Spec Ops: the Line. That is too many words plus a colon, so let’s just agree to call it “Spool.” I know that doesn’t really match up, but screw it. This game is all about choice, so I’m taking choice and running with it.
Spec…Spool (goddamn it. If I end up typing “Spec” and then changing back to “Spool” every time, that whole shortening will have been for nothing. And that first paragraph will have been a waste. My entire kingdom is crumbling before my eyes) is basically a shooter game where you are set up to make some difficult choices. So gameplay wise it’s nothing terribly exciting. Most of the talk has been about the story, which allows for some level of decision making and includes some dream-like sequences, some real purple haze shit.
Here’s what I liked about the story: It didn’t bend over backwards to make sure the player walks away feeling like the good guy. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that there’s a way to play the game that even makes this possible. Throughout the game, your two squadmates are constantly bickering about the decisions you’ve made and say some pretty harsh shit about it.
One would think that in our current stage of gaming, especially with the popularity of games where the main goal is to turn a human man’s head into a cherry Slurpee using a high-powered rifle, that there would be more games that had some legitimate moral issues. I mean, isn’t it curious that the line we find in game creation generally causes us to shy away from something like, I don’t know, a re-creation of the battle on Okinawa where a player fills the shoes of a Japanese guy? I sort of get that people don’t want to shoot their grandfathers…but it still feels like a bizarre line to me. Or, for example, I think that a Sims-esque game where you ran a plantation with slaves would be seen as a racist endeavor. However, that’s what fucking happened. If we make the same points by putting a city in the sky, it’s cool. If we demonstrate a reality where there are conflicting points and the player inhabits the role of the bad guy, that makes the game evil somehow.
I think that part of the issue is this: How would you make a game about something like slavery and still have it be, well, fun? I mean, it would take some real talent for suspending every emotion you have to enjoy playing a game where you were a crazed taskmaster whipping guys for not doing farm shit fast enough.
Part of me also wonders if this limitation will always be an issue when it comes to taking games seriously. There are a lot of movies out there, for example, that I would say were excellent, but were difficult to watch. Certainly not fun.
Classic example, I think Requiem for a Dream is a good movie, but it’s not something I’m super interested in watching again.
So the real question is, will players play through an entire game where there is no intent to have fun, or where the source material itself is decidedly unfun?
People should give Spec Ops more Spec Props. It’s done something that few games do in giving the player a role where he or she is shooting people that maybe shouldn’t be shot. In a climate that is very into Support the Troops, I’m pretty surprised that we didn’t hear more about this game.
The criticism I have of this game is the same that I have of the beloved Bioshock: the gameplay parts were the least interesting parts of the whole thing. And being a game, these parts made up the vast majority of the experience in terms of time spent.
People have fond memories of Bioshock, and when they talk about it they mostly talk about the creepy atmosphere, the first five minutes, and a few other memorable tableaus. They don’t talk about how cool the shotgun was or how it was really fun to drink booze and be woozy for a short time.
SPOOL (nailed it) is the same thing. There are cool gameplay elements. Parts where the encroaching sand comes torrenting into a building during a firefight. Some really excellent destroyed buildings. But at the end of the day, you’ve spent most of your time ducking behind a barrier and shooting at a generic baddie.
I don’t think the answer is to make games into something that’s not games. Playing games is fun. What I would like to see is more games where the narrative is in the driving seat, and perhaps the content determines the form. And it might be time to take a good, long look at first and third-person shooters and question whether these games are the best way to express what we want to say. We’ve become very attached to our shooters, just as we were attached to a 2-d sidescrolling platformer years ago. But as the technology and horsepower of consoles evolves, so should our methods.
As a quick example, why does the gaming style of driving a go-kart in Mario Kart and driving a motorcycle in Grand Theft Auto feel almost the same? There is a world of difference, yet we’ve stopped at saying gas, brakes, left, right. Why did playing Lost Planet, a game where you control a guy running around on a world covered in deep snow, control so much like Dead Space, a game where you are in a full space getup on a dilapidated space ship?
I know we can do better. Even in Super Mario Bros. 2 on the NES, you could pick from 4 characters and each had a distinct feel. Meanwhile, I picked up Borderlands and the character selection seemed to make about as much difference as picking a different pair from the same plastic bag of Hanes socks.
It’s not just a criticism. It’s a plea for people to ask the question. Can we make this game seem like its own thing? Is this the best way to handle this? How does the style of play either add to or subtract from the narrative?
I guess as the final analogy, sometimes a video game feels like a great novel, but the novel is printed in comic sans.