This Is Where You Feel Bad
Let’s look at the white phosphorus section, ignoring the fact Yager Studios seems to escape the obvious criticism that the jarring transition from technological detachment to real-world consequences had already been well-covered by the Modern Warfare series.
This scene is the narrative turning point that the producers proudly trot out time after time, and is commonly cited as the most personally affecting moments of the videogame by a number of people who apparently managed to transition to adult life, while still retaining the same level of emotional resilience as the target market of a cartoon about magic ponies (hint: children.)
In order to proceed through this section of the game the player is tasked with firing white phosphorus on an enemy position. Once wiped out, the game then walks you through the devastation you’ve caused, where you discover that civilians were sheltering with the enemy, and – oh no – they’ve all been horribly killed. It’s a pure gotcha moment, and doesn’t even give the player the opportunity to think or weigh his actions against the lives of digital civilians before firing. In the context of the videogame, the firing of the white phosphorus is explicitly justified because it is the only way to continue to the end of the game. In narrative terms, it’s easy to read this as ‘sometimes you have to do horrible things in war’ or ‘accidents happen,’ but the writers heavy hand descends and makes the characters rationalise the event by blaming the enemy for the things they have done.
Now, type ‘white phosphorus civilians’ into Google and see that most of the first page of links refer to Israel’s indiscriminate firing of white phosphorus into civilian areas. The obvious connection between the use of white phosphorus in Spec Ops and the implicit justification of such acts is offensive, poorly handled, and had hundreds of players stroking their neckbeards and posting on forums about how they understand that sometimes when you’re involved in imperialist conflicts in densely-populated foreign cities, you don’t have any good choices.
The easier connection is that it can easily be read as defending unnecessary real-world war crimes.
The whole scenario seems to make some very broad assumptions about the military attitudes towards civilian deaths. Who do they think invented the term ‘collateral damage?’
The man who planned and flew the bomber that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima said he slept fine at night and would do it again. Watch the Collateral Murder video and see the Apache crew practically begging for clearance to open fire on an unknown vehicle whose driver stopped to aid a wounded person, and after being informed that they seriously wounded two children riding in the back on the vehicle, one says “That’s what you get when you bring your kids to a warzone.” Astute readers will note that ‘warzone’ refers the city where the children live, despite the reclassification by an invading foreign military. It’s similar to the constant blame shifting in Spec Ops but with one critical difference: they are blaming the victims themselves. I’m not trying to imply that this way of thinking is the rule, but there’s enough evidence to consider it a pervasive attitude.
Then there’s the fact that civilian appearances are incredibly contrived. For some reason, despite setting their game in a densely populated city, the American military takes centre-stage, leaving civilian appearances subject to a “strict rule.”
“… we had a strict rule from the beginning – there can be no civilians in the scene unless they’re [sic] is an absolute, real reason – there had to be an organic and narrative reason to have them in the scene. We didn’t want to just have civilians constantly running around the line of fire, because then we would be ‘The game where you can kill civilians all the time.’”
– Williams in Kotaku
Yager instead chose to take the military-apologist route and became ‘The game where you can only kill civilians in situations where we make you feel forced or threatened.’ And why doesn’t ‘set in a city inhabited by two million people’ count as an ‘organic reason’ to have civilians running around? Especially given that they’re fearless enough to throw stones at armed, homicidal maniacs. My guess? It’s because giving a player the choice to kill/spare civilians during dynamic play undermines the narrative impact of their ‘non-decision’ decisions, and as we all know that the Narrative is sacrosanct — so all civilian interactions must be discretely staged scenes.
I feel like I should also point out to Williams that ‘the game where you kill civilians all the time’ already exists and it’s great. There’s more interesting narrative on the impassive horror of war-by-numbers in the emergent play of a twenty-minute game of DEFCON, than could be found in the convoluted narrative and painstakingly-modeled guilt-proxies of Spec Ops.
