This is not to say, however, that those options always mean the same things. The only choices you ever get are whether to open fire or to take your finger off the trigger (where most of its peers don’t make the latter a viable option). In essence, these Capital-C Moments Of Choice are just part of a broader sense in which Spec Ops casts the player as a ‘refrigerator box’ whose only means of interaction is as a walking gun. Even in the first real combat encounter, the player has the option of waiting for the others to shoot first. You can listen to conversations between enemy soldiers, or take the opportunity to kill them while they’re distracted. Some of the game’s battles can be avoided if the player uses stealth, while others don’t start until she fires. You’re asked whether you want to offer Riggs the mercy of your bullet or let him burn to death beneath the truck he crashed later, whether to fire into the furious crowd who have just lynched your buddy or into the air to scare them all away.Ĭrucially, similar choices, engaged through the same mechanics and having the same feel on the plastic of the controller, appear in a more mundane form throughout. You can either save a bunch of civilians, or let them die and save the CIA agent Gould, who is ostensibly more important to your mission. There is the scene where you can either shoot or negotiate with a hostile American who is threatening you with his gun.
Spec ops the line save gould full#
Spec Ops is full of moments of such limited ‘choice’. Instead, I see, behind all the theatrics and clumsy pretensions, a fascinating formal conceit: the swirling, repeated recontextualisation of a simple binary choice to either shoot or hold your fire. But I’m not too interested in the fleeting visual metaphors and symbolic set dressing that occupies much of Killing is Harmless. Otherwise, much of my thought about the game is informed simply by my experience enjoying it: it made me go ‘ooh’, and ‘wow’, and sometimes ‘oo-er’. Everyone who has completed it will have a similar reaction to words ‘white phosphorous’ (suffice to say, spoilers follow). In 2011 the Red Cross asked the games industry to start educating its players about humanitarian law and punishing them for in-game breaches Spec Ops goes further than most in pitching its perpetrators into a private hell. For a start, it is a shooter in which the player commits war crimes that are actually depicted as war crimes. Also, there are no women in it whatsoever.īut there were many things I liked about Spec Ops too. Dubai, like Africa, as a foreign heart of darkness whose primary utility is as a ‘savage’ backdrop for the psychological torment of our whitebread western protagonist. Moreover, there is plenty problematic in its unquestioning reproduction of Joseph Conrad’s colonialist geography. With its ludicrous twist, shouting CoDbros and heavy-handed Vietnam symbolism, it’s so hammy it might a well be called Speck Ops. The game lies wide open to accusations of trying to have its cake and eat it: ‘playing with’ and ‘subverting’ the violence and jingoism of the military manshooter instead of having the balls and imagination to offer an alternative. He disappears again before we have a chance to answer “meh”. Sometimes the male falls off a building.Įvery few hours the sandstorm lifts to reveal a smirking developer, who asks us if we enjoy all of this killing. We are assisted by two clones who explode heads of their own accord. We select a human with our cursor and press a button to make their head explode. Every five minutes he stops to duck behind a low wall as thirty humans pour in. Just look at this scathing plot summary which recently circulated on Tumblr and Twitter:Ī beefy male nothing with shaved head and dirty face…is walking towards a plot device named Konrad, who disappeared and then turned bad. It is an easy game to take the piss out of.
Shea as the cake-eating adventures of Captain Obvious, by Michael Clarkson as a “gutless and cowardly critique”, and by Darius Kazemi as “a middling shooter fumbling at meaning.” On the other, the mocking, the eye-rolling its indictment by J. On one side, its lauding as a landmark subversion and the subject of Brendan Keogh’s groundbreaking close reading, Killing is Harmless.
It is the line which divides people who like Spec Ops: The Line from people who don’t. There is a line that people like us (i.e.
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