Chris Martin is an English PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, whose dissertation research focuses on the QANON conspiracy community and the social media based disinformation networks that allow it flourish. When he’s not wading through the fever swamp of the reactionary conspiracy community, he can typically be found pouring hours into sprawling RPGs and Grand Strategy games. You can contact him via email at c23marti@uwaterloo.ca.

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In 2023, the potential for deconstructive narratives in video games almost seems self-evident. The critical and financial success of titles like Disco Elysium, as well as deconstructive turns taken in tentpole franchises appear to demonstrate a heavy appetite for gaming narratives that deconstruct genre tropes and challenge player expectations. Perhaps nowhere better can this be seen than in the transformation of God of War’s ultra-violent protagonist, the deicidal Kratos, whose latest games have seen his quest for blood-soaked vengeance become a quest for fatherhood and a redemptive escape from the cycles of violence that once defined the series as a whole. For all the acclaim these recent releases have received, many are unaware of the pioneering titles who helped pave the way for their success. One such title is 2012’s Spec Ops: The Line, an ambitious, flawed, and fascinating experiment that cleverly sets up, then deconstructs player expectations. Military shooters of this variety tend to offer up narrative and gameplay that provide a heroic power fantasy, one where the player kills hordes of faceless enemies under the banner of heroic military interventionism.

On the surface, Spec Ops looks like it will deliver on these expectations through a mishmash of Gears of War’s cover-based shooting with the militarist aesthetic of the Call of Duty games. Yet cracks in this façade begin to appear even before gameplay begins. The title screen prominently featuring an upside-down American flag (an official signal used by the American military to signal ‘distress or great danger’) set against the ruined capitalist glamor of a destroyed Dubai. Meanwhile, a distorted version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, specifically the one famously played in protest by Jimmy Hendrix at Woodstock, warbles in the distance as the faint sound of helicopter blades are heard.

It is an eerie scene, and far removed from the typical generic bravado and seriousness of Call of Duty. This moment of introspection quickly dissipates from the player’s mind as they are promptly thrust into the shoes of the protagonist, Delta Force member Sgt. Walker. The player takes control of Walker In Media Res, already in the midst of a bombastic turret shooting sequence that sees them gunning down enemy helicopters while hurtling through a massive sandstorm devastating Dubai. It abruptly ends as the player’s helicopter crashes, cutting back in time to the player character’s arrival in sand-wracked Dubai a day earlier.

The turret shooting section is amusing enough but doesn’t offer anything that hasn’t been reproduced in countless other shooters of the late 2000s. The opening half-hour in the dune sea of Dubai proceeds along similarly conventional genre fare. You play a handsome and stoic soldier leading a squad that has been tasked with investigating potential survivors after a powerful sandstorm ravaged Dubai. Walker’s squad is also here to investigate rumors that the American military commander who was overseeing the evacuation, John Konrad, has gone rogue. Unfortunately, upon your arrival you are almost immediately attacked by what appear to be hostile insurgents. Wielding AK-47s, and with faces obscured by scarves, they would fit easily into the role of cannon fodder in any number of post 9/11 American military movies.

After being lulled into the typical trance of cover shooting, it is not long before the game throws its first curveball. A doll cues the protagonist in to the fact that these “insurgents” are actually the refugees they were tasked with saving, and evidence begins to mount of American atrocities against the civilian population. A simpler game might be content with a simple indictment of American military interventionism, but here, this is merely the first layer in a wildly ambitious deconstruction of military shooters, violence in gaming, and personal agency.

Moral lines blur and atrocities mount as the players venture deeper and deeper into Dubai as Sgt. Walker, and by extension the player, become      increasingly complicit in this charnel house of horrors. Perhaps the most famous example is when Walker, who believes to be saving refugees from the murderous Americans, uses white phosphorus against the dug-in American troops. Unlike its contemporaries Spec Ops forces the player to walk through the aftermath of the attack. Maimed soldiers beg and scream for mercy as their bodies burn. Later, the player will discover that the Americans had actually been trying to help the refugees in this case, and the player has accidentally burned 47 refugees: men, women, and children. Discordant electric guitar chords play as the camera intercuts between the mangled body of a mother cradling her child and a close up of Walker’s face staring in numb horror while behind him his two squadmates descend into a frenzy of blame and recrimination. When the squad’s sniper screams that Walker has “made them all killers”, Walker snaps out of his guilt induced trance and numbly insists that they have no choice; they must continue their mission.

It is not subtle, and many players have noted that this sequence does not offer the player any choice—they have to use the white phosphorus to proceed, and then the game wags its finger at them for doing what they were told. It is a fair criticism, especially when compared to the game’s many other moments of choice that are better integrated into the game’s mechanics. When the game offers choices like whether to save civilians or a CIA agent who might have vital intel, they simply play out naturally in-game as the result of the players actions.

However, the white phosphorus scene is important for other reasons beyond a commentary on player agency. At the base level of interpretation, this is the moment where the protagonist starts to lose his grip on reality. From this point onwards, the player will hallucinate when under stress, and begin to receive radio transmissions from the enigmatic Commander Konrad himself. The game’s loading screens become darker and more violent, the tutorial style tips—“Press space to throw grenades. Use cover to avoid enemy fire”—are replaced with increasingly cryptic and dark intrusive thoughts: “There is no difference between what is right and what is necessary,” “How many Americans have you killed today?”, and the ominous “None of this would have happened if you had just stopped.” One is simply a definition of cognitive dissonance, another a description of PTSD symptoms. Walker’s movements become more violent, the combat executions more brutal and sadistic, the squad chatter more guttural and animalistic.

By the end of the game, Walker (and by extension, the player) has doomed the entire city to death by dehydration, personally killed countless soldiers and civilians, and has long abandoned any kind of humanitarian mission. The player character is hallucinating regularly, seeing the face of his dead squadmates on enemies, and at times losing their grip on reality entirely.

Finally, the last twist of the knife: the player discovers that Konrad was dead long before the player arrived, his voice another manifestation of the protagonists’ guilt. The final choice is between suicide and denial of reality, there is no happy ending. It is an effective gut-punch, and a fitting end to this ugly, violent journey into the heart of darkness. It is also not the end.

In an interview with Ars Technica, lead writer Walt Williams describes his approach to writing the game, and reveals a final layer of narrative depth. When the players find themselves replaying the turret shooting sequence from the opening, having now caught up to the opening’s flash-forward, their character expresses disbelief. “This is wrong,” claims Sgt. Walker. “We’ve done this before.” On a first playthrough, this is usually taken as a clever fourth wall breaking wink to the audience that acknowledges the player’s familiarity with the sequence and it certainly can function as such. However, upon repeat playthroughs, a different interpretation starts to form. From the Ars Technica interview, “It’s specifically designed so you would maybe read it as the prologue is the only part of the game where you’re really alive, and you die in that chopper crash, and everything after that is Walker kind of working through his guilt and forcing him to go through with what he has done and face up to it. This is his own personal hell he is creating for himself” (Orland).

That is a leap of logic, and comes dangerously close to the dreaded ‘it was all a dream’ cliche that is so universally loathed. What sets this twist apart is both the subtle way it is foreshadowed, and the fact that the story works perfectly well if the player never picks up on it.

Long before Sgt. Walker begins to openly hallucinate in accordance with the surface level interpretation of the story, there is smaller, but no less reality warping evidence that all is not as it seems. Throughout the opening chapters, Konrad’s face can be seen by eagle eyed gamers in the surrounding environments. On a first playthrough, the player does not know what Konrad looks like yet, so these moments will not trigger any suspicion, and if the player looks at them closely, they will disappear the moment the player looks away. The game does not make any attempt to draw attention to them, and they are not the only examples of this clever use of an unreliable environment. Trees will be in full bloom—impossible in the midst of a dead, sand choked city—only for them to be dead when the player looks again.

The game does nothing to draw attention to these discrepancies, no audio cues or camera zooms. They just slowly add to the sense of growing unease the player feels as they descend ever deeper into Dubai. In this descent, the game’s levels always involve the player moving down, cleverly masked by strong level design. They are always descending into gaping pits, rappelling down into deeper and deeper darkness, a motif that recurs in the game’s loading screen art as the game goes on. It creates an oppressive atmosphere, and from the perspective of a metaphysical interpretation, a clear symbol for Sgt. Walker’s descent into hell.

Even in the game’s cutscene cinematography, there is a pattern hinting at something strange going on. Williams describes how “every time the game is doing a normal transition, it fades to black. Whenever Walker is hallucinating, it fades to white” (Orland). This becomes clear when the hallucinations become overt and all encompassing, but observant players will note that this pattern is present for the entire game. With the metaphysical interpretation, these are deviations from Walker’s own life, moments of reflection and pain as he is forced to relive his actions again and again. This makes the lack of choice in the infamous “white phosphorus scene” make more sense—this is the moment Walker damns himself, it is the one moment there can be no deviation from in this personal hell.

As mentioned earlier, what makes this noteworthy is that the game’s narrative works perfectly without it. Williams speaks at length about the importance of this:

[of providing] a level of things that you can read into it that aren’t necessarily confirmed. I think it gives a richness to people who want to dig deeper. The top-level story needs to make sense, you don’t want people who play through it to just say ‘I don’t get it.’ If you can’t understand the main story without understanding the subtext, that’s my fault as a writer. (Orland)

This might be the most important aspect of the game’s enduring appeal is that it is not a polemic, it does not present easy answers. It does not force its artistic aspirations onto its audience, it merely invites them to engage with them. As a piece of interactive entertainment that aspires to the same levels of artistic abstraction found in literature or film, this game must juggle multiple artistic roles. They need to provide a reactive, engaging game with rules and systems, as well as provide a narrative context to ground those systems and make them meaningful, without one subsuming the other.

Spec Ops: The Line does not entirely manage this tightrope walk, with messy gameplay and narrative layers that will likely go unnoticed by users looking for a simple action game. However, it will provide players who are willing to bear some janky controls and engage with some dark subject matter, an experience that no other medium can quite provide. Existential questions of morality, agency and perception-as-reality that the player is not merely posed, but able to play out their answer. It is a brutal, oppressive game, and is often not really that fun to play. That it remains such a compelling, memorable experience speaks to the capacity of games to be far more than idle entertainment. I will not forget my time in Sgt. Walker’s personal hell any time soon.

Works Cited

Lawson, Susan H. “Do’s and Don’ts for Displaying Old Glory.” U.S. Department of Defense, 01 July 2019, https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/1892936/dos-and-donts-for-displaying-old-glory/.

Orland, Kyle. “Spec Ops: The Line’s Lead Writer on Creating an Un-heroic War Story.” Ars Technica, 19 July 2012, https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/spec-ops-the-lines-lead-writer-on-creating-an-un-heroic-war-story/.