Yager's Spec Ops: The Line

[TychoCelchuuu]

Speaking of that, the choices at the end specifically, what did everyone choose?

As Konrad was about to finish counting down, I shot myself. That just felt like the only real choice at that point.The way you saw yourself twice was neat - mechanically, aiming at your other self meant aiming the gun at yourself, that is, your head. It felt right to move my aim over to me and see me put the gun to my head. Or, should I say Walker, because the game does a great job of alienating you from Walker as the game goes on.

[JonCole]

I shot Konrad, then Walker realized that he's crazy after he was talking to a guy that really didn't exist (not Konrad, one of Konrad's 'people'). It picked up several weeks later when an American armed force came to Dubai to find me, at which point I was wearing Konrad's jacket and had a full-on psycho beard. I figured that with an outfit like that, I should blow all those guys away and proceeded to radio into headquarters that I was basically the King of Dubai.

[Badfinger]

I guess as my real/first ending I chose:

Doing nothing. If you take no actions (pressing no buttons, you can move from target to target), Walker shoots himself regardless of where you've pointed the gun. You die, and the game ends the same as if you'd shot yourself. You must take an action to get anything different.

Here are all the endings that I know of. Just gonna list 'em:

Do nothing. Walker shoots himself.

Shoot yourself. Same ending, with an action taken.

Shoot Konrad's reflection. Here the interstitial dialogue changes to reflect your choice. You also get one more option and a last segment of gameplay:

Surrender your weapon to the soldiers who've come to find you. They pack you into a humvee and there is some dialogue where Walker answers a question that suggests he's raised more questions for himself.

Shoot everyone that's come to rescue you. Become the Sand Baron. See JonCole's spoiler above.

[twmac]

There is one other ending available too.

[Badfinger]

There is one other ending available too.

Mind sharing what it is? I actually have a guess as to what it might be.

vvv That's what my guess was, yeah.

I also wonder if

they eventually shoot you/resolve it in some way if you never hand over the gun.

[melmer]

Maybe shoot everyone and die? i died during the shoot out and went straight to an end movie.

[TheYoungCato]

I also wonder if

they eventually shoot you/resolve it in some way if you never hand over the gun.

If you do nothing, Walker hands over the gun, and the cutscene is exactly the same.

[twmac]

Mington and Badfinger pretty much got it right.

[Tanukitsune]

I got this on the sale and I just reached

The Gate.... Screw you game, you FORCED ME to use White Phosphorus and I KNEW it was the wrong thing, don't try to make me feel bad if you don't give me an option NOT to do it!

[Lu]

Not having a choice could have been the point.

[Tanukitsune]

I guess I've been spoiled by the Walking Dead, there was always a choice and when something terrible happened I was OK because at least I tried to do the right thing, or what I thought was right.

That wasn't the only occasion where I felt the game didn't let me do what I wanted, and it kinda bothered me that some options didn't do anything.. Killing the snipers when they ask you to execute someone didn't seem to do anything and shooting the air to scare the people who killed my buddy didn't seem to do anything either. I guess this truly the anti-COD game and the message is: No matter what you do you are a monster, everything is your fault and you should be ashamed for enjoying this game. And since I already dislike these kind of game I feel like I was getting a lecture where the lecturer insisted I didn't get it... and maybe I don't.

[Lu]

and shooting the air to scare the people who killed my buddy didn't seem to do anything either.

That's weird, because that totally worked for me.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I've written a lot about this game elsewhere so I think I'll just summarize that stuff rather than bothering to rewrite everything. The TL;DR version is that I think it's not really interesting to read the game as saying "everything you do is wrong and you are a monster" or anything like that. Instead, I think it makes more sense to see the game as commenting on the narratives that most war video games give you and the efficacy of the choices or lack thereof in those video games. In almost every video game, the answer is "more violence" because shooting people or bombing them is what is necessary to get the happy ending. Sometimes you need to choose the right person to shoot or save or even though both choices are right the game makes it seem like it matters what you choose. Spec Ops is a rejection of that idea in favor of the notion that sometimes the only proper response to war and to violence is to walk away - sometimes you can't save the world just by shooting the right people or saving the right person.

If you read the game as saying "you are a monster fuck you for buying and playing this game" then it just seems kind of self-defeating. If you're a monster for playing the game, they shouldn't have made the game in the first place!

And yes:

Firing into the air works for everyone else so your game must have been bugged. Shooting the snipers also works (although both the men die). Your game just seems to have fucked up repeatedly for some reason.

I think you're right to say that a lot of your choices don't matter. A lot of your choices don't matter, because they're the wrong choices. The right choice is to leave Dubai 10 minutes into the game when he's accomplished his recon mission, but Walker doesn't make that choice. The idea that every choice you have should have a "correct" outcome that makes things better or at least is effective is a bullshit idea that comes from video games stroking the player's ego and telling them they can always do the right thing. Sometimes every choice is wrong because you got yourself into an awful situation. Sometimes in war you can't do the right thing.

But this doesn't mean you should be ashamed for enjoying the game - it means you should be ashamed for getting mad at the game for not giving you effective choices to make everything turn out happy. If you've been trained by video games to think "well here's a moral choice, I'll just do my best to choose the correct option" then you've bought into the wish fulfillment ego stroking that modern military shooters thrive on, the sort of narrative that says "you can be the hero, you can make the right choice." The right choice is to leave Dubai, not to come down on one side or the other of the various choices in the game.

edit: this is pretty much just the first point the Errant Signal guy makes in his video back on page 2. Also, Chris Remo definitely reads the game as saying "you are a monster for playing me" and his dislike for that message (and thus this game) is a reason I think that's a bad way to read it - it's just dumb for a game to be all "fuck you for playing me" because that's self-defeating. If I had Chris' reading I'd also dislike the game.

[Tanukitsune]

I should have been move specific, by "did nothing" I mean that the ending didn't seem to acknowledge many of the choices at the ending, unless

it's all in the corridor? The one where you meet some of the people that died because of you. If I had short at the villagers, would I have seen them there?

I know the morale of the game is, war is serious and not a game, don't play a hero. But that doesn't mean the game has me do some disgusting stuff like the white phosphorus part.

But I entirely disagree with the "just walk away", if they mean that me as a gamer should just walk away from a game I disagree with that's one thing, but since when is it OK for a soldier to walk away from it's duty? Wouldn't you just get a court-martial? Sure they do plenty of things that would have gotten him a court-martial anyway, but still "just walk away" seems like a cheap and lazy option. People need you, but you have to make difficult choice, which you will not like... just walk away! Imagine if wondered if Lee should have just walked away from Clementine in the beginning of the Walking Dead just because you didn't like the difficult choices of Walking Dead.

Walking away from tough choices is never a good choice unless you are never aware of the choice. I assume a soldier is always aware of the tough choices ahead, he just can't walk away, that's desertion, defection... it's bloody treason! The game forces you to make tough choices, many that are completely unnecessary, all trying to enforce this ludicrous idea that you can just walk away from it.

And what's with the PTSD? Isn't the other part of the game telling the horrors of PTSD? Well, that and the horrors of phosphorus attacks. It's very odd that a game that's trying to tell about PTSD is telling us to walk away from tough choices. Aren't the tough choices that soldiers have to take the ones that give them PTSD?

Hmm, maybe the morale of the game is "war is not a game, soldiers have to make REAL choices where REAL people's lives are on the line and they may never know if they made the right choice and they have to live with their choices... sometimes... they can't really live with the choices they make. And that's why they get Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder".

[TychoCelchuuu]

Walker is not "walking away from duty" by leaving Dubai. His mission is explicitly to go into the city and find out what's up - if he encounters any survivors, he is to leave, radio in the backup, and let the US Army take over. 20 minutes into the game you already go off-mission and everything that happens after that is a direct result of Walker's continual choice to keep pushing forward even as it becomes more and more obvious that he should follow orders and leave Dubai. He's going to get court martialed for doing anything other than leaving the city almost as soon as the game starts. I'm not sure why it seems like a cheap and lazy option - it's the honest option, because it acknowledges that there is no good ending to a lot of military campaigns, just a choice between "stop" or "bad ending." The point isn't to walk away from difficult decisions - the point is to walk away from the wrong ones. And everything Walker does after deciding to go find Konrad is the wrong decision.

One of the morals of the game, as I take it, is that war is not a game, and video games that present war as a series of tough choices where you can always do the right thing are lying. You don't get PTSD from a video game because a video game is a bullshit power fantasy that tells you that if you shoot enough people, you can solve the problem. In real life, if you shoot enough people, you get PTSD and kill yourself a decade later.

As for whether the game explicitly acknowledges the outcomes of your various choices at the end, well no, it didn't do that. What makes you think the only way for a game to acknowledge your choice is in an ending montage? Seriously? That's a very odd criticism to make of the game. Especially of this game, given the nature of the ending. The game acknowledges your choices when you make them, typically, and I don't see what's wrong with that.

[JonCole]

Re: choices -

The choices in Spec Ops don't really feel meaningful to me because the game's whole conceit and twist is that your guy is goddamn crazy and chasing after a mind-ghost. The only choices I'd consider to have any kind of impact are the ones at the very end of the game, because you're actually affecting the outcome rather than temporarily guiding your path down a quarter-mile side street.

It doesn't necessarily impact my opinion of the game that most of the game's choices aren't meaningful, it just better contextualizes the white phosphorus = dead civilians moment for me. In other words, would it really be satisfying to not kill those civilians if you did figure out that brief visual puzzle? I would argue no, because that choice would be completely incongruous with your character's propensity to fucking blow everyone away with no consideration for what is right.

[Tanukitsune]

Wait, when do you think Walker goes cuckoo and gets PTSD? From the beginning or when they use white phosphorus? The painting at the ending and dialogue you get makes me think he went crazy and convinced himself this guy is to blame because he couldn't bare with the guilt.

Because, even if his mission was to return when they encountered survivors, we wouldn't learn about PTSD if he obeyed, furthermore, don't they have this "stormwall" of sand that makes it impossible to leave?

I should just stop comparing this game to Walking Dead I guess, but now I'm wondering how strange is that his "insanity" tries to make confront the truth. I don't understand insanity, but why create the illusion of some big bad he can blame everything on, only to have thing illusion try to convince him he's to blame. Does anybody know if this make sense from a psychological stand point?

[TychoCelchuuu]

I think it's a bit of a lost cause to try to make an insane person's reasoning make sense - "insane" is pretty much a word to describe someone whose reasoning doesn't make sense to people that we dub sane. I also wouldn't really worry about whether Walker is a psychologically plausible character. The game is a story that comments on gaming and war and choice and morality. It's not supposed to be a realistic psychological sketch of someone you might meet on the street. Nothing about it is supposed to be realistic, from the shooting to the way people act. The characters are believable in a thematic sense, not in a "could this actually happen" sense. This fits because no character you play in any military shooter is believable in the "this could actually happen" sense but the realistic trappings of modern warfare the games go through such pains to recreate are most certainly supposed to be believable in a thematic sense. This is a point the Errant Signal guy made early in the video linked on page 2.

[darthbator]

In this podcast here

http://www.gamespot....e-line-6386587/

The lead writer of spec ops basically confirms that you're in a Jacob's ladder scenario. You have indeed actually already taken all the actions that occurred up to the helo crash and that is why there is an "orthodox" version of the events. When the game starts in the helo scenario is the only actual "orthodox" narrative part of the game you as the player directly experience. You guys go to dubai and do lots of fucked up things and eventual you ALL die in a helo crash. The entire game that you play after that first segment is apparently a Jacobs ladder esq "life overview" of walkers view of the events that lead to his death. This is why it's walked up with this like shooting 8 billion people super solider mentality. Because that character recalls these events in that manner. Apparently there are clues in the first 2 levels (like billboards) that EVERYTHING you are experiencing is an illusion.

I think that podcast is really worth listening to because it kinda reveals how much conceptually they really did try and achieve with spec ops (including the kinda Jacob's ladder angle that is not overtly presented). However I do ultimately feel like Spec Ops is a failure. It tries lots of cool stuff but really fails to effectively communicate any of it. Either way it's a real fun game to break apart from a creative narrative standpoint. It's cardinal sin is not being a very fun game to actually play...

[Tanukitsune]

Wait, that makes the ending more confusing if you are meant to be dead. You can die in the tower, but you are alive in the epilogue where the soldier are commenting on how "far gone" you look. Now I'm really confused, can the game still be about PTSD when the guy who is supposed to have it died, that means all the moment I thoughts where caused by PTSD where just his personal "life overview".

What I'm trying to say is that if this game is supposed to be about PTSD, then how can it be about when you were dead all the time? (Are we talking about the first crash or the second?)

The game has you descending and falling all the time, at first I though it symbolized Walker's descent into madness, but now it's his descent into his own personal Hell?

[darthbator]

I believe it's supposed to work on either level. It can symbolize either his descent into personal hell in the moment of his own death or it can be viewed as his descent into madness. It's been some time since I listened to that podcast but they address all of the story elements of the game pretty fully. That was the one that I found the most interesting, while being rather "inaccessible" in the main game.

[JonCole]

In this podcast here

http://www.gamespot....e-line-6386587/

The lead writer of spec ops basically confirms that you're in a Jacob's ladder scenario. You have indeed actually already taken all the actions that occurred up to the helo crash and that is why there is an "orthodox" version of the events. When the game starts in the helo scenario is the only actual "orthodox" narrative part of the game you as the player directly experience. You guys go to dubai and do lots of fucked up things and eventual you ALL die in a helo crash. The entire game that you play after that first segment is apparently a Jacobs ladder esq "life overview" of walkers view of the events that lead to his death. This is why it's walked up with this like shooting 8 billion people super solider mentality. Because that character recalls these events in that manner. Apparently there are clues in the first 2 levels (like billboards) that EVERYTHING you are experiencing is an illusion.

I think that podcast is really worth listening to because it kinda reveals how much conceptually they really did try and achieve with spec ops (including the kinda Jacob's ladder angle that is not overtly presented). However I do ultimately feel like Spec Ops is a failure. It tries lots of cool stuff but really fails to effectively communicate any of it. Either way it's a real fun game to break apart from a creative narrative standpoint. It's cardinal sin is not being a very fun game to actually play...

This does make a lot more sense than the alternative, more linear approach to analyzing the story. The events get considerably more ridiculous after that sequence that divides the game in half; it feels like the choices have undue weight and consequence. I agree that it works on either level -

1. He has the worst PTSD of all time. He continues his murderous rampage in the second half to only come to the epiphany that he is in fact totally screwed up. He decides how to spend the rest of his life in the final scene - either he embraces his warped mind by blowing the reflection away and potentially even the people who come to help him, or he acknowledges his damaged state by either killing himself or submitting to the soldiers who come to collect him.

2. He's dead in the helo crash. The second half of the game is him trying to sort out what happened to him, both physically and mentally. The final choices are basically Walker's cognizant choice of what to acknowledge - either he blows himself away (hell, kinda), continues in limbo after shooting the reflection and soldiers (Dubai is purgatory), or voluntarily goes down a path of reconciliation by shooting the reflection and turning himself into his government (heaven, kinda).

Thanks for the link to that podcast, Darth. I'll give it a listen this afternoon.

[osmosisch]

The fact alone that there is this much, and this level of, discourse about the game's plot is a sign how awesome it is. I feel like I robbed the developers by only picking this up during the Steam sale.

[JonCole]

Maybe I'm just the eternal pessimist, but I don't really think this a sign of how awesome the game is, though I do agree that this level of discourse does say something significant and positive about the game as a whole. Rather, it says more about games' general lack of willingness to explore a complex narrative structure. Even the games with the "best story" this year really don't do anything more than offer you decisions that amount to a choose-your-own-adventure book.

I wish more games would adopt mechanics that are more directly tied to story and stories that make people think about the game beyond "should I pick A or B".

[Tanukitsune]

I think the question is, can gaming actually allow a more complex narrative structure? Not only would we need writers capable of making it all cohesive in the end, but programming-wise it sounds like a nightmare. Has the gaming industry gotten that good at the "choose your own adventure" style anyway?