Spec Ops: The Line

Breaking the fourth wall in video games is not a new phenomenon; horror games use it to frighten players, bosses use it to “read the player’s mind,” and plot devices use it to convey information past a character and towards a player.

Spec Ops: The Line (2012) uses and shatters the fourth wall, not to impress or impart wisdom, but to mentally tear down a player.  As players continue in Captain Walker’s crusade through Dubai, the loading screens, once fonts of basic knowledge and tips and tricks, take a turn: instead of informing you how to throw grenades, they begin asking, “How many Americans have you killed today?”  “Do you feel like a hero yet?”  Reminding you that “There is no escape,” “This is all your fault.”  Suddenly educating you on the characteristics of white phosphorus after using it unwittingly to take out a platoon and kill a camp of civilians, on the idea of cognitive dissonance, quoting military suicide rates.  Assuring you that, amidst everything you have controlled Walker to do, “You are still a good person.”

Captain Walker never sees these loading screens.  Only the players will.  Each one speaks directly to them in a way that the acts in-game, however shocking they may be, simply don’t.  While, yes, players control Walker through a field of white phosphorus-fueled destruction, up a building in which every ‘enemy’s’ life back home is shared with them, around the damned city of Dubai on an attack helicopter firing at full power, and help orchestrate the slow and eventual death of every person in the city, it’s so different.  The moment of pause the game provides with just the right quote or question in a loading screen is sometimes just as powerful as first seeing the destruction caused with white phosphorus earlier in the game.

For me, it was asking if I remembered why I even came to Dubai.  I couldn’t.  The game had swept me up so perfectly in everything that I, as a player and orchestrator of all that happened, could not remember why I had allowed Walker to go this far and keep going.  And more than a boss examining your memory data to see what games you’d been playing, more than a game pretending to glitch and restart, and more than an ancient god turning to me, the character-controller, and sharing life-changing in-game knowledge with me, not the character, more than any of that, The Line forced me to pause my game and think about everything I had done up to that point, trying to retrace every life I took to get to where I was in-game.  And I couldn’t.  But I didn’t stop.  The game burrowed deeper with a few quotes than many others have and ever will.

And of course, there’s the moment when players finally find the soldier they spent the whole game looking for, and all he does is berate Walker for his actions.  But who controlled Walker?  Who kept going, laying more and more waste to the aggressors and innocents around them?  Who wouldn’t stop?  Even though Konrad, the soldier in question, is looking and talking to Walker, players controlled Walker.  As much as he is talking to Walker, Konrad is just as much talking to the players.

That’s the power of breaking the fourth wall.  While it can be kitschy and fun, it is also immensely powerful as a narrative tool, especially if used with the intent to impact.