LOOKING BACK, IT’S EASY TO FORGET THAT WITH ALL THE ADVANCES in gaming over the last few decades, games didn’t have much in the way of story in 1980. In fact, most weren’t much more than, “Enemies have appeared. If you a press a button, you shoot. You should probably shoot those enemies.” They were technical marvels, and we were happy to be playing them, but the story behind the gameplay left something to be desired, even if that wasn’t the reason you sat down to play in the first place.
These narratives, if made at all, were often relegated to a position outside the gameplay itself, explained in a quick paragraph of text somewhere on the arcade cabinet. At least they were trying, but few read these attempts at a story, and they certainly didn’t have an impact on how players experienced the game.
That wasn’t enough for Theurer, though. He didn’t want to just create another black-and-white adventure game that required you to shoot at an incoming enemy until you saw the game over screen. He wanted you to take something from the experience—he wanted you to leave with a message—a real message—even if he couldn’t tell it as deeply as he wanted to through the game. He captured the overwhelming fear of society at the time and used it as the vehicle for his message. If he was able to get people to associate their feelings with what they were experiencing in the game, he might be able to share his message without heavy-handedly forcing it into the game. He didn’t want the narrative to overwhelm the gameplay, and he wasn’t going to let what most would enjoy suffer for something a few might find interesting. But he also wasn’t ready to let it go entirely.
Game narratives are common now, almost required. You don’t see many modern games released without at least some semblance of a story thrown together to help justify the players’ actions and the scenarios they find themselves in. Many are garbage, and serve as little more than filler, but some stand out as exceptional.
Others take things one step further, utilizing the same technique as Theurer to pressure the player to explore more meaningful narratives outside of what’s meant for the general audience. Spec Ops: The Line, released in 2012 by 2K Games, is a perfect example of a dark and intense player narrative in modern gaming.
On the surface, it appears to be another military shooter, a genre that had become overwhelmingly synonymous with gaming in the early twenty-first century; and it is, but beneath its exterior you realize there’s something more to it. Most games that fall into this camp tend to focus on making everything big; you must save the world, nukes are going off, and so on. Everything is purposefully detached from who the character is. They don’t want people to be able to relate on a personal level, they want the faceless hero to be stripped down to “Well, they’re human” levels of relatability. And that’s fine, but that’s not Spec Ops: The Line.
As the game’s writer, Walt Williams, explains, Spec Ops is meant to be personal. He wants you to be able to relate to the soldiers in the game, whether you’ve ever seen a moment of combat or not. He wants you to feel their struggles, to understand their pain, and to be forced to remember that they aren’t just soldiers, they’re humans. As Williams told Greg Miller on IGN’s Up at Noon around the time of the game’s release, he wanted to create a game that “was actually about the soldiers that were going into combat [and] what happens when you take men and you put them into an increasingly bad situation until eventually they start to break.” He wanted it to be an opportunity for players to explore the more personal side of games that so typically attempt to withdraw all human elements from gaming.
In the game, Dubai is destroyed by a series of catastrophic sandstorms that require American troops, including Colonel John Konrad and his “Damned” 33rd Infantry Battalion, to enter and help with evacuations. Unfortunately, these evacuations never happen, as Konrad and the entire Damned 33rd desert, declaring martial law and taking over Dubai, cutting off all communication. Captain Martin Walker (which is your role as game player) is sent in with two other members of Delta Squad, a US Army special forces unit, to verify the existence of a group of survivors fighting back against the Damned 33rd and figure out what’s going on. But upon arrival they quickly realize that nothing is as it seems. Though originally this was meant to be just a fact-finding mission, Walker can’t help himself; he sees the atrocities being committed by the 33rd and has to step in. Once engaged, Konrad and the 33rd know of Walker and his men, and they tempt them into continued engagement.
Tracking Konrad’s squad to a specific area, Walker realizes they’re outnumbered and makes the call to use weaponized white phosphorus, a deadly chemical agent, on the group. Presented with the horrors of what this agent could do, Walker is questioned by his squad, saying they could go about it another way, that “there’s always a choice,” to which Walker coldly replies, “No, there’s not,” before setting up a mortar launcher to start raining down destruction on Konrad’s army. This sequence, presented in a top-down thermal viewpoint, is different from everything you, the player, have encountered thus far in the game. You’re put in a position of absolute power, taking out multiple enemies at once without even having to expose yourself. In the reflection of the targeting computer, you see Walker’s face, stoic, unaffected by the destruction at hand. Walker soon finds out, however, that that wasn’t Konrad’s army at all; it was a group of refugees escaping from Konrad’s clutches. He breaks down, realizing the atrocity he has just committed: in an attempt to defeat Konrad and save the civilians, he has instead killed dozens of the civilians, making him just as bad as Konrad. He’s been misled; Konrad purposefully tricked him into attacking the civilians. “We were helping,” whimpers one of the phosphorous victims with his final dying breath, looking directly at Walker, who believed himself to be doing the same.
As the next level loads, the game taunts you with subtle new loading screen text: “Do you feel like a hero yet?”
At this moment, you think about the effect you’re actually having on the situation. Are you making it any better? You just killed a few dozen innocent civilians, but it was an accident, or at least that’s what you tell yourself. While you may have entered with the best of intentions, each subsequent choice in the battlefield has an effect on the core of who Walker—and by extension, you, the player—is. Unlike other military shooters, the game forces you to feel the gravity behind each and every choice you make, slowing causing you to think “Maybe this isn’t the best way to go about this” despite your continuing contradictory actions otherwise.
Williams wanted players to think about this in a few different ways, beyond just gameplay. Undoubtedly, most players were initially drawn to Spec Ops for its unique sand environment setting and the gameplay that it provided, and not really for the narrative—he knew that going into it. It was an interesting setup for a story, but until the player got into the thick of it, it could easily be perceived as just another one of the military shooting games it was trying so hard to distinguish itself from. Because of this, Williams and the other developers knew they had to figure out how to use gameplay as a narrative lever for the player rather than for the game.
Spec Ops: The Line starts off like most modern action games: a cutscene setting up the basic backstory, shooting some guys, another cutscene that gets to the real meat of what you’re going to be experiencing, shooting some more guys, and repeat. But as you progress through the story, the game itself begins to turn, slowly transitioning from basic shooter into a much more thoughtful exploration of choice, morality, and obsession, questioning your actions as you progress. The game doesn’t get in your face; if you didn’t know any better, you’d never notice, but the farther into the game you make it, the more Williams’s challenge to the player begins to surface. It might start innocently enough as you’re forced to decide between killing two people, both of whom did something horrible. No matter which you choose, nothing changes in the story; you’ll get the same outcome. But the idea is that the consequences of choices don’t necessarily have to be reflected in the game to have an effect on the player. As the player you might not realize it, but the next time you encounter a similar choice, you will be confronted with your original decision and how that might factor in to what you’re about to do.
Williams wanted players to realize that in war there are no good or bad decisions—only decisions with different trade-offs. Sometimes you might have to take the least awful option, knowing full well that it isn’t ideal, or make a choice without being able to fully think through all the possible repercussions, forcing you to live with the consequences of that split-second choice. It isn’t about creating a game that branches off into eighteen different directions with each choice, but about using the player’s branching emotional state to have the same effect. If you chose to execute the enemy and take their ammunition and supplies, it might have been worth it, but you might also be horrified in the process, changing the way you’ll approach that scenario the next time you encounter it. Just as with Missile Command, Williams didn’t want the message to be shoved down players’ throats, but rather for it to be a subconscious one that players could interact with if they chose to. At the end of the day, some people might not have treated the game any differently from the average Call of Duty title, and that was okay. But for those who did, Williams wanted there to be great meaning.
As you progress through the game, you begin to question your choices—as does Walker, wondering if it is all for naught. Things go south pretty quickly, and throughout the course of the campaign, Walker is forced to choose among many different paths, none of which are objectively right, and thus to live with the horrifying consequences. These consequences begin to take a toll on him mentally as he begins to hallucinate, causing him to question his sanity. At the same time, these hallucinations are causing you, the player, to question what you’re seeing: Was that real? Did I actually kill that guy? Am I really here? This collective mistrust of what you’re experiencing grows deeper the closer Walker gets to Konrad. By the time he finally confronts him at the end of the game, Walker is a broken man, barely able to stand, and in the tattered rags of what were once high-end tactical gear. He’s been through hell, having seen and done things he’d never thought possible, and is ready to make someone pay for it.
Yet upon arrival, he finds nothing but Konrad’s rotting corpse with a self-inflicted bullet to the head from long before Walker and his team arrived. He’s then faced with the reality that Konrad was never really there to begin with. When they landed, they had encountered a local militia, and the release of the white phosphorus had messed with Walker’s brain, causing him to have horrendous hallucinations. In reality, he was the one who had carried out all those actions, committing the very atrocities that his traumatized mind had convinced him were Konrad’s doing. He was his own worst enemy; he was Konrad. You, the player, are then faced with the only true game-altering choice based on gameplay where your in-game actions have direct consequences on how your specific story progresses: with both Walker and Konrad at gunpoint, how do you proceed? There are two ways this can play out. Each choice results in a unique outcome and is the accumulation of every moral choice you’ve made thus far.
Knowing all that you’ve done, do you let Walker live? Was he justified in his actions against Konrad, whom he believed was the true perpetuator of these crimes, or was he the real menace all along? Or are both true?
With this choice, the game is essentially saying, “You’ve done all this stuff. It was you. How would you deal with someone who did what you did?” It forces you to choose your own fate. Walker hadn’t started off with a choice to be bad—and neither had you. Walker came to Dubai in the hopes of saving those who others couldn’t, despite knowing the odds. But in the end, he made choices, and needs to face the consequences, which was ultimately the message that Williams wanted to share. We often start with good intentions, simply playing through a game, not associating our character’s actions with our own. But as we continue to make choices, it becomes clear that the two are intertwined, and our merged situation evolves in ways we aren’t always cognizant of at the time, something Williams refers to as not “moving through the darkness rather than being engulfed by [it].” As a result of this intertwined narrative with Walker, you must determine your own fate, asking yourself, “Do you feel like a hero yet?”
If you allow Konrad to kill Walker or the manifestation of Konrad inside his head to kill himself, the game ends with the two corpses side by side, Walker having succumbed to the immense sorrow of his actions and unable to continue living. Fade to black. If you choose to kill Konrad, Walker lives to see another day, pushing off the moral resolution of what he did. He radios in for help, ready to go home. US Army forces arrive, ready for evacuation, but the game isn’t done making you choose. In a twist, there’s another gameplay-based choice in the epilogue. Walker approaches the troops wearing Konrad’s jacket and carrying a weapon. They tell him to drop it, unsure of his intent. At this point, you have two options: drop the weapon or open fire. If you drop the weapon, the game ends with Walker riding off into the sunset with the troops. One turns to him, telling him of the devastation in the city, and asks, “How’d you survive all this?” Walker replies, “Who said I did?”
If, on the other hand, you choose to open fire, it ends one of two ways: you die in a pool of your own blood or you defeat the platoon, informing the rest of the troops that they’re going to have to go through you with the same ominous opener that Konrad told Walker at the beginning of the game: “Gentlemen, welcome to Dubai.”
There are no good or bad endings, just as there are no good or bad choices. There are only choices formed through your experiences, and you must live with them. This message is powerful, especially in an industry filled with shooter games that often try to detach players as much as possible from their actions. And yet the message is one that can only be accomplished through gaming. If Spec Ops were a film, you would be removed from it. “It was them, not me,” you’d say. But in video game form, it wasn’t just them. Every consequence that came from the game happened because of something you did, whether you realized it or not at the time.
In one final “take that” showing there truly are no good endings, Walkers’ ride home after surrendering fades to white, not black. According to Williams’s story, every instance in which the game fades to white is the delusional manifestation of Konrad within Walker’s mind, showing that, even in the one that seems “kinda okay,” he never truly found peace. It was all in his head.
Just as Theurer had done more than thirty years earlier, Williams gave players more than they were asking for. He’d given them a result they were directly responsible for. The game doesn’t leave you with a sense of accomplishment at the end. Instead, it’s nothing more than a sigh of relief that it is finally over—at least for you. There was no way to truly “win” the game. Each option defies traditional game endings, leaving the responsibility on you, the player, to figure out where to apply the lessons that have just unfolded before you. In reality, most players leave with nothing other than the feeling of “Wow, that was a tough ending!” But for some it was a closer look at just how quickly things can spiral dangerously out of control, into situations where we don’t even recognize ourselves anymore.
This is just one example of the narrative style that Theurer developed, paving the way for games to be used as an artistic medium, and it perfectly demonstrates the power that this type of narrative can have when created with care. It isn’t just an interesting story; it is a commentary on the culture of gaming and the player’s actions within the game itself. In a time when almost every game had the average player gunning down thousands of enemies all in the pursuit of something “good,” Spec Ops broke the mold, showing that everything has consequences—seen or not. It wasn’t intended to sell more copies or appease a mass audience; rather, Williams felt the story needed to be told, and he found the only medium that would let him tell that story. As a result, he was able to create a game that so perfectly encapsulated the culture of gaming at the time, melding the player and character narratives together while simultaneously allowing one to mislead the other, causing both to question which was reality in a world where every action has a cost.