https://kotaku.com/spec-ops-writer-on-violent-games-were-better-than-th-460992384
Over the course of the talk, which Williams gave yesterday afternoon as a part of the GDC "Narrative Summit," his primary focus was the idea that any game is defined by action, and so the actions you undertake in the game will define the game's meaning. As an example, he said, if you're playing a platformer, the game will be defined by jumping. When you're playing a shooter like Spec Ops, the game will be defined by the act of killing a person with a gun. "When you're using an action as a tool, it's easy to disassociate from what that action is," Williams said. "When you play a shooter, that action is killing a person. When you sit down to play a shooter, you're essentially signing up to kill hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of the game."
Walker, the protagonist of Spec Ops, can't be all that righteous, Williams said, because he's got to kill enough people to fill many hours of gameplay. (Williams did jokingly point out that Nazis appear the only kinds of people who were excepted from this in video games. "Nazis are basically human demons," he said. Heh.) It's easy at the beginning of a game to have the killing make sense, but as the game goes forward, it becomes weirder and weirder that he's killing so many people. However, Williams pointed out, it's very easy to turn this weakness to a strength, at least for the story.
Key to that, Williams said, is having the characters themselves rationalize their actions, even the most extreme ones. They don't have to be successful at it, but they should at least try to explain themselves to themselves. In other words, the soldiers in Spec Ops should be killing people because they're soldiers, but as the game got more intense, they began to feel compelled to rationalize to themselves and one another why they were on such a violent, ultimately destructive quest.
