This is a follow up to my previous post about Spec Ops: The Line.
I was doing some reading about the game and the reaction to it and I came across this three part interview with the head writers from both Spec Ops and Far Cry 3. It’s a fantastic insight into how each chose to take on shooter conventions, their reasons for doing it, and how they went about it.
This passage from the first article, by Spec Ops writer Walt Williams about an experience he had during his short military career, really struck me:
There’s the level in Modern Warfare where you’re in the plane and everyone’s running from the bombs and machinegunning. [spoiler removed]. One of those pilots came and showed us a video – they came to the trainees and showed us what they were doing. There was a part in the video where they were leading a guy. They were using the machinegun to lead him. He was hiding under trucks. You could hear the pilots joking about it on the video. Everyone in the room was laughing. And that seemed very weird to me. I understood that this was someone we were technically at war with, and so the attack was something justified, but the tone and the actions in the attack seemed very off. That a room full of people would find this humorous, something to laugh at.
Admittedly, yes, it’s just a white dot on a black screen. But we were still watching footage of people being killed. This is actual footage of people dying. It’s not funny. That was the moment for me, when I was in the military, where I realized, “I don’t know that this is for me.” Not that I’m anti-military. I’m extremely pro-military. I believe it’s an institution that’s necessary and the people that choose to join it feel a calling. But obviously, it’s just not for me. That’s just always stuck with me.
Here’s another from a bit later that mirrors some of my own thoughts:
[…] we’ve moved beyond irony. The next obvious step for us is sincerity, being honest about the type of things that we make and being honest about how we’ve allowed ourselves to disconnect from our art and forcing ourselves to connect with it again. Once we start being honest and being critical internally of what we make, that’s how you grow up. You have to be able to look honestly at yourself as a person, see where you make mistakes, how you treat people and things like that, if you ever want to grow as a person. What we have to do now as an industry is look and see where we are strongest, where we are weakest, and what we’re lying to ourselves about.
There’s so much more in that interview that I could end up quoting the whole thing. It’s absolutely worth a read in you’re at all interested in game design, game writing, the future of games, interactive narrative, the relationship of games to society and morality, the increasing use of social commentary and satire in games, etc.
It’s also interesting to note how much this game has altered how I view other games. I was watching a trailer for another shooter today, and though it looked like a great shooter, I found it off-putting. I kept thinking that there was no sense of gravity to any of it. I’m sure that will fade quickly, but probably not completely. Check that, hopefully not completely.