If you think this game is just about player choice and not making a statement on the military idk what to tell you

Quarterly reminder that "protagonist" doesn't just mean "the good guy"

- Honestly if Walter just flexed into being a revolutionary instead of hoarding money that story could have been bad ass.
- Using le epic TOUGH MAN making HARD DECISIONS^TM as a conduit for my wamen bad politics
- They could have killed him in the movie length pilot, it woulda be fantastic, but noooo - fucking lib power fantasies "I went to school so obviously I'd be the best at crimes if I weren't so good"
  I slightly bristle at all the "we could [insert hypothetical fascist culture con] so easy!" comments many, including myself, sometimes make as well, it's detritus from being converted liberals. We all were, handful of possible exceptions available, it's nothing to be ashamed of but it is something to notice and potentially change. That said it's probably more true than the true lib examples.

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.
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
- You should have an explicit option to refuse war crimes, but then it should turn into something like a Hugh Thompson simulator.
- That's not at all accurate, to the point that I'm struggling to even place what you're referring to. I think it's about how if you help guerilla insurgents in the first Witcher game smuggle weapons they later assassinate someone? That was a big "wait, you're telling me the rebels fighting a war use violence to accomplish their goals and aren't just heckin wholesome peaceful YA novel protagonists who win by being ontologically good and having plot armor like in every other game, movie, and book that gets mainstream attention in the US?" shock moment for western gamers whose consumption of hollywood treats left them without a framework for understanding that sometimes the materially and morally correct side in a conflict can still be doing brutal and underhanded things as a matter of material necessity.
  I never got into the second game, but by the third one the overall moral tone is pretty clearly on the side of mercy and conservation, with sparing and helping magical creatures that are intelligent non-human persons that are just trying to survive being the clearly correct choice to the point that later on when you get put on trial by a werewolf for being a monster hunter a bunch of them show up as character witnesses to your defense. That's also the game where the narrator all but says "the real monsters are cruel and intolerant men" over and over, every aristocrat you encounter is some flavor of monstrous or dangerously detached from reality, and most of the plot ultimately revolves around trying to stop an extradimensional settler colonialist invasion.
  CDPR are still libs, but they overall have a much more materialist understanding of how things fit together instead of the sort of mishmash of hollywood tropes American lib writers throw together based on vibes.
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 include
- Why 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.
- 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:
To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.
Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously.
You are still a good person.
The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?
Do you feel like a hero yet?
If you were a better person, you wouldn't be here.
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.
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.

Gamers are the least media literate of people who's entire hobby is about exposing themselves to media.

- How dare a piece of media, I product I bought, challenge me by pointing out that the standard media of this type depicts horrific acts. Clearly it wants me to feel ashamed for playing, and not to reflect on why it's so uncomfortable when highlighted, but so banal it goes unacknowledged when not?
  Could I use this moment to grow? To ask how we got here and whether we should stay here? Certainly not, because games are masturbatory toys of indulgence and nothing more. Unless of course I'm defending how I spend my time, then they're art.
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.

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.

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??

” game

That 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.