This article is about the ENDING of Spec Ops: The Line. I can actually talk about the ENDING of Spec Ops: The Line without talking about most of the themes or plot of the game, so references to anything other than the ENDING of Spec Ops: The Line will be as limited as possible, but this is still about the ENDING of Spec Ops: The Line.

So, Spec Op: The Line is a straightforward, thrilling, terrifying, powerful dramatic engine of a story. Like most pure dramas, the story could take place anywhere and not lose much – it’s set in an American-occupied Middle Eastern city and stars an American military team, so take a guess what it would lose – and any medium – there’s criticism-via-dramatic-logical-conclusion of genre tropes of military shooters. But the thing is, if this were a movie or a comic book or prose fiction, you would lose the power of the ending, which smoothly and seamlessly asks the player to do something that any other medium would have to work much harder to get away with: judge the protagonist.

So, our hero is Captain Martin Walker, leader of Delta Force squad who are sent into disaster-struck Dubai to investigate why the local military group have dropped out of contact. Long story short, this is a tragedy, and it ends with Walker meeting his former commander John Konrad, who lays out his recognition for him. That’s the end of the story dramatically speaking. After finishing his monologue, Konrad points his gun at Walker, and gives him ten seconds. You and he have three options open to you, and ten seconds to make it:

A) Walker allows Konrad to shoot him.
B) Walker shoots himself before Konrad can.
C) Walker shoots Konrad.

The question the game is asking you is this: does Walker deserve to die for his actions over the course of the game? A and B are variations on the answer YES, with a subtle but powerful distinction, with Walker either accepting responsibility or conceding it. For my part, the first time I played through, I chose option B. Having seen everything he’d seen and done everything he’d done, I’d found Walker’s actions too monstrous to forgive, and the only way out that still retained his sense that he was a good person (a sense I wanted to retain) was option B. I suppose another person would say he’d done too much to deserve control over his own fate.

(People who’ve played the game might argue over the distinction of A and B. I say: nobody likes a pedant.)

If, however, you choose option C, something else happens. Walker sends out a message to his superiors, the credits roll… and we see a post-credits sequence. Another team has come into Dubai to investigate Delta Force’s disappearance, and they find Captain Walker, even more fucked up than we left him at the start of the credits and holding the biggest, most powerful gun in the game. We are then presented with another choice:

A) Walker drops his gun, and is taken into custody.
B) Walker has his gun taken from him, and is taken into custody.
C) Walker attacks the team, and is killed in response.
D) Walker attacks the team, kills them all, sends a curt message to the part of the team that didn’t come in, and walks back into Dubai.

Again, A and B are the same choice, with the variation being how much responsiblity Walker and the player take. It’s also the most forgiving towards Walker – he’s not arrested, he’s not being punished; the soldiers who take him in have no idea what he’s done or seen, and are flying him back to America to get treated. The odds of him actually healing are low-to-impossible, but he’s going to be treated as a victim, not a monster.

This is what causes C to be the most nuanced of endings. You can read it as Walker comitting suicide by cop, giving him a military punishment for his deeds – Walker still deserves to die, but he deserves to die in a specific way. He could also simply be as bad at being the villain as he is at being the hero, with this being the hardest combat sequence in the entire game.

Ending D is simultaneously the most badass, the most damning, and yet the most dramatically neutral of all. Walker went into Dubai believing there are heroes and villains, and heroes must kill villains. In four words, Walker promises to be the very villain he thought he was chasing – the most dramatic, horrifying revelation that someone isn’t a hypocrite. This ending is less judgemental and more of an observation of Walker’s inherent self being allowed to flower.

(Also, it has ownage and the promise of further ownage)

Conceivably, this story could be ported to any medium – most obviously, by picking one ending and going with that, but that faces the issue of forcing one particular judgement on the audience. You might be able to overcome this by presenting all possible endings, though you’d still have to cut off the more nuanced choices, and of course while it would be big and spectacular, you’d be pulled out of the narrative in a way you aren’t a video game, which presents you with choices all the way through.

SO:TL is nearly unique in video games – I don’t think there’s another video game that specifically asks you to cast judgement on the protagonist in such an explicit way. But it builds on the traditions of video games, and presents you with an experience video games have an almost exclusive monopoly on. Yes, there are prose Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, but these don’t force you to make a choice in the next ten seconds (and realistically, anything they do, interactive fiction can do better).

I guess what I’m saying here is, if the defining feature of films as a medium is control over what the viewer sees and when, the defining feature of video games is giving their audience a choice, and SO:TL‘s contribution to video games as a medium is showing us that game designers can make that choice whatever they want.