No Game Over: Super-soldier video games and war
BREAKING NEWS: A ceasefire has been negotiated after ‘Player One’ hit pause so they could have their dinner.
In other news, fighting continues in both Gaza and Ukraine.
More on these events can be found elsewhere, for now we return you to your regularly scheduled program – blowing up a rural Mexican community in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.
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Video games have one glaring difference which separates them from everything else – they are the only type of media which expects you to fail and try again. There is always a do-over, always one more life. It’s that notion of failure being an inevitability which makes the win so much more satisfying. You keep going because every kill you get, every goal destroyed, every objective completed–no matter how gruesome–gives you, the player, a sense of accomplishment that cannot be obtained from any other storytelling medium.
In 2012, one game dared to challenge the excitement and achievement offered by other military shooters.
Spec Ops: The Line was released with little fanfare. Appearing to be another run-of-the-mill shooter revelling in the spectacle of war, it instead subverted players’ expectations by providing a (admittedly heavy handed) critique on war and war gaming as a whole.
In its most famous sequence, the game tasks the player with firing white phosphorus on a large gathering of presumed enemy forces, only to then make the player walk through the carnage and find the bodies of civilians. Images of the charred remains of a mother cradling her infant are burned into the minds of anyone who played the game.
Last month, the game was removed from stores.
This might be a coincidence, but it’s chilling to see one of the few games that doesn’t glorify war ripped from shelves 12 years after its release. And right at the time when Gaza and Ukraine are suffering.
Today, Spec Ops: The Line is unable to be obtained legitimately. Due to the game's publisher, 2K Games, refusing to renew several partnership licenses, Spec Ops: The Line can no longer be purchased through digital storefronts. And due to the age of the game, as well as it being locked to PS3 and Xbox 360 on console, obtaining a physical copy of the game is easier said than done.
One of the few games to try and critique the power fantasy the industry sells just vanished.
At the same time, civilians are being murdered on the streets of Gaza, with images mirroring those seen in Spec Ops: The Line coming out of the warn torn region.
Unlike film and television, games allow the audience to be in the driver’s seat. You’re not watching the action, you ARE the action. You are an active participant in conflict, killing hundreds of thousands of any forces in the name of protecting the ‘free world’.
I feel like films critiquing war can never stand on the same level as video games, as no matter how hard a movie tries, it’ll never be able to make the audience feel like they’re pulling the trigger. There will never be a movie that gives the viewer the same emotional response as Spec Ops: The Line. The feeling of firing on what you think is a massive enemy encampment, only to be made to trudge through the bodies of civilians YOU killed is not possible in any other medium.
Video games are a medium built for exploring topics like this. Yet whenever war is concerned, mainstream developers only wish to put the player in one position: the hero.
Call of Duty 2’s British campaign focuses on the conflict in Egypt and Africa – battles my great-grandfather fought in are playable.
My great-grandparents fought in the Second World War. They watched their friends bleed and die around them, and came out alive with scars so deep we never saw them. Their experiences are the basis for countless shooter games, and now we’re seeing real-world conflicts mirror the experiences we use to unwind.
I don’t feel excitement or pride when replaying these levels. I don’t feel like the hero anymore – I feel uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable knowing the houses built from polygons and early 2000s textures were real, they belonged to real civilians caught up in real conflicts they never asked for.
While we might create fictional countries to use as the backdrop for fictional conflicts, it doesn’t change the fact that these games could not be further from fiction. They’re the daily lives of civilians in Ukraine and in Gaza.
Video games are an escapist medium. People play them to leave reality, not face its harshness head-on. It’s no surprise that playing the game which makes you feel bad for killing is less appealing than literally anything else.
But if facing the truth about what’s happening overseas is too much to stomach, why are we still giving ground to the super soldier fantasy.
Gaza and Ukraine are burning, and we’re kicking back playing Call of Duty like it’s not happening.
The civilians caught in these conflicts don’t get to hit pause. Their livelihoods are decimated, and we’ve made it into an entertainment product.
In war, there’s no restart. No second life. Game over doesn’t exist.