LazyAza said:
Spec Ops is the first game ever to make people (myself included) feel guilty about killing things in a game. No other game in history has accomplished that as far as I'm aware, this alone is reason enough for people to play it.
Actually that's old hat. Bioshock with it's dillema about the little sisters is an example of a fairly recent take on the whole "guilt" thing. You can go back further to things like some of the revelations in Silent Hill 3, or even perhaps games like "Dreamweb" for those who have heard of it. Games like Dishonorered are largely based around the evil of killing and pretty much punish you for doing it.
"Special Ops. The Line" is more like the video game version of say "Apocolypse Now" or even "Rambo" (the actual movies are hardly about the glory of War) as opposed to other gun toting action flicks which have a rather straightforward set up. It's a differant take of things motivated by a political perception.
Okay now for a long explanation of something many people might not have realized or put much thought into, but might have heard of (which has little to do with politics). Action movies are a lot like comic books. In comic books you have regular "default" comics with the good guys who are GOOD on one side, and do all the super hero stuff as you'd expect, and BAD guys on the other side who do all the super villain stuff as you'd expect. Then you've got the "deconstructionist" comics which tend to bill themselves as being "super heroes meet the real world" this is the kind of thing where noone wears costumes, everyone including the protaganists is generally a bad guy in the big picture, and everything is murky shades of gray. Then you've got the "reconstructionist" comics which are pretty much the hardest ones to do but tend to be comics for adults as opposed for a younger audience or emo teenagers/young adults and the ones that actually "get it right". The reconstructionist movement is one where the deconstructionist movement's points about realism are acknowleged, but it's demonstrated that everything eventually goes back to the original status quo. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, it's just their motives are xplained in more realistic terms. People wear costumes because simply put to do anything heroic and stop these guys you need to be able to avoid accountability, as opposed to the classic reasons of not wanting to be attacked by your enemies. This is a very basic run down on it.
Action movies, and to an extent games, tend to do the same basic thing accross generes. You've got your typical straightforward goods vs. bad shooters like say "Doom" where everything is straightforward (humans good, demons bad because they are demons, and that's pretty self evident), then you've got your deconstructionist shooters like "Special Ops. The Line" and "Bioshock" where there are strong elements of analyzing these kinds of events and portraying everything as being bad pretty much (in Bioshock your literally a complete tool), and you've got the reconstructionist games like a lot of the modern warfare games which acknowlege war sucks, and that shades of gray exist (the "No Russian" mission) but ultimatly come down to the good guys still being the good guys and the bad guys still being the bad guys. Both have more understandbale motives than simply demons are bad just because, or Doctor Doom is an insane megalomaniac which justifies any stupid thing he wants to do as opposed to just sticking to his own country where he's actually well liked and has the technological resources of a super power due to him... but it all ends in the same place where your heroically wading through a bunch of generally inferior opponents (because it makes for a cool game) for the right reasons.
Being regular, deconstructionist, or reconstructionist doesn't nessicarly equate with quality or always follow the pattern. Bioshock for example is a deconstructionist game, a movement mostly aimed at the disenfranchised youth, but is actually superior to a lot of reconstructionst games and has probably has drawn in a more mature crowd. Likewise most military FPS games are utter crap and despite being from a more mature style, tend to get more of the kids, despite the general pattern.
Incidently a lot of this can be tracked by looking at the generations that grew up with their escapist media, as opposed to simply putting it away like generations before. Comics having evolved with the last couple of generations for example. The whole 1990s era of comics for example had pretty much everything turned into a totally emo deconstructionst work, half the heroes were murdering sleazebags, couldn't turn around without doing something bad to torment themselves, and might not even be able to use their powers 90% of the time due to being too powerful and unable to control it if nothing else, this being compared to say the more straightforward comics of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In the late 1990s and the beginning of the last decade you started seeing reconstructionism as those people became older and gained a differant perspective. Things like Warren Ellis' run on "The Authority" more or less defined the movement, where the super heroes were pretty super, they actually did things, had them turn out well for them (though this changed after he left) but acted within the context of real world motives. "The Authority" for example took the whole "evil goverment" schtick from the 1990s that was built up, and then had a team roughly analogous to "The Justice League" pretty much blitz the living hell out of it in a straightforward Good Vs. Bad way with the sides simply being explained. With FPS it's pretty much the same thing, the reconstuctionists pretty much acknowleging the moral ambigiouty of pounding the crap out of the 3rd world and what it might mean to civilians, but realizing that it's still nessicary, and the people on the receiving end are the bad guys even if it's for cultural reasons rather than more direct ones.
A long rant, but I think understanding that trinity of design (which applies to a lot of things) let's you evaluate where works are coming from and their intent.
