blogs_blog_1633

I 'loved' that game. 

 

The images of that will never leave you.

It's one of my favorite games

It has its shining moments of glory, although the ultimate message was lost on me when the game tries to tell you that you're in the wrong for having fun when it never offers an alternative to the senseless killing it keeps telling me to do. I can either do this horrid thing that the game is laying out like a neat little prize for me, or I can just turn the system off and walk away, never finding any sense of closure. It's a nitpicky complaint, but in my eyes it also damages the game's core theme.

 

Of course, it's still charming when games do this. One of my favourite titles, NieR, also played around with it a lot and I felt utterly horrid after the game cheerfully asks you to play through the second ending and reveals all the terrible things you've done without realising you were doing them.

I think that's the point. You can either continue down the path of destruction, or you can walk away.

 

It's interesting that that's not viewed as a valid choice.

 

I know of at least one choice the game gives regarding gunning down a crowd of civilians. If you fire into the air, they'll clear a path for you. No casualties. Now that's a small amount of damage that's avoided, but it is there.

 

 

 

There's little more justification I can give, so here's what Extra Credits says on it:

 

"It's about that disturbing feeling you get from believing that shooting the enemy's the thing your supposed to do, because it's a game and that's what you do in shooters, combined with that creeping knowledge somewhere in the back of your mind, knowledge that they have set up throughout the game that this is all wrong, that you  shouldn't be killing those U.S. soldiers, or the residents of Dubai who you are extensively there to save."

 

And that's nearly exactly what you said.  (They have two videos on it, but I can't link to them here, if you want to find them then go for it, they're really great.)

 

It's not supposed to be fun. It's supposed to make you question the genera and gaming as a whole.and it does it in a hard hitting way, and rather then just do it themselves, they make the player do it, which is probably more effective.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I understand you completely. Overall it's a valuable message for games, a moral that needs to be pushed a lot more than what some other developers are focussing on. Is it fun to kill in video games? Why is it? Who's making you do it?

 

But that's also the crux of the issue, because I feel that walking away from the game itself shouldn't be an option. In regards to your quote, "that disturbing feeling you get from believing that shooting the enemy's the thing your supposed to do, because it's a game and that's what you do in shooters" is interesting and relevant but flawed because that's also what you do in Spec Ops. There is rarely, if ever, an alternative. It's just the game asking you to do a thing and then laughing at you for doing the thing. I think that example you posted, wherein you have the choice to either shoot the crowd or shoot above the crowd is the ideal that it should try to look for in every situation. While in some instances, this is an overly-ambitious approach, I still feel like in a dream world you would be offered the choice of doing something terrible to that crowd of enemies that you can efficiently erase, or you could go a very long way around that would take a few hours but lower the body count significantly. Just something that makes the player feel that little bit more blame for their horrible crime of doing the thing.

 

What I'm saying is that Spec Ops is by no means a bad game. It's a great game and it's an ambitious game and it should be praised for that. But in the future, these are areas games should look to develop on.

Hm. I can see what you're saying, But I would still argue that walking away is a valid way of interacting with a game. Or at least this one. Since a lot of what it's pushing only works because of things outside the game, like our general attitude towards war and shooters. 

 

Have you tried Dishonored? I aven't played it much, but from what I've heard of it, that's nearly exactly what you described. I really should play that one.