I never played Spec Ops: The Line, but I did binge a few months ago on its TVtropes page, and I also read several articles and interviews about and with the developers. This is a game that took considerable inspiration from Apocalypse Now and its own predecessor, Heart of Darkness; unsurprisingly, such a pedigree resulted in a much darker and more self-aware take on the standard military shooter than is common.
What stuck with me was a comment made by one of the executives or produces from the company - one of the people whose job depends on making a popular and financially successful product - who said in an interview that the game was intentionally designed so that there would come a point where the only morally defensible option available to the player would be to turn off the game and stop playing.
I thought that a fascinating concept at the time, but having just read ALL the spoilers on TVtropes, I didn't feel the need to buy it and see for myself. But now I can attest to that phenomenon, because for the first time, I have shelved a video game because of my discomfort with what it is calling on me to do.
The game is called Remember Me, which I described on Facebook shortly after starting as what would happen "if the Deus Ex: Human Revolution team decided to make an adaptation of Neuromancer starring Fayth from Mirror's Edge." Which is a pretty exciting pedigree, I have to say. The graphics are lovely and artistically interesting (the game came out in 2013); the music and the majority of the voice acting are very strong, and the sci-fi concept - of a future where memory has been commodified and become the tool by which massive corporations keep their dystopian hold on society - is fascinating. The main character, Nilin, is an interesting and largely likeable ass-kicker, whose amnesia makes perfect sense given the story and setting and is treated reasonably by her and everyone around her. The gameplay is fun if rather simple, with urban platforming highlit by helpful yellow markers and a brawling system that rewards a modicum of thought but still mostly ends up button mashing. All in all, my experience of the first two hours of the game was solid.
But I've walked away from the game - uninstalled it and moved it to a 'will not beat' category on Steam - because I just can't bring myself to continue one of the game's core mechanics - memory remixing.
You see, Nilin is a memory hunter, the spiritual successor to Gibson's cyberspace cowboys, but more than just finding and retrieving memories, she can change them - tweaking small details in ways that cause the subjects subconscious to rewrite entire scenes. These take the form of puzzles in-game, where the player uses the (utterly maddening) controls to pick what details to change to reach the desired outcome.
Which is a fascinating idea, and a great extension of the sci-fi setting the game is working with. It's also absolutely horrifying.
(Spoilers follow, although only for the first two hours or so. Caveat emptor, etc.)
After breaking out of the Bastille in neo-Paris, Nilin is tracked and cornered by a bounty hunter. Desperate, she jacks into the other woman's Sensen (personal computer and memory terminal) and watches a scene of the bounty hunter earlier that day giving a memory transfusion to help her husband, who suffers one of the new memory-related disorders in this brave new world. After the scene ends with the apparent success of the operation, you get your objective: rewrite her memory to show her husband being killed during the operation.
What. The. FUCK.
And I did it. In her memory, I swapped the doctor's sedatives for stimulants, unplugged the husband's anesthetic supply and unfastened his restraints. Thus incited, and still in the grip of violently fragmented memories, the husband almost kills the doctor, who triggers in self-defense a failsafe that instead kills the husband (because hospitals in the future have kill-switches for their patients, bwuh?). And the poor bounty hunter witnesses all of this, and now has in her memory - in the core of the experiences that make her who she is - that her husband died screaming in front of her.
This is without a doubt the most evil thing I have ever done in a video game.
I can justify it from Nilin's perspective - the bounty hunter was about to kill her, or at least return her to the prison where she was on the verge of having her entire personality destroyed, and after the hack, blaming the supercorporation for her husband's death, she joins forces with Nilin. It's a brutal way to survive, but she didn't have a lot of time to come up with a better course of action.
But there are two problems with that. The first is that the developers intentionally chose this particular scenario. She could have stumbled across any possible number of memories to modify in ways to turn the bounty hunter to her side, but they chose this one. They decided that the way they wanted to introduce players to this mechanic is by inflicting an unspeakable trauma on this other person - who they very intentionally make sympathetic over the course of the flashback - and one that will damage her for the rest of her life. Think about it. Even once she learns that her husband is alive, assuming she can repair all the damage she does while believing the contrary, she'll still remember him dying. That could mean lifelong flashbacks, that could mean all sorts of nasty issues distinguishing memory and reality, that could mean that she'll wind up needing a memory transfusion back from him. Unless Nilin (apparently the only one able to remix memories like this) goes in and manually undoes the damage, this other woman's brainspace is likely fucked up for life.
The other problem is that in her pre-amnesia days, Nilin presumably discovered, practiced and developed this talent, and almost certainly used it outside of life-or-death situations. And when it comes down to it, there is no 'minor' alteration to someone else's memory, any more so than there is a 'minor' sexual assault. Both are irrevocable assaults on the core of the other person's identity and being. I'm deeply uncomfortable playing the sort of character who would consider it worthwhile to develop this sort of ability.
To her credit, the new, amnesiac Nilin appears aware of the gravity of the power she controls. Unfortunately, her response is, 'I must learn to master this ability,' which is a great sentiment when one learns one has a destructive and unpredictable magical power prone to misfiring, but less so here.
I actually continued playing for a while after the memory hack I described above. I had a boss fight against a bounty hunter who stars in his own reality combat show, setting up an ad-hoc holographic arena with camera drones whenever he corners a suspect (awesome idea) and stole codes that the terrorist/freedom fighter archetype uses to open a dam and flood part of the city, killing dozens (not so awesome, and fairly predictable once he told you he wanted codes to a dam). Again, Nilin seemed properly sobered by the consequences of her actions, and I can 100% get behind her desire to get back her memories and find out who this terrorist/freedom fighter archetype is and how she was connected to him.
But she'll not do it with me, because I realized that to continue on this path, with however many more memory hacks it includes, is something I'm just not willing to do.
I've played games with moral options before, such as Renegade in Mass Effect (although I can never bring myself to go all the way; Renegade Shepherd is just an asshole sometimes) and assassin quests in Elder Scrolls games. I don't think it's inherently immoral to do immoral things in a game, whether as part of the plot or due to player choice. But from Remember Me, I've learned that there are lines it's just not fun to cross. And so, with no ill will to the developers, I'm going to have to pass on the rest of this adventure. I'll probably look up a plot synopsis, since I really do like the world and scenario they set up, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.
Anything else would make me complicit in something unacceptably cruel, and even in a video game, that's not how I ever want to feel.
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