To earn Walker’s insanity, we needed to break him emotionally and psychologically. There had to be a moment when Walker, under the player’s control, committed an act so terrible it could conceivably shatter his mind. If it took place during a cinematic, it would again be cheating. Walker can only do what the player wants him to do. They are the same person inhabiting two different bodies, one real and one digital. If Walker’s mental breakdown was caused by a moment outside of the player’s control, then they would no longer be in sync, and the twist would not work.
In chapter 8, Walker and his team stumble upon an encampment of Konrad’s men. They are hopelessly outnumbered. To engage the enemy in a firefight would be suicide. The only way for them to progress is to use a white phosphorus mortar taken from Konrad’s soldiers.
If you don’t know what white phosphorus is, I recommend you don’t Google it. White phosphorus is an allotrope that burns extremely hot and is capable of igniting cloth, fuel, munitions, and flesh. Once ignited, white phosphorus will burn until it is deprived of oxygen or completely consumed. This is especially bad for people, because phosphorus sticks to skin. If it lands on you, you can’t brush it off. The allotrope will burn deep into your tissue until it has run its course. If you survive the fire, there’s a good chance the phosphorus has now entered your blood through the wounds it created, meaning you can look forward to multiple organ failure. White phosphorus is a terrible weapon, and it is 100 percent legal.
Walker orders Adams to set up the mortar. Lugo disagrees.
LUGO
You’ve seen what this shit does. You know we can’t use it.
ADAMS
We might not have a choice, Lugo.
LUGO
There’s always a choice.
WALKER
No, there’s really not.
Adams does as he’s told.
The mortar launches a camera into the air. As it slowly descends on a parachute, it broadcasts its view in black and white to a targeting computer manned by Walker. It is an image evocative of the AC-130 footage I watched during my field training. The enemies are reduced to white dots running around a black screen. The player, as Walker, shouts targeting coordinates to Adams, who launches white phosphorus onto the soldiers below.
It’s a one-sided battle that ends quickly, but before it does the camera catches sight of a large group of soldiers attempting to retreat through a trench. The player tells Adams to fire. No one survives. It’s only afterward, when the player moves through the carnage, that they realize the truth of what they’ve done. The soldiers’ deaths were terrible, but they were your enemy. The people in the trench were not. They were civilians—men, women, and children—trying to escape the combat zone. You didn’t know, because you couldn’t see them. The targeting system had reduced them to white dots on a screen. All you cared was that the dots stopped moving.
This is the moment Walker breaks. He wasn’t the only one.
I was in Berlin when I got an email from the Fox. They’d focus-tested the scene for the first time. Immediately following it, many of the testers paused the game and left the room. They couldn’t continue playing without having time to comprehend what they’d just done.
It was the best news I’d had in months.
Walker was unable to accept what he’d done, and it broke him. To protect his sanity, he projected his guilt onto Konrad, unaware the man was already dead. As the rest of Walker’s mind unraveled, he hallucinated himself having conversations with Konrad through a walkie-talkie Walker believed had been left for him to find.
The haunting didn’t stop there. I wanted the player to come under attack even when they weren’t playing. When a game has to load a new level or location, it will bring up a loading screen, usually a black screen or a static image. Normally, loading screens will also display a small bit of text, giving the player helpful hints or gameplay tips. They’re innocuous and mostly forgettable. That’s why we decided to use them as a weapon of psychological assault; the player would never see it coming.
At the start of the game, our loading screen text was normal:
“Remember, you can sprint by pressing down on the Left Thumb Stick.”
“Captain Walker is a member of Delta Force, an elite unit of the US Army.”
As the story progressed, the tone of our loading screen text began to shift. Instead of discussing the game, it educated the player on thematic, real-world topics:
“Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously.”
“The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn’t real, so why should you care?”
Finally, near the end of the game, the loading screens began addressing players directly, calling them out for the atrocities they and Walker had committed since starting the game:
“If you were a better person, you wouldn’t be here.”
“This is all your fault.”
“Do you feel like a hero yet?”
Not everyone was comfortable with the new direction. Whereas before, we were often asked if people would play a game that made them feel bad, we were now asked a new question.
“What if people stop playing?”
My response was always the same. “If the game makes them uncomfortable, they should stop playing.” I could say this because I knew people wouldn’t stop. They’d keep going because we had trained them to believe they were the good guys. No matter how bad things got, everything would work out in the end, because that’s what happens when you’re the hero. All they’d need to do is reach the end and defeat Konrad, then their guilt would be washed away.
This is what I meant when I said the player and Walker are the same person. They really are. Every motivation Walker has in the game is designed to mirror the motivation of someone playing a video game. That’s why at the end of the game, when Walker learns the truth of what’s happening, he’s asked to accept blame for what he’s done. Standing face-to-face with a hallucination of Konrad, the player holds a gun to their own head and must decide if they can live with what they’ve done. The choice is simple: Shoot Konrad or shoot yourself.
When the game was released, some players found this choice to be unfair. They felt we, the developers, had forced them to do terrible things and were casting the blame onto them. These people missed the point.
If Walker was the player, then Konrad was the developer. John Konrad wasn’t ordered to evacuate people from Dubai; he volunteered, just as Yager had originally offered their services to 2K. They all became trapped in the storm. The Colonel and the studio were desperate to bring order to their worlds, but as time went on, the game and development only grew darker. In the end, they both built the same thing—a city of rules and horror, locked in constant opposition. Faced with this knowledge, Konrad chose to end his life. He took leave of his creation and left it for someone else to sort out. This is what developers do when their game finally ships. We build a world and then walk away so players can clean it up.
Spec Ops: The Line wasn’t a war story. It was the story of you and me.
* * *
I MADE IT CLEAR to the Fox that I wouldn’t stay in Berlin for more than two weeks at a time. He agreed, and my East Berlin apartment was traded in for a hotel that had TVs mounted to the wall at the end of every hallway, endlessly playing The Big Lebowski on repeat. My theory that I had died and gone to hell was only gaining more traction.
In December, when we were both in Berlin, I told the Fox I wanted to relocate to Dallas. My grandfather had been in and out of the hospital. My mother, having torn a ligament, had lost the use of her right arm. The rest of my family was old, and getting older. I wanted to be near them so I could help, but also because I felt as if I were losing valuable time.
I knew this was asking a lot, which is why I suggested Dallas rather than my hometown. Instead of a six-hour flight, I would be a three-hour drive away from my family. From there, I could use DFW airport to
travel anywhere the Fox needed me to go. It was the perfect compromise.
“Let’s talk about it after the new year,” he said. It seemed like a fair request, so I agreed.
When I brought it up again in January, he said, “Finish the script first, then we’ll talk.” He wasn’t comfortable letting me leave until the work was done. Again, I understood.
By February, the script was done. We traveled to Berlin and delivered it to Yager. After a week of meetings, everything was approved for implementation. As we were preparing to leave, I broached the topic once more.
“This isn’t a great time,” he said. “Maybe we can revisit the idea in June or July.”
I said, “Okay. I understand.” And I did. This was how the Fox dealt with unwanted situations. He didn’t like to say no. Instead, he repeatedly pushed off making a decision until the other person took the hint and stopped asking.
It’s hard to tell when you’ve reached the end of a road, because the end looks a lot like a rough patch. Smooth asphalt gives way to uneven dirt and stone. You keep driving, waiting for that smoothness to reappear, but it’s not until the blacktop has long since vanished from your rearview that you realize it is truly gone. You keep driving, because to stop would be to accept that you have wasted many, many miles. So you drive on, desperately looking for another road. If you can find it, everything will be all right. You’ll be back on track. You won’t get lost; not this time. Not ever again.
“Now that the script is finished, I think I’ll take some time off. If that’s all right with you.”
“That’s a good idea,” said the Fox. “You look burnt out. How long do you want?”
“Is three weeks possible?”
“Yeah, we can do three weeks. It’ll be good for you.”
When I got home from Berlin the next day, I packed up everything I owned, then called a moving company. Forty-eight hours later, I was on a plane headed to Dallas. By the end of the week, I had signed a lease on a new apartment.
It would have been easier to quit, but even then I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Quitting felt like failure. I needed the Fox to fire me. It would be my only saving grace, a lie I could hold on to in the future when I looked back and wondered where I’d gone wrong.
He didn’t.
15
* * *
INTO DARKNESS
In Dallas, I had a one-bedroom apartment where I rarely left the living room. A card table and folding chair were my office, a couch was my bed. Every day from eight until eleven in the morning, I was online with Germany. Starting at noon, I was with California.
When we started production on Spec Ops, 2K was still located in New York. That put us only six hours behind Yager, meaning our office hours overlapped. If there was a disagreement or concern on either side, we could get on a conference call and talk it out. This all changed when our office moved to California. Those three extra hours were literally the difference between night and day.
When I was still living in Novato, Yager and I were out of sync. I’d arrive to work in the morning as they were heading home for the evening. The ability to converse in real time became limited. Most issues were discussed over email, which changed the dynamic. Instead of talking through issues together, we were responding to one another hours later. This only led to increased frustration between the publisher and the dev team.
It was unexpected, but my relocation to Dallas helped production during the final months of development. Moving two time zones to the east made me the bridge between developer and publisher I was always meant to be. This was great for them, but I was still spiraling. Even though the Spec Ops script was finished, my work wasn’t done. There were new cinematics to storyboard, music to license, a final voice-over session to direct, and DLC to write.
DLC stands for downloadable content. It’s an expansion to the original game and can be something like additional character costumes, a new multiplayer map, or a narrative expansion that tells a new story within the same world. Sometimes DLC will be given away for free, but usually the player has to pay for it.
The more DLC a game has, the more players tend to see it as an attempt to nickel-and-dime them. Make no mistake, that’s exactly what DLC is, but as I’ve said before, wanting to make money off your work is not evil or wrong. You see, the production cost of AAA games has steadily increased while the consumer cost has remained at sixty dollars for around eleven years. If AAA games were appropriately priced, you’d pay more than a hundred dollars for them. Since that won’t fly, we’ve turned to DLC to cover the difference.
Over the past few years, we’ve made DLC a major part of a AAA game’s release by preselling season passes. A season pass guarantees a certain amount of downloadable content to be released over the course of a year. This shows we won’t abandon the game upon release, which in turn earns a bit of loyalty from you. That’s enough, though. We also hook you by selling the season pass at a slightly discounted price, in the hopes that by purchasing it you will hold on to your game for at least a year and not sell it back to a retail store, which means there are fewer used games for sale.
Used games are bad for the industry. When players buy used games, all the money goes to the retailer. If someone buys a new game on Tuesday for sixty dollars, then sells it back three days later, the store can resell it for fifty-eight dollars. That afternoon, someone else buys the used copy because two dollars off is better than nothing. In four days, that game technically made two sales, but only one of them earned money for its creators. DLC, especially season passes, helps prolong the amount of time between purchase and resale, meaning more money ends up where it belongs—with us.
DLC isn’t going anywhere; it is now an essential part of a AAA game’s life cycle. If that seems wrong to you, as a gamer, I’m sorry to say I don’t care. You’re already paying less for our work than you should be. I’m far more concerned with what it means for us, as creators. The financial necessity of downloadable content means narrative-driven games can no longer stand on their own. Even if the core experience doesn’t need a narrative expansion, it will get one at some point within the next year.
With some games, this is easy to pull off. The Borderlands franchise has amazing DLC that continues the main game’s story in an organic way, including the greatest piece of DLC I’ve ever seen, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep. In TTAoDK, you play a character in an FPS representation of a pen-and-pencil role-playing game (think Dungeons & Dragons). With Tiny Tina serving as Dungeon Master, you play a game within the game and set out to save the Queen, who happens to be a pony made of diamonds named Butt Stallion. I mean, holy shit. Layers upon layers, and all for a six-hour expansion pack.
Other games, like Spec Ops, weren’t designed for narrative expansion. In fact, one of the reasons all the characters die is because I was worried we might try to make a direct sequel, which to me felt untrue to the characters and what they endured. I was naïve. In video games, only death and DLC are certain, and the former will not stop the latter.
* * *
YOU HEAR STORIES ABOUT method actors who attempt to inhabit their characters so completely that they never stop acting, even between takes. Daniel Day-Lewis is a great example. He’s notorious for staying in character for the entire duration of a film’s production. While filming The Last of the Mohicans, he didn’t go anywhere without his twelve-pound flintlock. During The Crucible, he only traveled on horseback. As Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Lewis made things very difficult for the catering department, as he refused to eat meat he did not personally butcher. A lot of people don’t know that. Mostly because I made it up. But it sounds like something he’d do, and that’s my point. Creating and inhabiting a character can lead you to do some crazy things.
There has always been concern that violent video games create violent people. It’s nonsense. All you need do is look around to see the truth of that. No matter how violent a game or extreme the carnage, players are rarely required to take part in a malicious
act of violence. The most common combat scenario for a video game is one of survival: the player comes under threat of deadly force and must respond in kind. This won’t put them in the mindset of a desperate victim struggling to survive, unless that’s what we want them to feel. It’s more likely the situation will be designed toward fun and adrenaline, but that is a different emotional space than what is required to kill someone.
Even when there are exceptions, players are still physically separated from the actions of the character they’re controlling. They can inhabit a character for a time and walk in their blood-soaked shoes, but it is a superficial connection. Violent actions are as physically close as the television or monitor and yet still a million miles away. Even though players control a character, they are still separate from the actions occurring in the game. The physical effort required to kill a person is replaced with the press of a button. Shoot someone? Press a button. Hit them with a stick? Press a button. Summon forth a swarm of man-eating rats? Press a button. The player’s physical interaction is minimal; it carries none of the literal or figurative weight of a real act of violence. Any connection between the player and character ends the moment they put down their controller.
The same cannot be said for a character’s creators. We have to live with these creations for the rest of our lives. The main characters of Spec Ops—Captain Walker, John Konrad, and the rest—were not plucked fully formed from the ether. They grew from the darker side of our minds. Their brutality did not exist until we gave them name and verb.
Spec Ops had left me in an emotional state that was me and yet not me. It was the Lizard Brain—a mind capable of creating a hundred maniacs who in turn create a mind capable of birthing them. My mind was eating itself, like some kind of bastard ouroboros, that ancient symbol of a snake devouring its own tail.
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