Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2012-11-28 05:30 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2012-11-28 05:30 pm
[ SECRET POST #2157 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2157 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
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02.
[2 Broke Girls]
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03.
[Love Actually]
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04.
[Me and My Dick]
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05.
[Journey Into Mystery]
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06.
[cracked.com]
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07.
[Ryan Kwanten/L4D2]
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08.
[Whispering Corridors, Memento Mori, The Wishing Stairs]
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09.
[The Walking Dead (game)]
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10.
[Kuragehime]
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11.
[Thor]
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12.
[Bartimaeus]
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13.
[The Sentinel]
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14.
[The Mentalist and The Addams Family]
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15.
[Skyfall]
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16.
[Generator Rex]
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17.
[Partners]
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 036 secrets from Secret Submission Post #308.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
"You are still a good person."
"Do you feel like a hero yet?"
No, not really, loading screen, I don't.
It's so weird -- the first fifteen minutes or so are safe and banal. Lugo is the wisecracking guy, Adams is the tough guy, Walker's the boss. You don't even know what you're in for, or realize the scope of how fucked up it all is. Hell, your first enemies even evoke the classic "Insurgent" stereotype that every Modern Warfare knockoff throws in to simulate al Qaeda or the like.
And then the Damned 33rd starts shooting at you. American soldiers. And suddenly nothing makes sense anymore. And you can claim self-defense all you like, but the plain point of fact is this is no longer a faceless foreign enemy -- these are your own fucking guys, trapped in what's left of Dubai and screaming for Delta Force blood while some asshole who sounds all too similar to Dennis Hopper plays Deep Purple's "Hush" on the radio.
"How many Americans have you killed today?"
Too many. The game offers false choices -- no matter which you pick, the outcome always kind of sucks. The infamous white phosphorous scene -- they didn't wimp out on that. It's not like the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2, where the game asks you repeatedly if you want to skip. And despite what Lugo says, there really is no choice -- you HAVE to use the mortars. The designers intentionally force you into it. Oh, you could try doing it the hard way, by just shooting your enemies, but the game punishes you for it. There really isn't a choice. Cue a vicious dig at the AC-130 sequence from Modern Warfare 1; after you're done blowing the shit out of those faceless little white blobs on a grey background, you have to actually go down there and look at what you have fucking done. And what you've done... that's the line. The Line, as it were -- and you've crossed it. Again.
"You cannot understand, nor do you want to."
As a player, you may ask, What do I do now? And the objectives screen, always pointing you in the direction you need to go, will only tell you this: Obey.
Things get worse from there. Reality itself seems to be coming apart, and always, you're descending. The streets of Dubai are little more than a great pit, now, where it's always night, and the jackals are hunting you down. In many ways it reminds me of Lonesome Road, from Fallout New Vegas, where an entire city was simply swallowed by the earth. In that case it was a metaphor for history -- America's and the Courier's. In the case of Spec Ops: The Line, it's a metaphor for Walker's own psyche.
There was a moment, late in the game, where the screen started blacking out. I immediately panicked, thinking something was wrong with my graphics card or whatever. Then I noticed that the fancy clothing store mannequins were moving around during the blackouts, and the heavily-armed trooper slowly juggernauting his way towards my position kept turning out to be another mannequin every time I shot him.
Things got weirder from there. The loading screen, always helpful and full of useful tips, suddenly became accusatory. It told me the dead don't have PTSD, so, really, they're the lucky ones. It told me about cognitive dissonance. It told me that collateral damage is okay if the benefits outweigh the costs, then asked me how much Lugo and Adams were worth.
And I didn't have an answer. By then I was alone. Alone with myself, with only Joe Konrad, the mastermind of all this, for company -- and, really, I was still alone.
"Can you even remember why you came here?"
I killed hundreds of people, not all of them holding guns. Mercy killing a gravely wounded enemy became torture and violence. The camera became more and more soaked with blood, and the word "fuck" gradually went from sparingly-used exclamation to punctuation. As someone from another game once said, no need for bombs when hate will do.
And now, at the end, when all is said and done... I walked away the last man alive in Dubai, the only one who knows the secret of what happened. I went home with it, and I can't help but wonder... should I have died with it instead?
"To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless."
Re: "You are still a good person."
A lot of this is making me draw parallels to MGS, but done in a Western style, with a Western approach and sensibility in the world. And in a lot of ways, that makes it better to handle some of the issues, because imo Kojima was hijacking a culture he really didn't have access to in order to pull off a story.
Yes it was entertaining, and yes he got in across well, but in a Japanese way, with his own culture's sensibilities.
Seeing your thoughts on this, I can see how this corresponds to it's inspirational source, Heart of Darkness. I read it in college, and it dealt with a very historically placed British dilemma that was fascinating to read about. Now, I can see how this is dealing with a more contemporary American dilemma, like Apocalypse Now did for it's time.
The fact that it made it to a game intrigues me. I just went through a grad class where we talked about tranportational narrative, and educational narrative. The idea is something we all understand-- how the viewer/reader/player can get caught up with something, and be receptive to it's message. A piece of interactive fiction like a game is a fantastic medium for that kind of stuff.
On a more personal note, and as an aside, the way that games try to impress players about the brutality and violence in an action (especially Western FPS games) always leave me feeling hollow. I guess my own personal experience with watching people act barbaric, and doing it myself, leave watching it done distantly hard to match up to what I've done/seen/felt in real life. Or maybe I'm disassociating from it. I'm certainly not proud of what I've done, but I'm not impressed with a game assuming I haven't done/seen/felt something like what they want us to see/do/feel before.
But I guess it's aimed at people who never have been in any type of that situation before. So I'm probably the exception rather than the target audience.
At any rate, thank you for essentially writing the longest rec I've ever seen. :) You've definitely convinced me to look into it.
Re: "You are still a good person."
But will I appreciate it without having played any other FPS'?
Re: "You are still a good person."
Just picture everything you might have heard about Call of Duty whether it's true or not. That's pretty much what SOTL is a critique of -- the typical America-saves-the-day power fantasy fratboy bullshit.
Re: "You are still a good person."
(Anonymous) 2012-11-29 07:20 pm (UTC)(link)