Similarly, games can confront you with your own problematic beliefs. I may not feel complicit simply for sitting through all of Breaking Bad, but if I was cheering for Walt when he poisoned that kid, it may well prompt me to take a long hard look at myself. Here is where we finally get to the key question: when is a game justified in trying to make you feel guilty for something you had no control over? My answer is: when you were rooting for that thing to happen. But targeting the “Call of Duty audience” was integral to the entire purpose of the game: to reverse the player’s expectations (war is fun, Americans are good, the other guys deserve what they get), and to make them feel bad for having those expectations to begin with.Īnd, insofar as players had those expectations, the game was right to do so. It was sold to the exact kind of audience who were more likely to feel disappointed and betrayed by it than to appreciate its subversive themes. This might be because it was marketed as a regular Call of Duty-style military shooter, so the people who initially bought it had no clue that, instead of having a great time blowing up Arabs, they were going to be shamed for war crimes. When Spec Ops: The Line came out, it wasn’t a commercial success. Again, I ask - why is this message being shown to me? What purpose does it serve, if not to make me feel bad for what my character has done? To teach me a lesson of some sort? And, most importantly, did it work? It’s the equivalent of the doggy playtime scene. “How many Americans have you killed today?” the loading screen taunts you. I’m the good guy…aren’t I?Īnd just like The Last of Us 2, Spec Ops: The Line confronts you with choices you never made. Like The Last of Us 2, the game deliberately sets up an expectation, only to turn it on its head. It turns out the bad guys might be the American unit who have taken up residence in Dubai, or, more worryingly - it might be us. Cue the bang bang, some anonymous brown people die, but that’s fine, they were bad and we’re good. You command a small military unit of three men, who arrive in a chaotic post-apocalypse Dubai and decide they’re gonna clean things up. It starts out like any other standard gung-ho US-centric shoot-em-up. Remember Spec Ops: The Line? It’s a game that came out in 2012 and pulled a massive switcheroo on the military shooter genre. I don’t think that the devs were so silly that they believed you, the player, should feel bad because you chose to kill the dog (which by any reasonable standard you did not).īut there is a sense in which in which a player could feel bad - and that is if they wanted to kill the dog. If anyone literally killed that dog, it wasn’t the players, it was the developers, and they are very naughty indeed for murdering their own brethren.Īs hard as I bounced off The Last of Us 2, I need to defend Naughty Dog here. Doesn’t this make you complicit?” Which makes as much sense as saying that because you sat through Breaking Bad you are somehow responsible for Walt’s trail of blood. Unless you’re one of those too-clever-for-their-own-good people (in my mind they’re always twirling a well-oiled mustache) who say: “Aaah, but you chose to play the game. You can’t expect someone to feel bad for something that was out of their control. How could the player be expected to feel bad for that? Surely I’m not suggesting that Naughty Dog were trying to make me feel bad for something I had no choice but to do? After all, the doggy murder is an unavoidable moment in the game. And there is no other conclusion that makes sense to me than this: they did it to confront the player with the fact that they’d just, in a previous scene, murdered that dog. Someone decided to include the dog scene, and they did so for a reason. Creative choices don’t exist in a vacuum, and this game didn’t will itself into existence.
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