Hallucinations In The Crucible

The main character’s mental health deteriorates rapidly, experiencing hallucinations and loss of reality. In one scene, there is a consistent strobe light on as he shoots and there are also mannequins where we shot the soldiers. In another, someone surprises Walker and he jumps on him and beats him to death with his gun. Walker has a hallucination that there are burning victims running towards him when he is in the middle of a later battle, and Adams calls out to Walker to get him out of it. He also has a dream that is like the hallucinations he experiences where a victim says “There was always a choice. You just fucked it up.” and “I thought my job was to protect this city from the storm, but I was wrong. I have to protect this city from you”.

Walker wants to make sense of what he has done, but cannot reconcile his actions.
Unfortunately, war necessitates having the most effective tools available and using them to your disposal whenever possible, which results in escalation of every possible violent situation. This causes exponentially more deaths. In chapter 14, after we saw Lugo die and hear him say that he has a broken arm and is surrounded, we hallucinate him as one of the soldiers we must to kill later. Then we hear a random voice say that we are a killer. In the end, we see a younger Konrad that tries to threaten to kill us, and I shot him through the head to prevent Walker from committing suicide from his hallucination. Walker’s mindset shift can be seen in the language he uses too. Earlier in the game, he would say more neutral comments like “enemy down or neutralized”, but later he cusses more often. He also says “fucking stay down” and “I guess you should have stayed home”, which might project his feelings about the situation. Since the game begins with the explanation that citizens in the US did not do anything about the disaster in Dubai, or just wrote checks, Walker may feel like he should have been one of those people. Of course, these mental health problems cause your soldiers to trust you less, which is seen at the end when we have flashbacks of Lugo and Adams tell us to snap out of it.
Another scene that effects the group’s dynamic is when Lugo shot radio guy. He said that he “did what was necessary.” even though radio man let them have the microphone without a fight. Adams responded with, “You don’t get to make that call” which makes Lugo say “I just did”. Their little accountability, high independence, and the ambiguity of the situations and moral choices they are pressured to make further increase this tension. Completing horrible acts as a group and continuing to shoot people together, even after having key moral disagreements, nurtures a sense of twisted, unhealthy togetherness with my squad.
Konrad and the commander’s relationship is a bit interesting. The commander thought he knew Konrad because he saved him. But he had changed too much. Even if soldiers try to be good people, ultimately they have almost always “saved many lives, but [I’ve] ended even more”. War corrupts the soldiers, making them see, experience, and be involved in horrible violence and stressful situations without their needs being met and in constant pain. Konrad said that he was meant to maintain order and Captain heard him tell us to execute someone that stole water or someone that apprehended the man but killed five innocent people while doing so. This was a high pressure moral decision in the game, although it turns out that this was a hallucination. This reinforces the theme of helplessness because I am at the mercy of hallucinations and Konrad’s twisted games.
A major theme in this game is helplessness. Konrad, the major antagonist, tried to evacuate 1300 people in Dubai but they all died because of his “arrogance” in assuming it was possible. The endings lead us to a dead Konrad, making the player question all the choices he made that were exposed as mental delusions. One of the soldiers say “I know it was bad, what happened out there, but our hand was forced” and in one shootout, Adams states “Fuck, when is this gonna end?”. This represent how these soldiers feel they have no control or power over consequences of their actions, how completely exhausted they are, and why they may not honestly want control since the world is so unpredictable and confusing.
The sheer power of the sandstorm is also displayed well in this game and reflects this theme. The character has a bandanna over his mouth, the overwhelming loud sound of sand blowing, and you use your arm and hand to block the sand as you move forward for cover and power over the enemy. All the while, your men may scream that you need to find cover. Nature versus man is highly relevant, especially when resources are scarce. Even ammo becomes a problem.
There are other very realistic parts of the game, such as when an RPG goes off everything is quieter and there is a slight ringing in the background. All shots are heard in this game, as well as your soldiers responding, and soldiers crying out in pain. There are also splatters of blood that cover the top part of the screen when you get shot. The developer even exclaimed that the game was intended to be quite brutal and shift the focus from the main character. In most games, the main character controls almost everything. However, in Spec Ops the developer wanted other characters to respond to the player’s actions but in a more realistic self-centered way that leads to unpredictable outcomes that reflect real life. Bystanders play an important role in this game because they are often hurt and represent innocence. At the beginning of the game, the citizens threaten us and ask whether we are going to kill them too before shooting at us. This is an example of how the focus was shifted and how the game addressed the complex dynamic between the citizens and the soldiers.
When the game reloads after the character dies, there are messages that pop up. In the beginning of the game, there is information about guns or the game. However, at the end it has messages that make the player question their morality like this is all your fault and you’re still a good person. It also says if you were a better person you wouldn’t be here, and this represents the overall theme of helplessness and confusion about what has happened to their characters and the reasons they are choosing to fight. The craziest of all the lines in the game’s reload screen was- to kill for yourself is murder, to kill for your government is heroic, and to kill for entertainment is harmless. The sentiment of heroism accompanying murder for your government is consistent in war games, as well as killing for entertainment, since this is often the foundation of these games. One scene in chapter 14 of the loading screen is the women we saw earlier holding her child, as the screen fades in and out of white with a lullaby in the background.
No matter how hard I tried I never could escape reality.

At the end of the game, I see Konrad painting dead people with the woman holding her child at the center of it. He says 47 innocent people were killed because of his actions and that reports of his survival were “greatly exaggerated. My player has flashbacks about the worst experiences he experienced. My soldiers saw me react to outlandish hallucinations that attempted to make me be the “hero” and realign myself morally. Understanding that this game was fueled by my hallucinations was very upsetting. It made me question whether Spec Ops could be considered a game or art, since my enjoyment decreased. I came to the conclusion that it should be considered a game and art because there were high levels of creativity in the gameplay, storyline, and characters. Each development was well-thought out and the player had an integral role in the

experience.
This game was made with the intention for the player to question themselves and the military industrial complex.

Tavinor’s article argues that video games should be categorized as art. He outlines competition as one of the reasons that people to object to including games as an art form. However, competing does not take away from the aesthetic value of the game, and like Tavenor stated, if someone were to submit a poem into a contest no one would think twice about considering that art. When does competition start? If someone makes a painting with an intent to make something prettier than their brother has, would that be considered art? I think that competition is not a factor. There are marvelous aesthetics in Spec Ops that I doubt anyone can not call art if they have seen the game. Art has a long history of breaking through molds and forcing people to see concepts differently. Spec Ops broke the mold of what I assumed war video games could be and made me see the complexity of war differently. It made me asks questions I never thought to produce before, which I think is one of the most valuable aspects of art. As The New Art of Video Games states, these works engage with their audiences differently by using a narrative and letting their decisions change the outcomes. It may be a unique form of art because of its roots in technology, but that is no reason to reject it. One question did stick with me as a result of playing this game. At the end, a soldier asked how we survived

all of this, and Walker responded with “Who said I did”. This makes me ask: if you won but lost your soul, did you really win?
*works cited on next page