Unreliable narrators in books is a catch all term for characters that are unable to accurately look at and description their environments, situations, and the other characters they interact with. Most characters could be described as this as, unless the piece is written in a third person omnipresent point of voice, you can’t get an alternate perspective. Video games, on the other hand, are by design going to favor a third person narrative. We aren’t hearing a story from the protagonist, we’re experiencing it ourselves as a silent companion to the protagonist. We typically don’t hear the character’s thoughts or have the actions of others describe people or events through their own bias. Most of the time, we only see action and hear dialogue.
That brings us to Spec Ops: The Line, a seemingly run of the mill third person shoot and Call of Duty rip off. By the end, it’s told an adapted version of the story in the movie Apocalypse Now which was based off the novel Heart of Darkness by Conrad, well known for it’s intentionally disorienting writing and a conflicted protagonist seeing this world, this “heart of darkness” through their own bias, being a white man from Europe in the Congo. There’s some debate as to what extent the book was embodying the racism of the time or was critiquing the racism of its time, as the unreliable narrator muddies the waters of the clarity of the message. But I’ve gotten off topic.
Representing the Unreliable Narrator
Martin Walker, the playing character in Spec Ops: The Line, (spoiler alert) slowly loses his grip on reality as the game goes on and both he and the player witness and commit atrocious acts of violence. At the end, the game revisits some scenes of Walker’s insanity without the lens of his insanity. Though the game presented us with a third person point of view, the world is Walker’s world – his reality. We, like him, act based on the information we’re given and, in a lot of the circumstances in the third act, respond using that information. In a sense, we are a part of the unreliable narrator given that we get to make decisions within the framework given to us, the same as how unreliable narrators respond to their own frameworks. Because we can only see through Walker’s experience, we are in the same position as unreliable narrators that can only see through their experiences.
There’s a few visual clues that Walker’s experiences are not reflective of reality, through the comments of his teammates either reacting to his actions (sometimes as prompted by nothing in reality, as we find out in the end) or by the way some parts just don’t seem to mesh with reality, like the radio that Walker uses to talk to Konrad (the leader of the “Damned 33rd” squadron that Walker’s meant to recon and call for rescue) is placed right behind his head, alluding to the phrase commonly associated with auditory hallucinations or “hearing voices in the back of your head.” Additionally, the radio seems to be receiving and transmitting at the same time, typical of phones but not radios that have to stop transmitting to receive.
Your insanity is also hinted at as your teammates slowly become unhinged through the events they witness and participate in. It’s the games way of saying: no one could get out of this sane. In fact, the ending leaves you wondering how far back the madness really starts. What was real and what did we perceive as real? The first scene you play in the game is one where you’re in a helicopter and shooting other helicopters in a sandstorm in a backdrop of towering, reflective buildings. In the third act, you jump into a helicopter and begin the same sequence and Walker voices this feeling of deja vu, as the player is feeling (or at least should be) the same way.
The Truth at the End Starts with the Beginning
We vaguely learn about the truth of everything that’s happened at the end, though there is still that uneasiness of wondering what else was real. It’s an interesting take on the unreliable narrator as we play the game thinking we’re the hero: we’re here to find Konrad and any other survivors and call for an evacuation. At the end, we find out that we caused literally all of the deaths in the game. We find out we’re the villain.
We, as Walker, fight and kill enemy combatants, ones that seemingly show no signs of caring who we are. There are three major factions of people in the game’s version of Dubai. The first is the Damned 33rd that stayed behind when the US military was told to leave, volunteering to help evacuate civilians. The second is the civilians of Dubai. The last is the CIA – and civilians that are helping them – that’s there to burn down any trace of involvement in Dubai as, if found out by the international community, would link several human rights violations and possible war crimes to the United States military.
At the beginning, Walker and his two teammates, Adams and Lugo, are confronted by civilian combatants. By an act of shooting the glass above their heads and burying the majority of them in sand, you’ve broken the fragile truce between the 33rd and the civilians. As a result, you later see the 33rd gunning down civilians, making Walker and the others believe that they’re on the “wrong” side and are indiscriminately killing. This then leads you and your teammates to kill nearly the entire 33rd Battalion by the end of the game – the people you were supposed to rescue.
Still thinking that the 33rd Battalion is the bad guys, Walker sides with the CIA, not knowing their true aim to bury all evidence of what happened. One particular moment is after you deploy white phosphorus, a chemical that burns on contact that results in a painful death, in order to take out a section of the 33rd as there’s too many for you and your companions to take on alone. You speak with a dying 33rd solider that reveals they were trying to shield and protect a mass of 47 civilians, mostly women and children, from the coming battles with the CIA and the civilians the CIA roped in to help them. And now they’re all dead because of you.
As a result, we’re presented with two different forms of the unreliable narrator: working on partial information and working on misinformation. Both together provide a compellingly unreliable story, one that requires you to think about it to really understand what happened, forcing the player to further read into the game and absorb the meaning.
Video Games Deconstructed 