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| Gameplay footage from Ender's Game: The Video Game |
(Warning, there will be spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line. I will try to be as vague as possible, but it is still best to play the game before reading this article.)
The Game: Released in 2012, Spec Ops: The Line is a Third Person Shooter developed by Yager Development in which you play as a soldier who is part of a three man team known as Delta Force who get embroiled in a war between the CIA, a rouge squadron of soldiers, and a bunch of brown people who are stuck in this conflict because they just so happen to live in Dubai. It starts out as a typical modern day military shooter (hey white guy, here are some brown people, shoot them in the face) that slowly peels its layers to reveal that, at it’s core, the game is a
The Song: Released in 1968, 1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) is a psychedelic rock song written by Jimi Hendrix and preformed by the Jimi Hendrix Experience about the end of the world after a long and bloody war that never ends (Vietnam) in which our main speaker attempts to escape the dying desert for the peaceful ocean. It ends with the hope that the power of music will be enough to save us.
The Song in relation to The Game: Regardless of what you chose, the game ends with the same basic plot beats: a gun is fired and a message is broadcast over the apocalyptic landscape of Dubai. The credits open and the song begins with a rattle. A death rattle of a dying land murdered by you. The guitars kick in with a somber tone. Not funeral like death would suggest, but still a sense of death is in the air.
A cymbal crashes and the lyrics begin. The first quatrain consists of “Hurray, I awake from yesterday/alive but the war is here to stay./So my love, Catherina, and me/decide to take a walk through the noise to the sea.” When contextualized by the game, the first couplet can be read as referring to both the PTSD subtext the characters experience in the game (in particular the main character who repeatedly goes through numerous dream sequences and hallucinations) and highlight the cynical nature of one of the characters (possible) final words (No matter what happens next, don’t be too hard on yourself. Even now, after all you’ve done, you can still go home. Lucky you) in that, despite no longer fighting, the war is still with the main character. The next couplet continues with “not to die, but to be reborn/away from lands so battered and torn” with an echo on the word “torn”. The second line gives the motivation for the speaker to go to the ocean: to escape the hardships of this desert war. Given that the game ends at an aquarium at the heart of the hellscape that is this game, it can be read as not being attainable. But, more interesting, is the first line. When contextualized by the game, it can be read as another metafictional allusion to the genre. In nearly every video game, you end up dying at some point. And then you come back. And those you’ve killed also die and come back. Just because you are reborn away from lands so battered and torn, that doesn’t mean you reawaken to lands that aren’t battered and torn. (Also every time you die, you receive a loading screen with text. Initially, the text is generic game info (X gun shoot best, kill wounded enemies to get extra ammo) but gradually, the text becomes more and more confrontational (my personal favorites are “Can you even remember why you came here”, “If Lugo were still alive, he would likely suffer from PTSD. So, really, he’s the lucky one”, and “To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.”))
After Hendrix wails “Forever” twice, we have our second instrumental piece, shorter than the first. Combined with the drums, the guitars have a machine like quality that evokes the marching of soldiers.
The next stanza continues with “Oh say can you see, it’s really such a mess./Every inch of earth, is a fighting nest./Giant pencil and lipstick-tube shaped things/continue to rain and cause screamin’ pain./And the artic stains, from silver blue to bloody red,/as our feet find sand/and the sea is straight ahead!” The opening line evokes the Star Spangled Banner (a twisted version of the song already used in the menu screen as preformed by Hendrix) and thus the United States of America. And, much like the game preceding it, it turns the blame of the horrifying war on said country’s (possibly well intentioned) imperialistic nature that leads to more and more death and destruction. In particular, the lines “…continue to rain and cause screamin’ pain./And the artic stains, from silver blue to bloody red,” evoke a previous sequence in the game (pictured above) where you play the typical “press x to shoot the dehumanized white blobs” mini game found in most modern FPS’s only to then have to walk through the carnage of your deployment of White Phosphorus, seeing the human cost of it all. And then the game reveals that you just murdered the civilians you were attempting to rescue which kicks off the deconstructionist bent of the game. The final line evokes the railroaded nature of the game: you have to keep going forward. You can’t call for reinforcements, question what you are doing, or surrender once you’ve realized what you have done. All you can do is obey the orders given by the game or turn the game off.
The specific lyrics of next stanza is irrelevant to the context of the game, which is bound to happen when pulling a song written 44 years prior to the release of the game. The theme of the stanza, however, is relevant to the core of the game. The theme presented by the stanza is about people questioning the possibility of there being a better world than the one that exist with the eternal war. In turn, the game before questions the validity of the genre of military shooters (or, as most of them are nowadays, spunkgarglewewe). However, I question the plausibility of this being an intentional connection between the game and the song given that, unlike the song, the game doesn’t offer an alternative to the death and the violence (and I’m positive that the opening line of the stanza (Well it’s too bad, that our friends, can’t be with us today) is not a critique on the multiplayer aspect of the game that was forced into the game and developed by a different developer entirely).
After an extended instrumental piece, the song continues with another relatively irrelevant stanza aside from the powerful line “Before our heads go under, we take our last look at the killing noise” which evokes the player bidding farewell to the game itself and returning to the real world (which is just as violent as the game world, but lacking in the player agency of wartime events given by the game).
As the song goes on and on, the instruments become more and more chaotic, with the drums beating faster and faster, the guitar riffs becoming less and less workmanlike, all of which builds to the chaotic instrumental piece lasting the majority of the song. Here, contextualized by the game, we see the song giving metaphorical representation once again to the slow, painful, and bloody demise of those you have murdered (the earlier death rattle returning and being used throughout the instrumentals (particularly in the drum bits)). From the mad Radioman (who earlier rhetorically asks the characters “What are the eight scariest words in the English language”), to the nameless soldiers you killed when going guns blazing (A: We’re Delta Force, and we’re here to save you), to the innocent lives you killed when faced with a blood mob you doomed to dehydration by destroying the water supply (DO YOU FEEL LIKE A HERO YET?).
After the instrumental climax, Hendrix returns, with an oceanic instrumental, to sing “And down and down and down and down we go./Hurry my darlin’, we mustn’t be late/for the show./Neptune champion games to an aqua world is so my dear/”right this way, smiles a mermaid,/I can hear Atlantis, full of cheer”/Atlantis full of cheer/I can hear Atlantis full of cheer!” After the credits, there is, potentially, an epilogue to the game. In this epilogue, after you descend the skyscraper you’ve been searching for throughout the game, you are confronted by a troop of US soldiers who see you armed and, once more, you are given an choice: lay down your arms or start shooting. If you choose the former, then the final stanza can be read as hope for both the main character and the player. That perhaps the main character can get the medical attention required to help him with his PTSD and we can find a genre of games that isn’t as racist, sexist, homophobic, or downright offensive as the modern day military shooters. All we have to do is create it ourselves.
Of course, there are still three other endings to consider (two of which involve killing yourself (be it by yourself or by soldier), the third being a return to the battlefield, forever fighting your endless war against yourself (at least until you die from dysentery)) and something else that’s important: the title of the song. Take away the subtitle, and you’re left with “1983…”. In video game history, 1983 is perhaps the most important year of them all. 1983 was a year in which video games went through a narrative collapse and were nearly destroyed due to the influx of licensed titles and cash grab games, which caused the console market to nearlycollapse in on itself. It was only saved by the creation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and changed the nature of video games forever. While Hendrix would most assuredly not know about this event, the people at Yager most certainly did. As such, the song, with the context of the three other endings, could be read as one final critic/warning provided by the game: if we continue on this path, if we never question what we are doing in games like these, if we let the picture of gaming be defined by those who unquestionably play these games, then we might be facing yet another collapse of the narrative subgenre.
And with that, the song closes with the flute playing bird noises. But are they doves or vultures?
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| Portrait of a a man who believed himself to be the hero but proved a villain and now hates the idle pleasure of these days. |
(This post was brought to you by The Protomen; a fantastic band who are one of the few bands that can pull of preforming Queen songs and currently writing Act 3 of an apocalyptic rock opera based on the Mega Man games. Their music can be found on iTunes, but listened for free here)
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