1/24/2024 0 Comments Spec ops the line not launching![]() Throughout the game, Captain Walker is a devolving character who descends into madness as you are making increasingly harmful and destructive errors. You’re here because you wanted to feel like something you’re not: A hero. Walker’s dissociations are digetic, while your dissociations are meta. As a player, you kind of dissociate from Walker as he justifies his actions, while Walker also dissociates from reality. By the end, you are told that you always could stop, but you didn’t. Which brings us to the meta decision you’re forced into: the decision about whether you should keep playing knowing that you aren’t really the good guy anymore, or if you should just put the game down. The game will not let you progress without using the white phosphorus. Immediately after that last decision I mentioned is “the white phosphorus moment:” the only choice here is to use white phosphorus and kill everyone, including the civilians, or to just fight in one spot until you die. Later in the game, there’s an instance in which you can either take a shot to try to save a vital hostage while letting civilian hostages die, or you can try to save the civilians and watch him get killed. In the first hostage scenario you’re presented with, you can let the hostage get killed, or you can try to save him, in which case he dies anyways. The choices you are asked to make start out simple and become darker and more difficult as the game progresses. This adds a level of agency on your part, deepening the emotional impact of the scenario. And even then, it’s not a matter of pressing a button but of acting out your choice via the game mechanics (shooting, for example) that you’re already familiar with. B decision, but it allows you to make additional choices outside that decision tree. Here, the game presents what appears to be a simple A vs. I’m not sure if it’s actually possible to free both, but the game reacts to that decision, and your crew will try to shoot out the ropes as well. However, you can instead to kill neither and try to free them both. You are asked to execute either a thief or a soldier who killed his family by shooting out the ropes from which they’re hanging. There’s so much I could cover here, but the element I want to focus on for this specific retrospective is how the game uses choice.įor instance, there’s a point in the game where you see two people hanging by their hands from ropes. I actually helped write a group paper on Spec Ops: The Line at the end of a games journalism class in college, so this is a game I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Even so, I had my own perspective while studying this game. Of course, my own experience is going to be biased from that introduction, as this breakdown very clearly influenced my perspective.
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