Brendan Keogh - Killing Is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line

FOREWORD

The second wave of Western filmmakers (Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, Clint Eastwood) turned our deep familiarity with the genre in on itself, addressing existential questions and examining the nature of violence. These films were radical departures from the Hollywood formula, not because they rejected the familiar settings or the guns or the hero/villain dichotomy, but because they made these the very subjects of their scrutiny.

Michael Abbott, The Brainy Gamer .

We shouldnt be afraid to question our own medium. It is ours to do with as we see fit. There is no problem in questioning what is your own and asking what it is that you want to do with it, and are we necessarily doing the right thing with it? I mean, thats the other great thing about mediums, is that there is no right thing.

Walt Williams, lead writer for Spec Ops: The Line.

In his article High Noon For Shooters, videogame critic Michael Abbott notes that as the Western film genre matured, it turned its gaze inwards onto the Western genre itself to ask questions about the ways it depicted violence. This second wave of Western filmmakers were not necessarily trying to determine if what Western films did was good or bad, but they simply wanted to create films that poked at the genre, interrogated it, unsettled it.

Abbotts point is that the bulging bubble that is videogames shooter genre is heading towards a similar introspective turn. Only so many games can be absolutely uncritical and unthinking in their violence before players start to think more critically about what these games are asking of them and developers start to question just what they are creating. After so many years of shooters that dont think twice about the excessive violences they ask their players to participate in, the shooter genre is set for a second wave of games that, much like the Western film genre, turn the gaze back onto themselves. These shooters wont necessarily be trying to determine if shooters are good or bad, but will simply want to create shooters that poke at the genre, interrogate it, unsettle it.

Of course, critics have been critiquing shooters for years. Even those of us that sincerely enjoy shooters cant shake the feeling that there is something fundamentally unsettling about them. Even though most of the articles I write about shooters are praising positive things about them, I always feel obliged to add caveats. The Modern Warfare trilogy is an absolutely magnificent example of how to tell a scripted story in a videogameeven if that story makes absolutely no sense and the trilogy completely alienates and vilifies the stereotypical Russian and Arabic enemies in really problematic ways. The Gears of War games are a terrific example of how to convey a games tone through its core mechanics, with its seminal cover system evoking the intensity and claustrophobia of an utterly futile wareven as the games laughably ask us to weep for a characters dead wife moments after he trash-talked an enemy while stomping on his brains. Far Cry 2s open vistas and persistently uncontrollable skirmishes give an intensity to its violence matched by few gameseven as it chooses to depict a nation without civilians, a conflict without collateral.

Theres no shortage of shooters that want to be about something. But very few shooters are brave enough to look in the mirroror to force the player that enjoys shooters to look in the mirrorand question what they see. Not to pass judgment. Not to ask them to change their ways. Just to understand what is going on here. To appropriate Abbotts post, it is high noon for shooters to take a long, hard look at themselves.

Clearly, Abbott is onto something with his prediction. Not two months after he wrote his article, Yager and 2K released Spec Ops: The Line and made me question everything Ive ever thought about shooters.

Spec Ops: The Line

The Line is a shooter about shooters. It makes some interesting commentaries on modern warfare and Western interventionism to be sure, but what I got out of it most were questions about the shooter genre itselfthe questions that other shooters either willfully ignore or simply dont think to ask. Is it really okay to be shooting this many people? Does it actually matter that they arent real? What does it say about us, the people who play shooter after shooter, the people who have a virtual murder count in the thousands of thousands, that these are the games we enjoy playing? What does it say about us, as a culture, that these are the kinds of games that make so much money?