No the point of the game was pretty obviously that you, the player, are a bad person for wanting to enjoy media that portrays something as horrible as war. It's made pretty clear toward the end with the loading screen "tips."
The game was marketed as just another military shooter in a time when the market was saturated with those and then did a bait and switch trying to shame the player for wanting to play just that. The whole point falls flat if you consider that as stated there are no real world effects of playing or enjoying violent media. It's pure moral posturing and self righteous wank.
No the point of the game was pretty obviously that you, the player, are a bad person for wanting to enjoy media that portrays something as horrible as war.
It's pure moral posturing and self righteous wank.
People can make criticism of whatever they want. Calling a game that criticized the common military game a 'self righteous wank' is reductive and insulting for no reason. The whole point is to make people think about their usual war media and that's not a bad thing.
It honestly sounds like you took the tips personally and are still salty about it.
It does seem like you missed the point again. It didn't criticize the common military game it critized the players of those games. It equated the consumption of media to the actual thing i.e. If you enjoy military shooters, you enjoy actual human suffering.
This is blatantly false. The media we consume doesn't have a real world impact on our actions or character. It is the same moral grandstanding video game players have had to endure since Mortal Kombat packaged in a more artistic manner.
Also stating that anyone can criticize anything is a truism.
Of course different people can have different interpretations of the same thing, but I'd like to defend mine:
When someone says eat the rich is it that they intend to practice cannibalism or do they mean something else? Similiarly, when a video game questions the morality of its players for actions it made them do, does it intend to make the players feel bad for playing or does it have other intentions? I think they're both ways to shock people out of their preconceptions like the rich are superior or military violence is justified.
The media we consume doesn't have a real world impact on our actions or character.
This is just false. Media, just like real world experiences, absolutely impacts how we think. It might not have a "guy plays terrorist side in a game" -> "guy decides to be a terrorist" kind of causation, but it might have a "guy stops associating terrorists with terror and instead just the people soldiers fight" type of effect. Edit: It also can't be denied that what we consume is based on who we are. One might not play Spec ops the line because they like making virtual people suffer, but they might play it because they like military aesthetic and want to experience being in a badass heroic situation. Or they might play it because sandstorm dubai looks cool. But either way it's not removed from the real world.
Spec ops the line wants to make people stop associating "solider" with "hero" and instead associate it with "hero?". What better way to do that than asking the player directly? I think putting bad npc soldiers in an ordinary video game to get the same point across would be ineffective, as it lets players disregard those soliders as pure evil. Putting the player character in that position lets them see that you don't need to be inherently evil to do bad things, but they're bad nonetheless.