Spec Ops: The Whine

It’s basically Apocalypse now the game…. with Nolan North playing the part of Martin Sheen *rolls eyes*

  Spec Ops: The Line is a third-person shooter brought to us by Yager Development and published by 2K Games. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on June 26, 2012 in North America and on June 29, 2012 in Europe. First off I’ve got to say, I despise games like this, military games are like the kryptonite of video game plots, because you basically do stuff because you’re a soldier and it’s your job, your character has no motivation other than a pay check and a pat on the back so it’s doomed from the start. On the other hand I was pleasantly surprised by this game. I hadn’t looked twice at this when it first came out but I was put on to it by some respected sources and I thought it couldn’t hurt to check it out because it deals with philosophical issues I’m enticed by.

  First impressions

The very start of the game is a turret mission on a helicopter, so already I’m not impressed because mandatory turret combat is just annoying and really boring, I don’t know about you but manning a stationary gun isn’t my idea of excitement when I’ve been blessed with legs. Just to point out how little I knew about this game before I bought it, I was surprised when I discovered it was another cover shooter.
 I absolutely loathe cover shooters, it just seems like the most boring people on earth came together to come up with a way to make gun fights as interesting as an evening with Chris Hansen and what they created was chest high walls, and on that day jumping and shooting with two guns in slow motion going; ‘ahhh’ died. I like fps games because they’re challenging but covers shooters are just an exercise in turn taking and they’re painfully dull. Regardless the beginning of the game was pretty interesting because it feels a little more like a horror game than an action game, because you’re entering a no man’s land and you feel really unwanted, and that Dubai isn’t a natural place. Oh yeah it’s set in Dubai and you’re on a rescue mission to save survivors from a massive sandstorm that has swallowed the whole city, so it feels a little like the beginning of resident evil 4, your just on a rescue mission and then it goes tits up.

How does thy shoot?

Game play is fairly basic; Wait behind wall, shoot, move to other wall, shoot, rinse and repeat. You can give orders to have people killed if you don’t like shooting people yourself, since you have to aim the reticule over them to have them shot anyway, also oddly you can blind fire turrets which makes it ridiculously easy because you don’t really aim turrets anyway.

  I shoot therefore, I am.

So game play wise it’s fairly unremarkable, where it really shines is in its philosophical ideas in regards to combat. We’re used to killing hordes of ‘bad’ Nazis or Russians that eat babies for breakfast and never asking why, but in spec-ops you’re fighting rogue American soldiers and you don’t fully understand why.
You fight only to preserve your own life, there is no greater good, no overarching goal to save the world, you just want to live long enough to understand why. Also there’s this weird bit where the enemy uses white phosphorus and for those that don’t know what that is, let’s just say it’s a very unpleasant way to be burnt to death. You then get the opportunity to use it yourself and it seems like a moral choice.
 The game doesn't really have moral choices because it’s about survival but there’s a fine line because we want to kill our enemies but we also understand that they’re people and we empathise with them so we don’t want to make them suffer needlessly.
 You do it all through a launch-able mortar so you get an overhead view like in cod in the bomber, but your face is reflected in the screen and you’re close enough to hear the screams of the men being burned alive so it doesn’t let you make that disconnect between weapon and target. It doesn't let you distance yourself and then you actually have to walk through the dead and the dying that you created. Still it’s a little hard to swallow since they make this big deal about all the killing and they feel bad about the genocides they take part in but they still keep killing because it’s a game, you can’t just choose to become a Hari Krishna.

 It’s a little weird because the plot doesn’t really follow a pattern, there’s not much structure, it’s not really a journey, I don’t feel like much really happened.
 It starts to feel like the character you play might be worse than the villain you've yet to meet.

 I don’t really think this game is genius but I really respect it because it’s not just about combat. Cod is just ‘bang bang bang, oh isn't war horrible bang bang bang’ but this is really quite introspective, it’s not trying to say war is horrible it’s asking us what we think of war and soldiers in general. I'm not sure it really has a moral message, if there’s anything really to be learned is that people are no better than animals really and maybe sometimes they’re just better off dead. I think it’s hard to make a moral message in video games because it seems like the way you fix problems is the same way the problems are created, shooting people. How can you stop violence with more violence? All you can really do is just kill everyone and that doesn't make anything better just quieter.

  The Road  Home

I think it’s a great criticism on what soldiers actually do, and what they think they do, they think they’re heroes but they’re just killers. Overall I think the game wasn't that spectacular, it didn't try anything new with game mechanics or have any flashy gimmicks; it was just a game that put more emphasis into character development and asking difficult questions which I think is a good start. It didn't necessarily answer the hard questions but it’s just a game, you can’t expect it to, but I applaud this game for its balls. We live in this climate of half arsed, lazy games with no balls, that are too afraid to actually try to make an impact and this cuts through that.

 Pros; Good story/character development, dealt with serious subject matter quite intelligently.

Con; Mediocre game play, a little short, the plot formula was a little unsatisfying.

 6/10

It's All Part of the Plan

“You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”
  The Joker

 Games evoke wonder which is what any good piece of art should do but I personally have always seen games as a form of catharsis, a way to unwind, take out all the stresses of life on someone that isn’t real, and if I had the figures to back it up I’d hasten to add video games have probably stopped more killing sprees than they’ve ever started, I mean I haven’t killed anyone… yet. There are uninformed people all over the world claiming video games create killers, but is it games or society that is criminogenic?

Evidence points to the later since murder was around a long time before games but there are still people that like to blame games for a deeper problem. Marx argued that capitalism created crime because it encouraged people to want more than they needed and then crime became a natural evolution of that goal. People want more than they need so they steal, people kill because they want a taste of the power society takes away from them and because of this it justifies employing police to control us and protect us from those people the system has created to scare us, and it’s all part of the plan.

  “A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities”.”

Marx (Theories of Surplus Value 1861)

 Maybe one day a more realistic murder game will be created to prevent serial killers killing real people, like putting heroin addicts on methadone. I mean look at it logically if you were a serial killer and could kill a fake person and it would feel the same, smell the same be the same as killing a real person without all the pesky police investigations and trials and none of the messy clean up, you’d choose that over real murder any day.
 That is to say we assume serial killers think logically which it’s safe to say the vast majority are not but some of them are perfectly logical functioning members of society. For some reason that seems to shock us more, like it wasn't part of the plan.
 It makes sense if they were abused or they live in a cave and eat babies because we can classify them as ‘other’. I don’t do that so that explains why I’m normal and they’re not. I can distance myself from them, if they have a job and a family and collect stamps suddenly it becomes weird, turns everything on its head, every normal action becomes fantastic because it’s almost like they’re like you, the bottom line is of course they’re no different from you.

  "You know, madness is a lot like gravity...all you need is a little push." --The Joker

 People like to think that there’s a massive gap between sanity and insanity, murderer and ‘normal person’ but really it just boils down to choice and circumstance. We choose to deal with our problems or we lock them away and allow them to fester or redirect them, blame them on someone/something else. The idea of being controlled by an urge to kill is an excuse, it’s like saying you’re possessed by the devil.
 I suppose what I’m trying to say is that video games don’t influence violence in society, they are in fact influenced by a violent society.

Video games could have the power to rid the world of violence but in a sort of ghost busters ghost vault way, just imprisoning violence in games. I think getting rid of violence is impossible but instead of adding to it like some opinionated mothers might think video games could in fact channel it like in Max Payne when the two hitmen settle their differences with a kung fu video game.

 Violence will always exist until we’re all mediated by our machine overlords. Therefore would people given the choice, rather their violence take place in games or on the street outside their window?   Its part of being human, it’s that part of us that thinks fight club is a good idea, that part of us that walked out of Kickass and thought “I could do that”. Whether people like to admit it or try to pray it away, we all have little lizard brains telling us that you’d be much better off if everyone was dead and you had all their stuff.

 Now whether that’s just a capitalist slippery slope rationalisation or just a survival instinct is beside the point, people love violence, they live on it they feed it, they tacitly consent to it in regard to war and the death sentence, contact sports and torture, it permeates every square inch of our society, it’s the same thing that keeps us safe and makes us scared at the same time.
All legal systems boil down to a threat of violence, every rule we have, even school and religion hang the sword of Damocles over our heads if we transgress their important rules. Punishment and suffering and the threat of violence is so ingrained in our society I don’t see a time when we will ever be rid of it or even if living in a world without violence would be a good, because it seems punishment and fear of pain is what holds a society together.

  “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” 
- Friedrich Nietzsche 

 The fact of the matter is we like to think we live in a civilised society, but it’s just more civilised than the dark ages. The world we live in is a vicious, corrupt little rat trap where all the rats are eating each other  and it surprises people when a rat crawls out a monster, like that wasn’t part of the plan. Society pits us against each other and makes money and success out to be the ultimate goal that can never be fulfilled because you can never have enough of either and then is surprised when people value money and power over human life.