White Phosphorus: two words that will forever stay with me, burned into my mind 13 years ago after seeing the horrific consequences of my actions in Spec Ops: The Line. To this day, no game has ever made me put down the controller and just stare, motionless, at the screen at something I had done.
“Something must have been wrong”, I remember thinking at the time. Surely I just need to restart and ‘play this part’ a different way? But no… through Yager’s masterful direction I felt the full consequences of actions… and it still sends shivers down my spine.
Rewind 13 years ago and Spec Ops: The Line was very easily mistaken as a ‘just another third person shooter’. Published by 2K and sporting a solider holding gun wth a backdrop of explosions, fire and smoke, the cover art certainly presented it that way. Even after the first few minutes, with its ‘Gears of War’ cover-to-cover style gameplay and basic squad commands, there was an immediate familiarity.
Add to the mix Hollywood-style touches purely for cinematic feel, for example the slight ‘slow motion’ triggering when you successfully landed a headshot, and you’re reinforced in your opinion that this was just another title framed by a war that chose to say nothing. It’s Yippie-Ki-Yay all the way, or at least that’s what you’d expect. Hell, it even had a multiplayer mode.
Death from Above
When Captain Walker and his squad come decide to use the White Phosphorus in in the campaign, it’s treated just like any other action-packed shooter. You’ve fought to the roof, you’ve found the weapon, and you then drop bombs from above like every other Call of Duty since 2006’s Modern Warfare.
At the time, I did this without thinking. For those who played the infamous ‘No Russian’ level in the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, games do have a habit of making you act automatically, but few make you feel and live with your actions after you’ve done them. They’re just little white dots on a plane up in the clouds. Just targets to take out, right?
As the poisonous white clouds began to clear, and the screams stop, Walker and his team investigate the remains, meandering through the bodies of enemy troops. Then, you see it. The cages of innocent men, women and children who were caught in the blast. One victim holds her child as the white gas cloud took them. I still clearly remember this image, and Yager wanted you to. For the rest of the game you are dealing with your decision, reforming the reality and what you see as you desperately struggle to come to terms with what you’ve done.
I’ve just used one of the worst weapons devised in human history, one designed for maximum suffering, not maximum efficiency, and now I’m watching the effects of its destruction: the devastated city, the burning bodies writhing in pain, the screams, and the flames flickering on the ones who can’t scream anymore.
The True Horror of War
Spec Ops: The Line didn’t celebrate war… it was actively doing the opposite. Or, at least it tried really hard to. Some would say that by basing the game’s mechanics on tried-and-tested cover shooters, and by the sheer numbers of enemies you mowed down throughout the eight-hour campaign, at least a part of Spec Ops needed to be familiar to gamers interested in this style of game. The addition of PvP multiplayer likely didn’t help its message either.
However, the juxposition of ‘run and gun’ gameplay combined with horrific moments is what helped elevate Spec Ops above the ordinary. Too often in games you feel ‘like the good guy’. Spec Ops, successfully and strategically destroyed any sense of you being ‘good’ by the end of it, forcing you to literally face the truth and the horrors of your actions long after the credits rolled.
It dared to do something different, and capture just the tiniest morsel of the horrors of real-world conflict and PTSD. In today’s world, where war and brutality is rife, Spec Ops seems to be more important than ever. There’s even more distance from what war is in video games now than there was when Specs Ops first released.
When Call of Duty fills the battlefield with cartoon characters and Nicki Minaj skins, and has a White Phosphorus killstreak in modern games, there’s a dichotomy between what war actually is and what games present it as.
Spec Ops: The Line isn’t just important because of what it did differently, but also because of how the world has changed. If you turn away at the virtual horror from an Xbox 360 game, just imagine what the real-life victims of conflict are going through. So, while Black Ops 7 entertains with its AI art slop and its quirky skins, just take a while to think: these aren’t war games anymore. Spec Ops: The Line is, and it’s horrible.
