In my experience, I had none of these storytelling expectations about WalkerвЂ™s reality in mind вЂ“ and perhaps thatвЂ™s the ideal way to experience this narrative. If this repeated death experience is in fact the case, then the ending of Spec Ops: The Line can be explained away as entirely psychological with no basis in reality. Rather than a case of deja vu, or a wink to the player acknowledging this fourth wall break, itвЂ™s almost certain that Walker is experiencing his own death but for the second time alongside the player.

For, in a later iteration of this same helicopter sequence, Walker acknowledges out loud that something isnвЂ™t right вЂ“ that he has done this before. Some people have theorized that Spec Ops: The Line is a pre-death sequence that flashes before WalkerвЂ™s eyes, while others contest that the narrative sleight of hand exists purely to cause the player to question WalkerвЂ™s perception of reality throughout the game. One of the great debates of Spec Ops: The Line is whether the game is simply trying to hook the playerвЂ™s attention with this opening helicopter scene, or whether it is a coded message that depicts Captain WalkerвЂ™s death, rendering the remaining game a kind of hallucinatory purgatory riddled with mired flashbacks. This helicopter scene crescendos into a great crash where the helicopter explodes, tailspinning down until Captain Walker, the protagonist, loses consciousness.

ItвЂ™s a common design motif of military shooters to throw an introductory bombastic set piece in medias res to inspire curiosity in the player and set expectations for the heights to come. When first booting up the game, you are placed in a helicopter firing a turret, tasked with gunning down enemy helicopters that are aggressively chasing you. One would be completely forgiven for dismissing this game on its bland aesthetic alone, for the reason this game lingers within the consciousness of gamers is its narrative subversion despite the adherence to design tropes. Most of the time, however, the storm serves as a means to obfuscate the draw distance of the already washed out game. In execution, these setpieces comprise but a handful of spectacled transitions as glass implodes under heavy fire, causing an almost hourglass effect of environmental terrain shifting. For a 2012 game, the developers touted the revolutionary sand technology that helped dynamize and change shooting environments on the fly, embracing the idea of an almost supernatural sandstorm plaguing modern day Dubai. Time has not been kind to the graphics and mechanics that Spec Ops: The Line offers. Because although Spec Ops: The LineвЂ™s gameplay is mediocre and repetitive, robbing me of the initial sense of awe that people describe when referencing this game, the storyвЂ™s moments of moral quandary stand above nearly any other installment in the shooter genre. Spec Ops: The Line is a third-person shooter that addresses several concerns raised in that article that I think are worth exploring in depth. There are hundreds of games that anchor shooting guns as their primary mode of interacting with an environment or narrative, but few ask the player to reconsider their relationship to the core gameplay tropes of shooting waves of enemies before clearing an area to progress. In 2018, I argued for a few select examples of first-person shooter games that utilized their mechanics to help develop their storytelling. Yet, I didnвЂ™t feel that way when I first finished the game. Spec Ops: The Line, however, is often regarded as a thought-provoking exception to that rule. Most of the time, the shock value is the only thing that cuts through the experience, causing only the shock to be memorable, as too many shooters fall into identical patterns of gameplay. Many games in this genre, like the annualized Call of Duty franchise, evoke moments of shock value purportedly under the auspice of provoking player contemplation, but these moments are few and far between. This is not a denigration of the genre itself, but rather a commentary on the overreliance of game design tropes to require the player to shoot their way through a story. The military shooter genre has been oversaturated for as long as video games have been rendered in 3D environments.

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