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My tl;dr for why Spec Ops is bullshit:
The game is trying to make you, the player, feel bad about doing all of these horrible things, that you cannot advance the game without doing, and the smug retort whenever you point this out is that you could have actually chosen to quit the game.
Excuse me? I'm supposed to delete the game I paid for instead of experiencing it to its conclusion?
For me it worked, because I genuinely started to get carried away during the white phosphorous scene just like in the support mission in CoD: Modern Warfare, and when a big white blob appeared on the screen I enthusiastically went "Ha! Got you all!" before really thinking. So the reveal that I just killed a bunch of civilians felt like me and Walker were to blame. I guess you and @Dean have better fire control .
Nah, not at all. That scene is precisely where I think Spec Ops was strongest as a deconstruction of the COD formula, and as art in its own right. The getting caught up in the momentum is a key part of the moment, and not knowing the consequences has a merited sting. Walker and you being in alignment is what makes it work.
For me, the point where The Line approaches the line is the much-later twist, which recontextualizes Walker from understandable to deluded from the start. Here the alignment between the player and Walker turns into a jab at the player, because there's a sharp difference between 'kept pressing on a questionable mission' and 'was clearly deluded and having conversations with no one.'
Part of the drama/tension of going forth with a questionable mission is that there's an actual conflict over the decision. There are reasons to not go, but also reasons to go. A good deconstruction / reflection on the tragedies of war accepts responsibility for the decision- either decision- despite the sentiment (and flaws) leading to it. Walker can work perfectly fine getting his team risked / killed because he wants to be the hero, and the ending where he stops fighting and goes back home is a glorious defeat.
But that tension fails when the player-avatar is forced to be the unreasonable person in a reasonable-standard test. Then it's not a question of 'did he do the right thing for the wrong reasons' or 'did he do the wrong thing for the right reasons.' It's just a question of 'should this guy be in a sanitorium?'
That's a pretty direct question with a pretty boring answer. And when the subject in question is more or less explicitly a proxy for the player, it's an implied judgement on the player as well.
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There's more than a nugget to this.
Commercial art as a message partly depends on people recognizing the message they'll be seeing in advance. Video game purchases aren't a random loot box dynamic where you know in advance that you don't know what is coming out. Player's money, and time, is limited, and so they're trying to select for their desires. If you want a horror game, you don't look for a highschool rom-com game, or vice versa. There's a reason even Doki Doki Literature Club has great big warning labels, just in case you are confused.
Subverting expectations is a delicate balance between surprising and delighting the audience with a twist they didn't see coming, and the writer being a pretentious twat. When people went to the Star Wars sequel trilogy, they wanted a sequel to a known property. And when they went back for episode 8 after the fanservice feel-good nostalgia baiting of episode 7, it's because they had an expectation of what they were going to get. However, Rian Johnson was a pretentious twat who thought subverting expectations was a pass to shit on the audience's interests, and low and behold interest in the Star Wars properties, and merchandise, and everything else promptly and sharply declined.
Spec Ops: The Line isn't Rian Johnson tier subverting expectations, but it very much is a product that does a bait-and-hook. Come for the modern warfare shooter gameplay, stay for the... warcrime simulator? Emotional masochism?
Don't get me wrong. On balance, I like Spec Ops: The Line. I think it has some artistic merit. But that artistic merit is when it's focused on the central character, not the player who doesn't know what's coming. The player is being carried along by pre-commitment bias, not agency of deliberate choice. They don't know what's coming, and that's not their fault when it's the artist doing the bait-and-hook.
I am extremely sympathetic to the people angered by the 'you could stop playing any time' after they paid. I am more sympathetic than I would be if, say, the developers got an attendance commission to go to a convention, and then got pissed on with the threat their attenndance commission being forfeit if they left rather than take it. At least the developers would have been led there with the prospect of something they wanted, money, if they put up with it. The Spec Ops players already got their money taken. Making them the subject of ridicule by proxy is just rubbing salt in a wound they weren't expecting and were misled into paying for.
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