For maybe the
first time in my life, a video game has truly affected me.
Sure, video
games have had an effect on me before. Portal 2, which I wrote about last week,
briefly left me considering non-Euclidian paths through any room I entered. But
I don’t think a game has ever truly shaken me like House of Leaves or Incendies or
Essex County have. While many games
have engaging stories and characters—BioShock
and the Mass Effect games chief among
them—the video game medium makes it difficult for those elements to transcend
the far more immediate mechanical aspects of the game: sure, your favourite
teammate might heroically sacrifice himself, but only after you’ve somewhat
tediously cut your way through dozens of nameless, identical enemies. The
impact is lessened a little, is what I’m saying.
But one game,
which I first heard about less than a month ago and played over the course of
two days last week, has managed to break the mould. Spec Ops: The Line is a gruelling, unsentimental military shooter
that not only forces you to experience the horrors of war, but makes you
culpable for them as well. It’s a damning deconstruction of the modern war game
genre that’s become incredibly popular in the last half decade and possibly the
only video game I would consider a genuine work of art. And I can’t get it out
of my head.
