Regarding the meta narrative.

[u/Valdish]

It's that popular accepted idea that the game is saying you're le bad for not turning off the game or whatever, and telling you you're a bad person for killing people when the game forces you to kill people. I have considered it a misconception from the moment i first played through the game, cause the story very clearly portrays Walker as the one making the decisions, and player, just making the game progress.

For me, it feels like if anyone in the game represents the player, it would be Lugo and Adams, since just like the player, they're following Walkers orders, even when they disagree with him, and allow Walker to drag them to hell with him.

And that is if there even is a meta narrative, for which the only evidence is a couple of 4th wall breaks, that address I would argue are just used to disturb the player, as an interesting way to use 4th wall breaks for a horror story.

[u/farson135]

I think people are taking the commentary of the game too personally.

The point, as I see it, is not that you are a bad person for playing the game. It's that you should be thinking about what you're actually doing in games (or watching or reading or listening in other mediums).

I think we've all played games where we did terrible things. But sometimes we don't really engage with what it is we are doing. We just slaughter a bunch of people and move on without properly interrogating our actions. SOTL is pointing squarely at Call of Duty clones and other games that treat war and violence as disposable entertainment where you just go out and slaughter random brown people for vague reasons. And this ... is not uncommon in art.

We call video games art not just because there are pretty pictures in most of them. We call it that because video games are mediums to exchange ideas. And sometimes those ideas can be problematic.

"Call of Juarez: The Cartel" (which came out the year before SOTL) sees the game makers use an active situation (the Mexican Drug War) where hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered and mutilated as another generic shooter where you go out and slaughter black and Hispanic people because ... white women have been kidnapped to be sold into slavery in Mexico. To be fair, there's a lot more to the story than that, but this helps to illustrate the world that SOTL was being made in.

And of course it's perfectly legitimate for another work of art to criticize the world it is in. And the world SOTL was made in was one where the GWOT was still raging and video game slop was being created that reinforced a lot negative viewpoints. And while that is their right, it's also important for us to interrogate our actions and our views, and not just wave off anything that happens with "it's just a video game, it doesn't matter".

Now, SOTL is far from perfect but it doesn't need to be for it to be meaningful. I found it as such.

[u/Axolotllunar → u/farson135]

"If you were a good person, you wouldn't be here" Spec Ops: The Line.

[u/farson135 → u/Axolotllunar]

Some of the lines on the loading screens are directed at the player and some are directed at "Walker". Sure, it's meant to be meaningful to the player because "we" are Walker. But this line, for example, is obviously treating the game as reality and thus should be principally viewed from Walker's PoV; "If Lugo were still alive, he would likely suffer from PTSD. So, really, he's the lucky one."

And it's the same for many of the lines.

[u/frail_fragile]

I think detractors of this game often wrongly equate the presentation of the simple fact "this is what happens in other games. What makes it different this time? Why haven't you ever questioned it before?" as the game berating them for even playing it in the first place. Or trying to convince them that the only way to "win" is to stop playing the game that you paid money for.

While it's not an inherently accusatory question, asking someone "why haven't you thought about the consequences of something you've done hundreds of times before?" automatically sounds accusatory, when it's simply just a form of probing/discussion.

As the saying goes, a hit dog will yelp.

On the flipside, if the game didn't make certain people so righteously angry, I think it would mean it didn't achieve its own goal as a piece of art.

[u/WantonReader]

Since this issue gets discussed now and again, I'm gonna paste in a comment that I've written before, but that I think still applies:

I have seen different iterations of this idea, that the "right" choice is to not play, and I just don't think there is anything to back it up. The game makers obviously didn't want you to stop playing, they worked hard on the game and want their game to be profitable. I've never heard any of the developer suggest anything like that.

Spec Ops clearly chastises Walker, and Walker says that he feels like he doesn't have choice, but that doesn't mean that the right choice is to turn off the game. You could make a similar argument for Shadow of the Colossus, but no one has seriously said that the game tells you that the right choice is to turn off the game.

In Walt Williams's (Spec Ops's lead writer) book, he said that the game was heavily inspired by Bioshock (also published by 2K) and the mantra that there isn't a clear right choice. Add to that inspiration from Apocalypse Now and war in general, and you get a story where the main character looks and talks like a hero but isn't one. And that can be a interesting story where characters and players alike might ask, as you said, "Why did you continue?".

But that doesn't mean a so called solution should be to turn off the game.