White Phosphorus [Spoilers] | Spec Ops: The Line (Ep.3) | State of the Arc Podcast
Вставка
- Опубліковано 21 вер 2024
- This game. Just, this game. This episode contains spoilers for the entire game. It's a short game, so you should be able to beat it in just a few hours. We are joined by Sam from Games as Literature @GameProf. Leave a comment if you feel so inclined. Thanks for watching!
**We’re Now On Spotify**: open.spotify.c...
**Listen On Soundcloud**: / resonantarc
**Listen On iTunes**: podcasts.apple...
**Listen On Pocket Cast**: pca.st/NJsJ
Patreon Page: / resonantarc
Subscribe Star: www.subscribes...
Twitter: / resonantarc
Facebook: / resonantarc
Instagram: / resonantarc
TikTok: / resonantarc
Man this podcast is so good. This series is a perfect example of it
I finally beat this game because of this podcast, and wow, the most shocking thing to me wasn't the White Phosphorus (which I was led to believe) but rather the hole that Walker keeps digging deeper for himself.
Fun fact: When Walker confronts Konrad at the end of the game, the latter has just finished a painting of the white phosphorus attack and asks the former what he thinks of it. Walker says: "You did this," to which Konrad replies: "No. You did."
This exchange is a direct reference to the Picasso painting, "Guernica." The painting is an abstract representation of the Nazis fire-bombing Spanish civilians. Rumor has it that, when Picasso was living in German-occupied Paris, a Nazi soldier was in his apartment once, saw the Guernica painting on the wall, then turned and asked Picasso: "Did you do that?"
Two which Picasso replied: "No. You did."
Walker and the player had a hundred choices BEFORE getting to the white phosphorous scene. Now, you've thrown away all the chances you had to do the right thing, and there are no choices left for you to waste. Also please don't turn the comments into a cesspool, you guys are better than that.
Really good thoughts from everyone, particularly on the white phosphorus segment and the feeling of desensitisation that the player gets to all of the violence committed in his wake.
While I generally agree and like Mike’s point about needing to question our fundamental assumptions before we act, since we’re wrong more often than we think, I think that Walker’s situation might be a little bit more nuanced than that. In political theory, there is the idea of a “state of emergency,” where the ordinary rules don’t apply given the extreme state of duress that a state is going through at the current moment.
It is all well and good to say that Walker has to question his assumptions, and that a core message of the game is pointing out what happens at the failure of Walker to precisely do just that. But in the “state of emergency,” I wonder also about the extent to which Walker has the luxury to mull over these decisions, and whether he has to simply *decide* and *act*.
Perhaps it was because I’m really bad at shooters, but I felt stressed almost the whole way through while playing Spec Ops, and the experience led me to think about what it would mean to make such difficult decisions under duress. I could all too easy see an argument where Walker “justifies” himself in saying that it was a “state of emergency,” and that he had to act based on the “most reasonable assumption” he had at that current moment in order to save the lives of those under his charge.
I've tried at least half an hour to defeat the infinitly respawning enempies before I gave up and used the white Phosphorus.
I'm one of those "deep thinking players". I mostly play RPGs and almost never any shooters, but since I'm german, there was a lot of talk about this game in the press, so I checked it out!
Something I remember hearing is there was an interview with actual ex-Delta force about what the game got right/wrong and there were only two major inaccuracies (both justifiable)
1: when the reality of Walker's situation set in, protocol is to override him and seize control to maintain order because his judgment is clearly compromised. But it also makes sense that at that point they want to be able to put it on him instead of actually taking responsibility themselves. They're too traumatized to step up like that which makes sense.
2: Delta Force units always comprise four individuals.
You can read that as being done for story purposes, or that you, the player, are the fourth member of the team.
I vividly remember getting to the White Phosphorus part and actively searching for an alternative and was mortified when I had to just do what I had to do. I think the first time I played it, I had a more negative reaction, but when I returned to the game years later, I had a better understanding of what the game was trying to convey and I appreciated the scene more.
First of all, props to all three of you. The game and the subject matter can be quite politically divisive and difficult to navigate.
I doubt anyone (especially in 2023) can get through reviews or analyses of this game without being attacked from some perspective or another, but thank you for trying anyway!
You're all awesome, and I can't wait for more analyses on games past this!
I remember playing through this game 10 years ago and not fully understanding what Walker was going through.
And then I entered into a relationship where neither myself or my ex treated each-other particularly well, but we were convinced we were individually good people.
Spoilers... we weren't. Or at the very least, we had an inexperienced, somewhat immature view on what being "good" was.
A year after that, I replayed the game and I was able to appreciate it 150% more. It's one of those few games, up there with Telltale's The Walking Dead Season 1, where every time you play it, because of your growth as a person, you experience the game a little different each and every time - like reading the Bible.
I watched two of my friends play through this back in the day. One was your everyday, run of the mill, generic shooter fan who loved Gears of War and Call of Duty. Like me originally, the plot of the game (and the point) went right over his head, but he enjoyed the action. And then I watched my South African friend, who had personally been on the receiving end of a gun, play through it and while he enjoyed the game, he was visibly uncomfortable with the subject matter. He paused the game several points throughout to discuss Walker's motivations and complete lunacy. Come the White Phosphorus scene, he put the game down for an hour, went for a walk, came back and finished the game. We still talk about it to this day.
I think this game is one of the few rare games - up there with Undertale and Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide - that attempts to partly illicit guilt in the player for participating in viewing or playing them. I think it's extraordinarily difficult to create a work of fiction that undermine's the player's value system by subverting expectations and subtly enforcing a moral message. It makes me appreciate the unreliable narrator trope even more.
It makes me appreciate that there is no such thing as completely good or completely bad people - it's highly contextual.
And it's through the experiencing of that cognitive dissonance that makes us truly human.
Great video.
I hope Sam comes back again in a future games podcast! Really enjoyed his insights and commentary on the game and it seemed like a genuinely fascinating conversation between you three. Great stuff all around as usual. :)
Sam is a good dude!
I think a point that kinda got forgotten about the call of duty 25 and halo 500 talk is that there will always be a next generation of younger gamers who need these "wake-up" calls to inspire them to to be more mindful of the media they're consuming. So I'm unsure of to what extent these games can really become obsolete
The guest of this one gives me what the kids call "the ick."
Have you ever thought about doing a podcast on Signalis? I'm fascinated by the game, it would be great if you guys played it and talk about it.
THANK YOU FOR MENTIONING NIER!!!!! Favorite game of all time!
I would like to add to the discussion that in TLoU2's case, it's more a case of "the game is trying to make me feel bad for doing something I think is justified (i.e. going after Abby to get revenge on her)", and this is what I dislike about the game, how it tries to paint the "everyone is human and you are killing good people" but at the same time the game allowed Abby to have her revenge meanwhile Ellie was denied hers, we the player were denied OUR revenge, Ellie just gives up. The only person shje had the "right" to kill, she doesn't. I think we can describe TLoU2 as Zenos from FF14 once said "For nothing, in the end. So much wasted effort".
TLoU 2 spoilers...
...
...
The part of Abby's character that made it really hard for me to empathize with her was that right before she takes her revenge, Joel coincidentally saves her life from the Zombie hoard. And yet she still goes through with brutally torturing him before killing him, showing no remorse or doubt, despite that fact that without him, she wouldn't be standing there to even have that choice.
It made me see her as a legitimate narcissist/psychopath. Imagine what it would take for you to torture and murder someone who just saved your life 10 minutes earlier. That kind of person is lacking so much empathy and so psychologically damaged that it's going to take a whole lot more than just showing me that she has friends and people who care about her too before I come around to her side of the story.
The theme the story was going for was "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind", but the character who took the first eye (Joel) was a deeply flawed, but empathetic character. Even people who disagreed with his choice at the end of the first game understand why he made it. But the character who took the 2nd eye (Abby) was introduced to us as a complete monster first that they tried to contextualize as a flawed person after the fact, but they dug her character a hole so deep that I didn't think they were able to pull her out of it by the end.
I walk away from spec ops feeling like walker was wrong and as a player what I did was awful. Tlou2 does not achieve this
I'm late to this, but another aspect I can't stand with TLoU2 was during the time you're going out and hunting Abby and Abby going after Ellie vice versa, we kill so many people. The message we are suppose to get is so convoluted throughout that I didn't care anymore and wanted to play something else. It completely desensitized me towards caring about any character.
"Seven is one stroke" was my catch phrase when I was a kid, great reference there
I absolutely love hearing your discussions, but unfortunately I rarely am able to play the games discussed. I understand this is like a book club of sorts, but I do wish I could just listen to you guys tell the story/narrate the game for me (hah!). I mean, you guys are doing some real magic here!
I really agree with the bit at 46 minutes in about that if you are questioning the game already, then the game isn't for you, because that is exactly what happened to me when I tried to play this game. I didn't know anything about it at first, but it did appear in my Steam library years ago, probably from a Humble Bundle. I started playing it and I knew in about 5 minutes that the main character was the bad guy. I unknowingly went in already agreeing with the game, which is why I don't think I enjoyed the game. I am just not the target audience.
Holy wow that was an unlucky shot. XD
I love you Mike and Casen
42:40 is so funny out of context.
I am a little surprised that during the brief discussion of the mob scene that there wasn't a mention that the choice is not a simple binary between letting the citizens kill you vs. slaughtering the lot of them. If you fire into the air the crowd freaks out and disperses. Granted at this point the game has driven so much gruesomeness on you that you probably just chalk it up to just another awful thing you're made to do, but it's actually not. This time you have a choice, even if it's an insignificant and ultimately meaningless one since if those people don't die by your guns they'll die of thirst in a few days anyways.
When that 33rd soldier asks "Why?" after Walker bombs them with White Phosphrous . . . it breaks my heart. And then he points them toward the war crime they've just committed. And my broken heart sinks into my guts. Didn't know what White Phosphrous was until this game, and afterwards I wished the human race hadn't discovered it.
Superb acting in that scene. I mean, for the whole game, but when Lugo loses his mind, screaming "He turned us into fucking killers!" it's so powerful.
Regarding the image of the mother and child, there was a part that caught me unawares and really creeped me out. I'd played through the game a fair few times, and one time I died to the hallucination of Lugo. When he turns up as one of the heavy enemies? And when you get gunned down in that area, a brief flickering dream like moment featuring the mother and child and other dead bodies while Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is being hummed like a lullaby. Caught me off guard and haunted me.
It's interesting to look at the social commentary of the mortar minigame of "The Gate" chapter through a more modern lens. The technology of remote warfare has evolved from the point of view of infrared imaging of UAVs and fixed-wing gunships (popularized by the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare original trilogy) during the game's zeitgeist, to that of full-color imagery from off-the-shelf small drones in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War.
And we can pretty much fill the blanks...
I mean you can’t spell asshole without hole, and that’s exactly what Walker has become.
Ayyyyy I’ll be here all night!
One thing I didn't hear yall say that I thought was worth saying was about the phrase "I wouldn't have done that."
Let's say you're right: you wouldn't have done that. The thing about this game is: this isn't your story. This goes back to Extra Credits' videos about the difference between JRPGs and Wester RPGs, and insurmountable waist-high fences.
Compare this game to Dark Souls. In that game, the story is almost completely under your control, starting from when you name the character. Siegward's quest doesn't progress unless you progress it, and you decide how it ends. You choose what bosses to fight (with special mention to Priscilla, who did nothing wrong). And you choose whether or not to rekindle the flame.
Extra Credits taught me the idea that boundaries in games aren't just the developer's boundaries, they're also the character's boundaries. Red from Pokemon chooses not to jump over fences, Mario in Mario 64 chooses not to leave the castle area. And in Metroid Fusion, when SA-X uses a power bomb, it blows a hole in a wall, but when Samus uses a power bomb, it doesn't. That means that Samus isn't the kind of person who goes around blowing holes in walls, so you're not allowed to do that when you play as her.
This game starts with the main character telling you his name. And the story is made up of decisions that he chooses to make. You can't rappel down ropes until he decides to, and you can't turn back because he decides to continue pressing on. In Undertale, it's within the protagonist's range to be a pacifist or a killer. But it's not in Walker's range to do anything other than what he does in this game.
I think people in general fail to grasp this point because games put us in the character in a way that movies and books don't. At least, I know that was the case for me until I watched Extra Credits, and yall have helped me understand a lot too.
I think this outlines and reinforces everything else yall said.
I love this podcast and yall's analyses.
I think your arguments regarding people pulling back from character choices puts the onus in the wrong place, I think inherently if the developer wants the player to connect with the character they playing then they have to tailor it so that connection isn't broken. What you are saying is something along the lines of if a book had a hero become the villain and then the writer states they want the reader to feel and be fully behind the now villians actions. You simply cannot have it both ways, if you want to you have to walk a very fine line and ensure that players mostly would make those decisions or face players saying "Well the main character is awful". You can't do what they did and not have a disconnnection unless you are a very specific kind of player.
The easiest way to answer the question of if their is a way to justify doing evil to someone is, if "you" will be fine with it beaing done to "you".
Banned weapon is not really the correct term to use for it but more of a highly regulated weapon since it depends on how it is used. In general, it depends on the situation, it is allowed for stuff like smoke covers (having to be really careful because YT doesn't like any mention of it) but using it as a direct weapon on the enemy is the war crime use for it is. Search up the page online for the details regarding the usage of it since last time I tried linking them here YT wasn't having any of it
51:00 - 51:44
WORD.
Re: conspiracy theories, I think it's important to remember that every piece of information that we don't have direct access to must be taken on faith (and even information we /do/ have direct access to requires us to take our senses on faith!).
Extending that faith to those around us by default is generally healthy. But it's not unreasonable to withdraw that faith from a source of information if it demonstrates that it prioritizes its own interests over the pursuit of objective truth (even if that tends to be a lot easier to recognize when said interests conflict with one's own).
When mainstream media sources demonstrate that they've prioritized their own interests over the pursuit of objective truth, that creates an information vacuum. And it's only natural that an information vacuum will generate confirmation bias and paranoia.
Said paranoia can only ever be exacerbated by calling it madness and treating it accordingly, because no one's ever going to extend faith to someone who thinks they're insane. To overcome someone else's information vacuum-based paranoia requires a demonstrable sacrifice of one's own interests in pursuit of objective truth. I'd argue that the inability of our current establishment to sacrifice its interests under any circumstance and its rejection (even in principle) of objective truth is critical to the current impasse.
(And yes, this implies that relativism is intrinsically vulnerable to conspiracy theories. Relativists can't regain the trust of conspiracy theorists because no one trusts truth claims from those who don't believe in objective truth; this leaves relativists with no way to eliminate conspiracy theories short of force, and using force against conspiracy theorists provides them a perfect opportunity to convince others that their paranoia was completely justified all along.)
I didn't even realise I owned this game until you started this series. I don't remember buying it on Steam sale or anything so it must have been part of a charity bundle:)
I think it was given for free on Steam a few years ago.
I wonder if games like these, which put the tropes on their heads end up killing the genre...?
unlike films when games do this they arnt seen any diffrent afterwards. i have never seen a blazeing saddles moment with these types of games.
Mike, but in order to emulate choice and our lack or assurance of our decisions, the game should've given one an alternative. There's parts of the game where you DO have choice but not this?
So I think the criticism is due to the execution of the WP scene and the hitback from the creators is "just don't play the games is the alternative" which is a cheap copout since they CHARGED you for a video game and not a thought or social experiment. (Which can be executed as well but in the context of a video game where player choice is crucial).
My problem with the WP scene is because you're railroaded into it without a viable alternative like shooting the crowd or shooting the air to scare them in the same game.
I saw the civilians and experimented with multiple possible alternatives to avoid dropping it on them. But it became obvious that the game wanted me to do it because the game provides no path aside from dropping WP on civilians. It's their destiny to die, a choice made before you ever got there.
The lack of player agency here is what robs the moment of any feeling of personal responsibility. Rather, I feel this much more sharply in games like Walking Dead or Life is Strange, where the player is given morally grey choices to make that can lead to terrible outcomes, but the KEY DIFFERENCE is that the player has a real choice to make there, and thus they get a chance to feel ownership rather than mentally pushing that ownership onto the developer.
So I'll elaborate on the distinction with an example:
Let's say a mad scientist locks you into a room with two buttons labeled "A" and "B", associated with two people tied to chairs. The scientist informs you that you have 10 minutes to talk to these two people and decide which of them will die. If you don't push a button before the end of the 10 minutes, then a machine will automatically kill both of them. So you talk to "A" and "B", learn what you can about them, go through internal ethical struggle, and make a choice to kill one to save the other.
You push button "A", and a curtain drops over the person "B" that you just saved, and then you watch person "A" die a horrible painful death, cursing you with their last breath. Obviously the mad scientist is the villain here, however, YOU are now stained with having partial responsibility for the fate of person "A", and you have to make your own peace with how you rationalized saving one person over another, and justifying to yourself that you made the right choice.
So that's the example case. NOW, let's pull away the curtain on person "B", and reveal that the machine had simultaneously killed "B" behind that curtain at the same time it was killing person "A".
The truth is, both of these people were going to die no matter what you did with those buttons. You stop any internal rationalization process you were going through. Now ALL the blame rests on the mad scientist and you feel no responsibility over the life/death of those two people, because you found that you never had any agency over the outcome. This is what the WP scenario is like in Spec Ops. It's laudable that they attempted to tackle some bigger ideas than most shooters attempt to address, but that doesn't excuse the flaws in execution.
Of course I can tell that the game is asking you, "Why don't you just stop playing?". Asking this question of the player completely breaks immersion, because the cost-benefit of ceasing to play means recognizing that this is a fictional scenario, and that these are virtual lives with no value or consequence. That complete lack of value behind virtual life, is now weighed against your very real value of having paid money to be able to play through this game. Obviously real value is going to trump an absence of value. The immersion has broken, and I was never confronted with a difficult decision to make. Virtual lives only have value if you preserve the player's immersion in the situation. Obviously nothing that happens in singleplayer games really matters, it only matters to the extent that you allow yourself to believe that it does, and that's why it's absolutely critical to preserve that immersion in order to give these scenarios impact.
"I saw the civilians and experimented with multiple possible alternatives to avoid dropping it on them. But it became obvious that the game wanted me to do it because the game provides no path aside from dropping WP on civilians. It's their destiny to die, a choice made before you ever got there."
I think if on a blind 1st playthrough of the game, you were already the type of player who was perceptive enough to see the potential consequences of the WP scenario before it happens, and were actively looking for options to avoid that outcome, then... you weren't really the target audience the game was speaking to with it's "Meta" commentary.
The Meta storytelling angle of this game only really works for the type of player who strictly or lazily follows the instructions of the game (mission scenario text, Map Waypoints, NPC instructions, etc.) without taking other options under consideration or considering the consequences. "It's what the mission objective was so that's what I did". I think only for that type of player does the "Oh Shit" moment of the WP scene really land as they intended. Which to be fair, was MOST players who would buy this type of game back when it was released. (And probably still a majority of casual AAA players today.)
But the moment won't land nearly as strong for players who already know it's coming (and try to avoid it) or players who value game stories with many branching narrative choices with different outcomes. For those players, the Meta angle doesn't land nearly as hard due to the railroading you mentioned, but there is still value to be gained from the story by disconnecting from the Meta aspect of it and just viewing it as a cautionary tale of the sunk cost fallacy and digging a hole deeper and deeper from just "trying to help".
@@dudemcguy1227 I basically recognized the themes the game was going for the first time and I'm the type of player that is usually looking for that angle in certain games. Even in Modern Warfare "No Russian" mission I knew that the game gave me an option by allowing me to either shoot or not. No matter what, the shooting did happen regardless if I pulled the trigger or not. It had no relevance on the overall story if I did or not but this is an option that isn't even viable here in Spec Ops. Don't get me wrong I understand the whole "war is hell and lots of bad decisions are made which can cost many lives" and the whole "you could be that soldier committing these types of atrocities" , so don't fully judge Joe Blow who signed up and was ordered to follow orders.
But the game itself wasn't marketed as some COD shooter but some deep type of game so I don't think that rationalization fits. The average mindless shooter player is in no way interested in a game with deep themes or pretending to be some type of horror game. They want a fun game with some heroic badass men like Price who are edgy and give it to the bad guys but mostly, a good online experience.
Most average shooter fans aren't the target of some thought experiment inserted in games, otherwise they'd play like Silent Hill games or Telltale games.
I mean, it all boiled down to the power of player agency in response to what is doomed by canon. In the face of a scenario designed to be "doomed for failure," the least we can do is to use our _free will_ and choose to get off the bandwagon and actively not participate (one that quite often entails going outside the box) in such a scenario we knew would not end well.
@@TheNobodyNamedDubyaBee that's not real player agency though. In the context of a video game, player agency means I have control of the outcomes and decisions.
A dev company charging me money only to tell me "don't play the game then" feels like a dishonest trick. You charge me full price for a game that robs me of player agency, only halfway though the game the only alternative you give is NOT to play the game?
Yeah sorry, I know the spirit of the idea behind this but the execution was not really well thought out. If this was a movie where you are just a viewer then yeah.
I love SpecOps:TL and I really wanted to finish watching this series but I can't. Sam's multiple almost constant feeling attacks at his political opponents is just too annoying. SpecOps:TL is a nonpartisan critique of bipartisan problem and making reference to "right wing misinformation" as if there is no left wing misinformation, or acting like well document voter fraud from both sides of the aisle isn't real just because your guy won takes me too far out of the game analysis.
Love the subject, but Sam was really getting on my nerves. Just leave your politics at home, kid. Hearing a lefty use the word misinformation is always ironic. Can't wait for that word to go out of fashion.
Dudes, I don't want this guest to come back. Right wing misinformation circles, handing several of election wrongdoing... The actual hosts are much better about being balanced.
anyone play the game Haze?
The guest strikes me as somebody that would write for Kotaku.
That's a blatant Russian disinformation campaign. You are a threat to our democracy 😤
@@rredix Oops
When he started using alt-right and right wing conspiracy theories I knew what side of the political spectrum he fell one. Someone who voted for a president who can’t function mentally.
LOL at thinking America being trusted is good for the world. Even as a thought experiment. LMAO even.
I don't particularly think Spec Ops: The Line is a well-written game, and I don't think its message is particularly intelligent or insightful. It's an interesting game, but I think it's a game that does not do a particularly good job making the points it tries to make. Over and over again you allude to the common criticism of the game, that it makes you do bad things and blames you for doing bad things, and you try to explain why this criticism is wrong. The criticism is not wrong, but even if it was, the mere fact that criticism is so common goes a long way to prove that the game is bad at making its point.
You say the game isn't talking to players who were looking for an alternative to using white phosphorous? Too bad those people are the only ones who played the game. The hypothetical Call of Duty fan who is mindlessly playing SO:TL after work doesn't exist, because none of those people bought it. The game was exclusively bought and played by people like you and me, who heard it was a brutal deconstruction of war shooters and played it to see how it did that. And how it does it is this: it railroads you into doing bad things and screams at you through the fourth wall over how terrible the things you did are.
I played this game years and years ago, long before it was featured on the podcast. I didn't like it then, and this series has not changed my mind on it. The game tells you you could have stopped at any point. This is false; you are never given an option to turn around, abort the mission, or do anything meaningfully different. Thus, the only possible interpretation of "you could have stopped at any time" is, you could have turned the game off. In fact, when I explained why I did not like the game on forums all those years ago, I had fans of the game tell me exactly that. I'm sorry, but when a game's message is "you should not play this game," the game's story is fundamentally broken at its very core. I'm not saying it's not interesting, but it's broken and refutes its own point. When there's such a deep contradiction in a work of art, it loses the ability to comment on anything external to itself.
I typed up this comment before I even got to the part where Casen says "You could have turned the game off." The fact that this podcast repeats that tired refrain only proves my point further. When it comes down to it, defenders of this game CANNOT help but fall back on "you shouldn't have played this game."
When a game's most ardent defenders are all in agreement that you shouldn't play it, I don't think it's a particularly hard choice.
We'll reply to this next time.
I made similar points in my comment and totally agreed!
"Don't play the game", alright then devs will you return all those thousands or millions you made if we player decide not to play and demand a refund? No you won't, so that's another way this while moralizing in a video game without an option feels cheap and dishonest.
That's like charging people to see a very horrible scene that will traumatize you but then half way through the movie they tell you that you can leave the theaters at any point, nobody is forcing you. What's the point of making a damned movie then?
This is kind of an absurd argument, and you're really telling on yourself here. If you went into the game looking for a deconstruction of war shooters, why would you think that the game is talking to you, personally, as the player, and NOT criticizing Walker as a character? It's Walker's actions, as the protagonist of a war shooter, that are getting criticized; the game is saying that his actions should not be framed as heroic, and so it doesn't frame the actions as heroic. If you already agreed with the game's message, you should have continued agreeing with it at that point, as well. Because I certainly did. Spec Ops is saying: "What Walker just did is something you would find in any random Call of Duty game, and the game frames it as heroism, but it shouldn't be seen that way."
That's not a statement on you as the player. It's still a statement on the genre. You taking it personally is not the game's fault.
So, unfortunately, as much as you want to try to brag that you're not, you actually ARE the audience that this game was intended for. Your inability to compartmentalize the difference between a character's actions and your actions is exactly what the game was trying to show you, and the fact that you felt personally attacked is not a statement on the game itself. It's a statement on your own personal inability to practice self-reflection and separate the dramatized fiction from the what actual reality is, which -- as Mike and Casen said repeatedly -- is the whole point. Instead of engaging with the game critically, you shut down and went "Naw. Naw. Nah. Nope. That ain't me. Nope. It's wrong." And it is genuinely hilarious that you can't see the irony in that.
@@OhOhShinra You're projecting an insane amount on me that isn't there. I'm analyzing what the game does and explaining how it doesn't work. The motivation you've written for me, for why I arrived at the conclusion that I did, exists entirely and only in your imagination. The one telling on himself is you.
spoiler thumbnail
It doesn't really seem like a spoiler without context. Someone who's never played the game won't know who those people are or how they died until they get to that moment.
It's a shame that Sam can't seem to put his political biases aside for the discussion, it's rather obnoxious and distracting.
The game revolves around the consequences of military action in another country and then Mike brought up the topic of Conspiracy theories. So it's kind of inevitable that the conversation would get political to some degree. Same thing happened with the conversations about Ayn Rand and BioShock.
But in either case I don't think Sam's political opinions detracted from the discussion. It was just a few anecdotes here and there and it didn't get derailed at all.
@@dudemcguy1227 My issue is specifically with the partisanship: "alt-right this", "right-wing misinformation that". We should strive to be more objective and balanced than that when dealing with these subjects.
@@ManiacalForeigner I understand that he revealed his political bias, but that's all he really did. I don't think it really derailed anything or turned the conversation into a different subject they weren't exploring already.
Mike already brought up the idea of Conspiracy theories first, and so Sam gave a personal anecdote about someone he knows who is in a "right-wing misinformation" rabbit hole.
And the mention of the "Alt-right playbook" was literally just the title of the video series he was referencing to explain his analogy about the table missing a leg.
If Sam gave his opinion on a political argument or cast judgement on others for having different political opinions than him, then I would agree with you. But a few comments here and there that just feature some political language shouldn't be an issue imo.
But I understand that everyone has a different level of tolerance for political subjects.
@@dudemcguy1227I think Mike handled it well, but when you start showing bias so obviously, you lose credibility. They could have easily gone down the 2020 election and then this episode would have lost its point. I think that’s the point that this original comment was trying to make
Some people either just can’t help themselves from repeatedly making subtle hints at their political leanings, or they do it to be passive aggressive. At some point, you just learn to roll your eyes and move on rather than letting it annoy you
They, look like a duck, quack like a duck etc etc... Mr. Brown really wants me to believe this is not just another lefty centric messaging media hub. What with his "I don't have an ideology" ideology and Casen's "I'm so far right I don't want you to get in trouble Mike" ideology, but observation and logic makes this a challenge...
"Lefty centric messaging media hub" lmao. If this conversation was "too lefty" for you to look past that and still enjoy it then I don't know what to say.
Smh
The title and thumbnail spoil the game too. Do better
It really doesn’t without any context
The game is 10 years old and has come up at least 3-4 times over those years. The spoiler tag has worn off.
@@TheMilhouseExperiencethey put the term [spoilers] in the title to let viewers know their spoiler discussion. Which shows they care at least that much about spoiler tagging it. But then spoilers in the screenshot
Mike and Casen have already flagged this video for spoilers, warning their audiences to watch it after playing the game, so I don’t see the issue here. People need to learn to be less sensitive: The Empire Strikes Back doesn’t suddenly become any less good a movie because everyone knows the twist.
Moreover, the impact of the scene lies not so much with the horrors of war (which everyone who has even heard about Spec Ops knows this game’s reputation), but the fact that you’re responsible for perpetuating it and that you did, with the kind of unthinking Call of Duty mindset that you bring to some of these other games. You can’t really spoil that.
Gotta love the cry babies that scream spoilers knowing the context of the spoilers