Fortifying “The Line”
or Some Stuff About Single Player Campaigns v. Multiplayer Matches
*Nothing written here is meant to convey the idea that I or any contributors to this publication mean to draw a direct connection between video game violence and actual physical violence.*
Full disclosure, I haven’t owned a video game console for over a generation and I recognize that the primary examples I planned to use in these discussions are dated. So, I spent … 10 or so hours watching Tetra Ninja’s let’s play of Spec Ops: The Line. Specifically, I chose this game because of what I’d heard about its attempts to manipulate players affectively. The Line, by Yager Development, is like a reboot of the long running (though also long abandoned) Spec Ops series of shooter games. In this case, the game is an avant-garde, metafictional deconstruction of modern shooters with a narrative loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and what is apparently a lackluster multiplayer experience, which is why we will not be talking about that. I suggest you play it if you get a chance. I will not be marking spoilers. You have fair warning. This three year old game’s spoilers start with the first sentence of the very next paragraph.
The big buzz around the game centers on a scene in which the game forces you to unwittingly fire white phosphorus mortars at civilians, killing 47, along with a number of rogue US military personnel. One of your character’s partners (Lugo, the one who dies first, because spoilers!) pleads for you not to issue the order, but your character, Walker, assumes (correctly) that there is no other way to proceed. The player is then immediately forced to encounter the devastation brought forth by his aggression, including the reveal that there were many civilians in the area. (The game at this point has already gone a long way to justify killing US soldiers, who the player character was originally, ostensibly supposed to be cooperating with.)
The game is filled with instances where the player is given a choice as to how he or she wants to proceed, with the implication being that the player’s value judgments make them complicit with Walker’s atrocities. You may save a valuable military asset or save a group of civilians. (They all die regardless of your decision). You can decide to end a man’s misery or simply allow him to burn to death. (He dies regardless of your decision.) You can decide to fire into a crowd in order to disperse it or over their heads. (But you must shoot somewhere or they will kill you.) But none of these choices effects the game or the story in a significant way. (This serves as a commentary on the binary structure of many games’ morality systems, but that’s not the focus of this discussion … maybe.)
The White Phosphorus scene is different than most, however, in that your only choice to proceed is to violently kill those civilians in probably the most painful way ever. You may decide not to shoot the other scene’s crowd on a subsequent play through, but every time you play through the White Phosphorus scene, you will murder civilians. Except you do have a choice, even though the game never explicitly tells you. “ There are 4 official endings and 1 unofficial ending. 1 in Konrad’s penthouse. 3 in the epilogue. And 1 in real life, for those players who decide they can’t go on and put down the controller.”
That is from the words of Walt Williams, one of the game’s creators. Earlier in that interview, he says “ The idea was that we, as gamers, have been trained to disconnect from a game when the gameplay experience drastically changes. We stop thinking about the enemies as Soldiers and instead see them as glowing dots that need to be turned off. Once the Player disconnects from the reality of the situation, something truly horrible happens. And it hits Players in the gut, because now they have to face the consequences of their actions. They don’t get teleported to the next location. They have to face the human cost of their actions.”
This was my original premise: that we as gamers are trained to disconnect from the digitally constructed humans that populate our games. But I also assert that this may train us to disassociate from the actual people that lie behind the avatars that populate our multiplayer, networked games. And if this is true, what does it say about other forms of mediated communication? I mean, I’ve noticed this trend of internet citizens self-diagnosing as having Aspergers Syndrome or existing on the Autism Spectrum, when really they just feel socially awkward. Typing “socially” into Twitter or Google Search tries to auto-complete to “socially awkward.” Is that a factor of our mediating technologies or something else?
My goal in watching these videos was to pay attention to what affects I was being presented with and to see whether this altered my feelings towards the Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) on screen. (This is a bit unfair, considering I was further mediating my experience by not actually playing, but finances are a factor.) And, in the end, even a game that was designed specifically to make the player feel the consequences of his or her actions, I found that I was disconnected. Part of this is likely due to the fact that I knew the major twists beforehand. But I think a larger part is due to the fact that I never had a chance to see these NPCs as even truly representative of real people. Since they were drawn with pixels instead of polygons, I’ve been killing video game bad guys and enemy soldiers for nearly 30 years. I know I’m not killing a real person and that there will be no real life consequences to my actions. Even when the game “speaks” to me as the player, like in both The Line and Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2, I can recognize that this is a medium affectation. Both of these games make comments about the player, the choices we make, our tendencies to follow in-game orders, and our hero fantasies. (Both games also include a major antagonist that “speaks to you through your radio” throughout the game, but turns out to be “dead” at the end. It’s surprising that MGS2 doesn’t get mentioned more often next to The Line.) But I know that these are storytelling techniques and ultimately I’m unaffected. I like the games, and I think they’re both interesting and artful. But I’m not really affected. I don’t cry for those victims any more than I cry for Robert Paulson in Fight Club. I don’t question my actions any more than I question the “I” character’s actions in any first person novel.
I do think think The Line does have a lot to say about the way we view networked games, however. In a way, it serves as a demonstration of many things that have come to define the modern online shooter, even as it deconstructs those tropes. For instance, the conflict begins because soldiers that should be friendly mistake your team for enemy soldiers because you’re all wearing nearly identical US uniforms. Likewise, your team mates will often run into your line of sight making it difficult to distinguish between friendly and enemy combatants. Your partners are fairly competent as far as NPCs go. A good portion of the game sees your team not really sure of what they should be doing aside from shooting everyone who is not them. The protagonist team goes from disassociating from their enemies (referring to them as “targets” that need to be “neutralized”) to taking a survivalistic glee from killing them (“Got the fucker!”). It can function as a simulation of networked games in multiple ways.
So what does this have to do with actual networked games? Well, this is getting pretty long, so let’s pick back up later with some talk about Team Fortress 2, a wacky first-person, multiplayer only shooter from the same company that convinced us all that “the cake is a lie.”
Lates.
-ED
