Quarterly reminder that “protagonist” doesn’t just mean “the good guy”
yea its like criticizing red dead redemption because you can’t play entirely nonlethally. the point of the fiction is to analyze the topics via the player character. its not an RPG (it has like 2 or 3 ‘decisions’ you can make in cutscene/QTE scenarios that lead to 2 or 3 slightly different endings that are all kinda depressing) its a linear 3rd person cover shooter. COD: Black Ops 2 is more of a choice based RPG than this. the whole point is that the war crimes feel the same as the normal gameplay, because normal military shooter gameplay is already making horrible things like war and murder feel ‘rewarding’ and ‘compelling’ and ‘satisfying’. how many times have you executed a wounded or ‘downed’ enemy in video games? perhaps even with a fancy animated ‘execution’… its a war crime.
I actually agree. Giving the player no option then scolding them generally isn’t effective. Give them two horrible options? Sure. Make them make a choice. If they didn’t make a decision it generally doesn’t land.
any other propaganda military shooters doesn’t give you a choice neither. yeah i agree it’s bad as a morality to system to just say “well if you wanna be good just quit” but spec ops isn’t some rpg it has all the mechanics of its genre including the lack of choice but it’s opposing their dominant narrative. if you had the option not to murder the civilians i think the impact of the game would be lost.
And they’re not trying to make any statement or impact to undercut the dominant narrative. They don’t want players to question, they’re reinforcing what the player already believes.
The game doesn’t need to give you a way out. But for the moment to be impactful you do have to manipulate the player in to believing that they made a decision and are thus culpable for their actions. Players have to feel ownership of what they did to feel shame, remorse, and horror. If they had no choice except “press x to do warcrimes” or turning off the game they’ll press x and grumble about being railroaded by the story.
yeah i agree it’s bad as a morality to system to just say “well if you wanna be good just quit”
“Just don’t vote”
You actually do have an option IIRC, it just never tells you. It’s supposed to highlight why the military is systemically bad and appears to remove all choice, even if individual soldiers could disobey orders.
Yeah, the only big unavoidable choice is the white phosphorus
pretty sure in most others you can either stand for a second and it proceeds or you shoot into the air instead of at someone and it proceeds
While the white phosphorus part doesn’t give you a choice, isn’t it basically that they used it only intending to hit military targets, then it turns out it hit civilians too?
I think it’s not a choice precisely because it’s the worst or most blatant war crime in the game IIRC and most people would decide against it even for “only military targets” and that would stop them from getting the point across.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played it so I might not be remembering entirely right. I might play it again now.
Yeah the white phosphorus scene was really dumb but the rest felt justified.
Yeah, the white phosphorous scene doesn’t really work unless you’re coming into it with a mindset of “whoa badass, this is gonna be just like those AC-130 missions in Call of Duty”
Apparently the devs wanted to include a branching story path where the player doesn’t use the WP, but they didn’t have the budget.
You should have an explicit option to refuse war crimes, but then it should turn into something like a Hugh Thompson simulator.
CW war crimes
When news of the massacre publicly broke, Thompson repeated his account to then-Colonel William Wilson[6]: 222–235 and then-Lieutenant General William Peers during their official Pentagon investigations.[15] In late-1969, Thompson was summoned to Washington, DC to appear before a special closed hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. There, he was sharply criticized by congressmen, in particular Chairman Mendel Rivers (D-S.C.), who were anxious to play down allegations of a massacre by American troops.[6]: 290–291 Rivers publicly stated that he felt Thompson was the only soldier at Mỹ Lai who should be punished (for turning his weapons on fellow American troops) and unsuccessfully attempted to have him court-martialed.[5]
Thompson was vilified by many Americans for his testimony against United States Army personnel. He recounted in a CBS 60 Minutes television program in 2004, “I’d received death threats over the phone…Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up.”[16][7]
Yeah I was just following orders
🤔
No one forced you to pick up a copy of Bland Early 2010s Modern Military Shooter: Pentagon Propaganda Boogaloo
. You picked it up (ostensibly) knowing what it is and what it was going to includeWhy use that image of edgeworth to make your point? That’s edgeworth standing on the right side of the courtroom, where he’s always wrong.
The whole point of the ace attorney games is if you are on the left, you are good and correct. If you are on the right, you are evil and wrong. And if you are in the center, you are either a hopelessly confused idiot, or evil.
type :shrug to look up emojis
took the one of the argumentative lawyerman
That’s… a bit of a stretch to consider that using a shrugging emoji of an antagonist in a video game means my argument is inherently wrong?
I think the sidebar in the emoji comm is helpful to remember. It says “emojis are what they convey”, so expecting everyone to know the direct reference to the video game (and by extension all other 2400 emojis) is a little much. You can use it that way or as a lil guy shrugging.
This is dialectics
No one forced them to tell their story in a way that robbed the moment of it’s impact and made the player feel annoyed and hoodwinked instead of horrified.
The player could always make the choice to stop playing and turn the game off, and it even says as much during one of the loading screens so it’s 100% intentional. Often times the correct choice is one that is outside the narrow range of choices that are given, and I believe that was the point the developer was trying to make.
EDIT: It’s worth checking out the loading screen messages in the game, since these often give away what the devs intended, sometimes in an ironic way. Some examples:
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To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.
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Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously.
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You are still a good person.
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The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn’t real, so why should you care?
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Do you feel like a hero yet?
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If you were a better person, you wouldn’t be here.
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Kill a man, and you are a murderer. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
There’s a whole list here: https://pastebin.com/w7x0LJ5w
They’d best be prepared to offer you a full refund if they intend you not to actually use the product.
It’s poor storytelling.
If I remember correctly, that part happens relatively late in the game, so you play a decent amount before that.
They aren’t preventing you from playing the game or anything, as the choice is ultimately up to you. You just don’t get to be a hero if you choose to keep playing.
Sure, right, it’s their game, they can do whatever they want, and what they wanted to do was tell a story badly.
People talk about The Line to this day, but they only argue about whether that scene was a legitimate story telling beat or a gotcha. No one actually talks about the story, whether the story was moving or effecting, whether it changed anyone’s minds. They just argue over the wp scene. People remember that there was a forced non-choice that folks didn’t like and that’s all they really recall about the game. I’d argue that’s good evidence the game failed in its messaging.
No one actually talks about the story, whether the story was moving or effecting, whether it changed anyone’s minds.
You might be right, though I don’t think that’s necessarily because the story is bad. Overall, I thought the story was pretty decent (even if a little derivative), though I also think it was much more relevant when the “War on Terror” was fresh in people’s minds. That particular scene is discussed more because of how shocking it is and due to it being a major turning point in the story, but there is a lot more to talk about imo, including the loading screen messages.
Have you played it yourself, just curious?
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People continue to defend their design choice even though “uh aktually you could prevent bad thing from happening by not continuing” has never worked for other media. Imagine people saying this shit for a novel. If it’s not a real choice, then whatever you do to continue the game is functionally the same as turning the pages of a novel. It’s whatever set of mechanical motion that is needed to advance progress in consuming the media.
Spec Ops The Line is a fantastic game that just so happens to be a thorough deconstruction of the generic power fantasy military shooter so naturally gamers hate it for making them question why they enjoy playing games like Call of Duty or Battlefield.
Yep. It holds a mirror up very thoroughly to the audience to show them what they are and they unsurprisingly HATE that.
Sends them scurrying back to their reddit shithole to jack off to gore footage of surrendering Russian conscripts being blown up
Yep. It holds a mirror up very thoroughly to the audience to show them what they are and they unsurprisingly HATE that.
Gamers are the least media literate of people who’s entire hobby is about exposing themselves to media.
It’s probably time to start including videogames in English or whatever class covers media literacy. Not just movies and books.
Can you imagine the backlash though? From chuds and boomers alike.
I spend too much of my life in games (board, social, or video I play them all!) and I really do wish more people who enjoy them were interested in critical analysis of them. Outside of gamedev circles and weird youtube channels asking “why is this being presented the way it is?” is a technique for speedrunning slur%. Especially if a game is non, or non traditional, narrative. Like I dare you to try analyse the themes of slay the spire or whatever on the subreddit haha.
Shout out to the time SUPERHOT tried the “Stop playing the game! I mean it! You’ll be responsible for the consequences!” thing and I just ended up shutting it off and never playing it again
But but but you end up shooting yourself in the back of the head. It’s tight.
The game works if you realize that there is no “bad apples” when they work for the empire, only “good apples,” and even then 9/10 times, they will volunteer to be a rotten apple for self preservation. Therefore, the only choices you have are to kill, kill, and kill.
But i don’t think Americans are introspective to be making media like that. I believe it really was just a dumb gotcha ‘mmmm hypocrite much??
” gameThat comment is probably bait posted by the OP in the image on another window to drum up engagement.
I’ve never played it but it seems like it’s mgs2 for normies and 10 years later.
I always maintained it was just a worse and less topical MGS2.
Spec Ops: The Line, beyond being a pretty good game with a lot to say about the average gamer’s enjoyment of military shooter power fantasies, also introduced me to my favorite band, the Black Angels, and I’ll be forever grateful to it for that.
Least enjoyable game I’m glad I played. Actual art. Hamfisted, leaned too much on using the term “Cognitive dissonance” as a magic spell to contain and explain, but well done.
