You get it all in this game, white phosphorous, lynchings, gunning down protestors, etc. The only positive of this game is that you get to gun down American troops in a video game with no pretense of doing this in real life(In Minecraft).
The worst part about this game is that war crimes are framed as inevitable. I literally can't progress in the game without gunning down civilians or shooting white phosphorous at the troops™
Like, this game would be good if there was once an anti-war message sprinkled in there. The fact that this producer can spread war crime porn is disgusting.
This game was marketed as the tough choices horror show of games, and boy did it fuck that up.
As an addendum: the campaign is kind of fun to play
The worst part about this game is that war crimes are framed as inevitable.
They are not. You always have a choice. You could have simply chosen to quit the game and uninstall it. But you chose to accept the games logic and burn those people to death.
This is the same logic of those in the military when faced with the inhuman choice. To quit at all costs, or to surrender with your consent.
I stopped playing the COD Black Ops campaign after we got to Vietnam
Yeah the devs literally said it is as legit an ending to STOP PLAYING. It is inevitable because, you chose to keep going. It wouldnt work if you could just stop in game and go full anti-american or something. it is about the psychological box the american military creates for its soldiers. Konrad tells you this in no uncertain terms ffs when the protag says it was out of their control
Was it? None of this would have happened if you just stopped. But on you marched. And for what? and
The truth Walker is, that you're here because you wanted to feel like something you are not, a hero
I have no clue how that could be construed as war crimes being a sad thing we just gotta do. The writer Walt Williams said this
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.
You have to stop, you have to evaluate your relationship with violence and war as a consumer of shooters or just media made in a war-obsessed society. There is no reason to let the player play the game and keep killing but for good reasons. You dont get the excuse, you dont get to keep doing the shooter mechanics but good this time around or whatever. You are left with your own thought and choices as a person. Removing that would make the game pointless and frankly would be inherently a less effective vehicle for addressing the genuine evil of war
The worst part about this game is that war crimes are framed as inevitable. I literally can’t progress in the game without gunning down civilians or shooting white phosphorous at the troops™
The justification is "not playing the game is also a choice" which is very silly, you can't do an artistic message that involves the 4th wall like that (at least in Spec Ops' particular case; obviously just not playing the game isn't an option IRL, so it undercuts its resonance with reality).
spoiler
People talk about the WP scene, but I actually think the better one is where a mob surrounds one of your squad members. I'm not gonna lie, I absolutely fired in to the crowd before learning they disperse if you fire warning shots and felt pretty ashamed.
As someone who played it back when it released at the height of call of duty's popularity I always thought that:
spoiler
The really effective thing about the WP scene is that it kinda tricks you into doing it, quite a few of the CoD games had sequences where you fly a drone or an AC-130 and just blow away endless little white silhouettes without thinking about it. And the WP bombing plays on that expectation and makes you realize what you've been doing without thinking in all those other games.
The justification is “not playing the game is also a choice” which is very silly, you can’t do an artistic message that involves the 4th wall like that
It's entirely correct and the fact that people still have this take 9 years down the line only serves to prove Yager even more right.
Spec Ops definitely has anti-war themes because obviously, but the first and foremost question is "Why do you entertain yourself with the war crimes simulator?". It's not so much about "don't do the war crimes" because fucking duh, it's about "don't entertain yourself playing the war crimes"
On all accounts, I'm guilty as charged on that one but the entire point is "Literally do anything else", the game basically outright tells you this via the later loading screen messages.
The war crimes are as inevitable in SOTL as they are in any other military FPS, except instead of patting you on the back for being a cool gamer sergeant supreme soldier or grimly going "we had to do this in order to save america freedom", SOTL makes you acknowledge the horror intrinsic to it.
having perfect moral agency is another kind of power fantasy, and a feature of games-as-children's-toys. won't be elaborating on this theory further rn.
"wow, i wrote some really fucked up stuff on that last page. why did you read it, you monster?"
I found the campaign to be a tedious cover shooter, and personally I thought that helps it function as a criticism of the shooter genre
Tbf you can progress without gunning down civilians not without white phosphorous them
Would you be happier if there was an ending where you Press X to fake depression or gay or whatever and get sent home, where you watch the news of troops bringing freedom and democracy around the world?
Would you be happier if I made up some absurd response to this that no one would do in real life?
A Heart of Darkness knockoff that missed the entire point of Heart of Darkness? Preposterous
