10 Most Harrowing Decisions We Made To Progress In Video Games

2. Using The Napalm - Spec Ops: The Line

Another subtle progression the shooter genre made was through this relatively unknown title, rather than the overblown, "Hey mam, look at me kicking things!" attention-seeking of Call of Duty's No Russian level. Spec Ops told the gradual degradation of one Captain Walker as he is exposed to a war-torn Dubai-gone-mad under the regime of a former Lieutenant John Konrad. The Line walks a fine one, having on one side the always-present voice of contention, yelling that 'just another Gears-style shooter' is not in a suitable place to make enough waves. Yet on the other was the inspirational Apocalypse Now, the novel Heart of Darkness, and Paul Haggis' fantastic The Valley of Elah, all artistic works that explore the psychological effects of increased exposure to desensitisation and warfare on the human mind. Spec Ops succeeded immeasurably at making the player have medium-specific revelations, re-appropriating a scene inspired by Call of Duty's AC-130 gunship levels i.e. staring at a group of blips through a heat-vision scope, and pulling the trigger. The twist in this case though, was that after resorting to using napalm to vanquish a large number of soldiers up ahead by your own trigger-happy 'enjoyment' of those mechanics, you finished the sequence by targeting the largest group of icons all clustered together, and wiped them out. This was only to find out upon removal of the scope that it was a huddled-up group of hostages, one woman still clutching her child as she was immolated by your actions. It's incredibly heavy stuff, so much so that the creator of the game Walt Williams talked about how the alternative no gamers partook in, was to put the controller down and refuse to carry on playing. Which is such a powerful/potentially stupid thing for a creator to say, that you can draw your own conclusions.