it’s key events feel gimmicky. From the outset,  Walker’s faith begins to crack as his sanity begins to degrade, it’s a solid character arc shaped by the events of the story and unlike in, say, Modern Warfare 3, the protagonist feels like he’s been through a war.

So, could this be the future of adult gaming? Responsibility, blame and regret are not generally things one would like to experience when purchasing a piece of entertainment, but in recent years this way of writing has produced some of the mediums most progressive moments.
In ICO, your elfin hero is tasked with the protection of a helpless princess and in it’s thematic sequel, Shadow Of The Collossus, you vanquish a collection of giant leviathans only to find out they were benevolent protectors of an ancient evil. In Warhead, Crytek’s action packed follow up to their techno-masterpiece Crysis, anti-hero Psycho takes a breather from destroying the Korean military to have a good cry. In Ken Levine’s steam punk classic Bioshock, your hero reaches the end of his journey through Rapture to find that he was once the community's favourite son and has been under the influence of mind control the whole time, forced to kill and destroy in the name of the villain. It’s a far cry from the ‘beat the boss, save the princess’ dynamic of yesteryear, shades of grey are the new black.

During the finale of Spec Ops: The Line, Walker discovers that Konrad never really existed, that he had invented the crazed Colonel as justification for his heinous actions. As he points his gun at his own fractured reflection, it feels like a rallying cry for a better kind of storytelling, an ultimatum for the gung ho meat heads that decimate entire countries without breaking a sweat.
Far from advocating a revolution in order to save the troubled youth of today from feeling compelled to go spree happy in the nearest movie theatre or elementary school, it would still be a positive thing if writers would sprinkle a little nuance on their narratives from now on.