South

Atlantic
Review

34
Volume 80

Journal of the South Atlantic

Modern Language Association
 Editor
R. Barton Palmer

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Contents
2013 SAMLA Presidential Address
1 Cultures, Contexts, Images, and Texts: Materials for a
New Age of Meaning-Making
Kathleen Blake Yancey

2013 SAMLA Graduate Student Essay Award

13 Dehumanizing Rhetoric in Vicente Huidobro’s
“La cigüeña encadenada”
Sam Krieg

Special Issue: Adaptation Studies

Editors
R. Barton Palmer and Julie Grossman

Essays
23 Introduction: New Essays on Adaptation
R. Barton Palmer and Julie Grossman

25 John Huston and Postwar Hollywood: The Night of the

Iguana (1964) in Context
R. Barton Palmer

46 Staging Identities and Events in Here Lies Love:

Adaptation, Immersive Theater, and the Biopic
Julie Grossman

34
63 A New Model for Reading Adaptation:
The Textus, with a Brief Case Study of Adaptations
Recreating the Lives of C.S. Lewis
Sarah E. Davis

79 Unfilmable Books
Kamilla Elliott

96 Displacements and Diversions:

Oh! What a Lovely War and the
Adaptation of Trauma
Kevin M. Flanagan
Contents
118 Playing in the Corporate Toybox: The Multiple Levels of
Adaptation in Disney Infinity
James Fleury

136 The Wind Done Gone or Rewriting Gone Wrong:

Retelling Southern Social, Racial, and Gender Norms
through Parody
Emmeline Gros

161 Performing the Nation: Adaptations of Mexico and

Madre Patria in La mala educación
Elena Lahr-Vivaz

176 Adaptation is Anarchist: Understanding Narrative

through Complexity
Kristopher Mecholsky

194 Alfred in Wonderland: Hitchcock through the Looking-

Glass
Mark Osteen

215 The Worlds of Downton Abbey

Nancy M. West

234 Gaming into the Heart of Darkness: Adapting Conrad/

Coppola
Johannes Fehrle

254 The Task of the Adaptation Critic

Glenn Jellenik

Book Reviews
269 The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and
Confederate Persuasion. By Kimberley Harrison.
Reviewed by Kristie S. Fleckenstein

272 Faulkner and Film. Edited by Peter Lurie and Ann J.

Abadie.
Reviewed by Doreen Fowler
Contents
275 Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White. By
Sarah Gilbreath Ford.
Reviewed by Heather Duerre Humann

277 Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages. By

Lynn T. Ramey.
Reviewed by Tison Pugh
 Gaming into the Heart of Darkness:
Adapting Conrad/Coppola

Johannes Fehrle

R obert Stam’s intervention into novel-to-film criticism “Beyond

Fidelity” has been read primarily as targeting an evaluative as-
sessment of whether an adaptation is faithful to its (single) “original.”
Although this type of judgment often dominates public and occa-
sionally journalistic discussions of particular adaptations, as Simone
Murray points out in The Adaptation Industry, the so-called fidelity
criticism was, in fact, never a major force in academic adaptation schol-
arship (8). Beyond the invaluable use for pointing students to more
productive ways of studying adaptations than counting elisions and
changes, Stam’s contribution (here and elsewhere) can point adapta-
tion scholars to questions even more fundamental, and certainly more
productive than once again slaying the (largely imaginary) dragon of
fidelity criticism; these are questions around which adaptation studies
has always revolved, at least implicitly. These include: What exactly is
transferred from one medium to another? Is there a “core” or “spirit”
of a text that can be captured in an adaptation? To what extent is an
adaptation dependent on or independent of its medium?
While few adaptation scholars would follow Marshall McLuhan’s
famous dictum that the medium is the message, media specificity,
media potentiality, and the role of mediality have been central to adap-
tation studies since George Bluestone’s foundational 1957 monograph
Novel into Film with its contrastive media ontology. In 1980, Seymour
Chatman summed up what he regarded as the common wisdom of
narratological research of the day in his contribution to novel-to-film
studies by claiming that narrative was “a deep structure quite indepen-
dent of its medium” which needs to be actualized in each instantiation
of the telling of what sounds like an underlying non-mediated, non-
textualized ur-text preceding any particular telling (121). While the
claim of an unmediated ur-text seems debatable, raising, for instance,
the question of whether such an idea is not always already mediated
or actualized in some form—even before it is fixed textually outside
a creator’s mind—Chatman’s article nevertheless touches upon a ten-
sion between media-specificity and the extent to which narrative can
exist independently of a medium. This contention has been debated
heatedly in adaptation studies for the past decades with theorists rang-
ing from those who regard narratives as inextricably connected to the
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media in which they appear to those who—like Chatman—regard nar-
rative as medium independent and adaptation studies as one of the
loci that highlight this medium independence (cf. Elliot).
The debate has gained a new twist with the advent of new media
forms. By exposing the multiplicity of intertextual connections, e.g.,
through hyperlinks new media have intensified the ongoing challenge
against notions of a supposed fixity of texts that adaptation studies
has continually advanced. These intertexts include not only multiple
sources of a text, but also cultural contexts, media themselves as ac-
tants in accordance with Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, the
influence of a text’s creator(s) (be these intentional or subconscious,
intra- or paratextual), and readers’ responses, to name only a few (cf.
Schober). Furthermore, many new media forms offer a degree of inter-
activity and non-linear variability or (at least seemingly) distributed
agency that are at once more conspicuous and have a greater impact on
the diegetic world than those available in films, novels and other “old”
media. Since most new media foreground the malleability of reader-
text interaction by nature of their mediality, video game adaptations in
particular can work as a focal point for many of the debates currently
going on in adaptation studies. Introducing a game studies angle into
adaptation studies furthermore exposes a blind spot within adapta-
tion studies. Despite the important role that the elements traditionally
examined by narrative theory (e.g., plot development, characters, and
setting) play in making a reader/player aware of a text’s status as an
adaptation and the way in which these devices consequently shape the
reception process, adaptation scholars’ frequent focus on narrative at
the cost of mediality is not necessarily the most appropriate approach
for all media. Video games in particular add a new angle to the old
question of narrative and medium by playing narrative against formal
and rule-based ludic elements through their interactive nature. As
game studies have shown, these “rules”—a term used as a shorthand
for “rule-based formal systems . . . with variable and quantifiable out-
comes . . . [that] are assigned different values” and in which “the player
exerts effort in order to influence the outcome” because she “feels emo-
tionally attached to the outcome” (Juul 6-7)—are more fundamental
to the “gameness” of games than narrative, but they can be obscured
by a too exclusive focus on narrative transposition. As a game studies
angle shows, contrary to the suggestions that scholars such as Linda
Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn have introduced into adaptation stud-
ies, the element of interactivity does not necessarily result in “non-
linear narratives” or a greater flexibility of narrative development per
se.1 Instead, interactivity needs to be (re)conceptualized as a ludic in-
teraction that precedes the level of narrative and shapes it in any kind
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of meaningful way only in some cases but not in others. Even if it does,
however, it only shapes them within a very limited scope of pre-con-
ceived, pre-programmed and thus pre-established narrative options,
at least at this point in the evolution of AI technology and game design.
In the following, I will focus on the video game Spec Ops: The Line
(2012) alongside its two main pretexts, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of
Darkness (1899) and Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation/reinterpre-
tation Apocalypse Now (1979/2001) to highlight the role of interactivity
in what constitutes a narratively mostly linear video game. Following
the steps outlined above as a typical approach to a video game as an ad-
aptation, I will first identify some of the narrative and textual “overlaps”
of the novel, the movie, and the video game that mark the texts as part
of an adaptation “cluster,” as well as the core of the cultural transfer cen-
tral to these adaptations, in this case the setting and characters. I will
then introduce the idea of a double nature of video games (narrative
and ludic) which has been established in game studies, and demon-
strate how Spec Ops: The Line (SOTL) offsets its ludic elements which
necessitate the player’s interactive involvement with narrative elements.
These narrative elements comment on the player’s ludic actions aiming
to involve the player in the text on an ethical level and thereby evoking
an affective response that can be seen as an adaptation of those evoked
by the game’s source texts. As a final step, I will link the implications
of my theoretical and textual analysis back to adaptation scholars’ at-
tempts to come to terms with video games as a new interactive format
being used, in some cases, in a fashion that capitalizes on video games’
media-specific strengths to adapt previous texts in new ways.

From the Congo to Dubai, via Vietnam: Re-adapting

“the horror”
From its opening scene, SOTL announces its status as an adaptation
to those familiar with its pretexts. Like Coppola’s movie, which begins
with a long take showing the bombing of the Vietnamese jungle by he-
licopters, the game also starts with a helicopter scene. Before the credit
sequence and before any introduction to the storyworld (except for the
paratextual starting screen which already establishes the game’s mood
and themes; cf. Keogh 11-13) or the elements of gameplay has taken
place, the player is put on the spot, finding herself behind the Minigun
of a helicopter that is attacked by other helicopters. If the player char-
acter survives, the scene ends with another helicopter crashing into the
player character’s and a black screen announcing what is to follow as
having happened “earlier.”
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A video sequence introduces Colonel John Konrad, SOTL’s version
of Kurtz whose name is an obvious nod to the Heart of Darkness author
and thereby underscores the game’s invitation to also read it as an ad-
aptation of Conrad. The sequence combines images showing Konrad’s
movement through an opulent room and a voice-over commentary
by Captain Martin Walker, the player avatar and the game’s version of
Marlow/Willard (Martin Sheen). The newspaper clippings telling of
Konrad’s deeds and his medals shown on a wall, as well as Walker’s ad-
miration for Konrad, whom he describes as possibly “the greatest man I
ever served with,” resonate with Kurtz’s portfolio shown in the film and
Willard’s fascination and increasing identification with Kurtz as he
studies Kurtz’s dossier on the river patrol boat in Apocalypse Now. In
its own fashion, the game also adapts—via Coppola’s movie—the no-
vella’s famous frame narrative on the Nellie. According to Louis Greiff,
the effectiveness of Conrad’s frame narrative is closely tied to the novel
form, yet Coppola captures its essence by also opening his movie with
“a disembodied voice,” that of Jim Morrison singing “The End.” Indeed,
Greiff’s argument that “the beginning [of Apocalypse Now] announces
itself as the ending” (Greiff 188), can be extended significantly. Willard’s
voice, which speaks sometimes from the present and sometimes from
the future, and the imagery both muddle a clear linearity of action and
instead suggest a circularity by overlaying Sheen’s face with images
of the jungle, particularly with the stone figures from Kurtz’s palace,
which seem to haunt Willard’s thoughts although the character has not
yet seen them at this point. Furthermore, the trance-like sequence is
replicated in a similar montage sequence in the last images of the film,
now with Kurtz’s disembodied voice whispering his final “the horror.”
The opening of SOTL, while being significantly less psychedelic in
its imagery, likewise puts the player in a scene more typical of the end
of a game. The player, in fact, has to replay the helicopter scene towards
the end of the game with the player character self-referentially com-
menting that this is wrong since “we” (a “we” that indicates both the
“we” of player and character, as well as the “we” of Walker and his team)
have “been here before.” The sense of finality is strengthened when the
player character seems to die at the end of the sequence: we see Walker’s
body lying in the desert, with the “camera” slowly pulling away, plant-
ing the somewhat false hint that the character will die at the end of the
game.2 Only after this in medias res beginning are we presented with
the chronological beginning of the story when we are introduced to the
absent Colonel Konrad, via the images of Konrad in his hotel room and
Walker’s voice over. In this sequence, Walker is introduced as another
disembodied voice, commenting in a fashion reminiscent of Willard’s

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 Johannes Fehrle
dominant voice-over narration throughout Apocalypse Now and, to a
lesser degree, Marlow’s voice in Heart of Darkness.3
As we watch the opening sequence, we learn through the voice-over
narration that Captain Walker is following a distress call by Konrad,
who has been lost along with his 33rd battalion in a visually post-apoc-
alyptic Dubai destroyed by sandstorms. Like Kurtz (and later Walker),
Konrad has disobeyed his orders, refusing to leave the city, supposedly
to assist the evacuation of the city’s civilian population. The only trace
left of Konrad other than his appearance in the opening video is his
distress call informing Walker and the player that his attempted evacu-
ation ended in “complete failure.”
As the game begins, the player-controlled Walker and his team,
Sergeant Lugo and Lieutenant Adams, follow this call to its source
hoping to find Konrad or at least determine what has happened. What
begins as a recon mission soon turns into an armed conflict with gener-
ic-looking Middle Eastern “enemies,” and within the first few minutes,
the objective is redefined by Walker as a rescue mission because the
“enemy insurgents” have taken American soldiers hostage and Walker
wants to leave no man behind. Soon, however, the “enemies” the player
encounters are no longer veiled “Middle Easterners” but American sol-
diers. Walker explains this to his fellow soldiers, himself, and the player
by speculating that parts of the 33rd have “gone rogue” and are either
under the control of someone identified as “the radioman” or (after
the radioman is killed by Walker) by Konrad himself. As it becomes
increasingly dubious what has happened in Dubai and who, if anyone,
is “the good guy,” Walker and his team tumble from alliance to alliance,
killing both American soldiers and unarmed civilians and helping a
CIA operative to destroy Dubai’s water source with the effect of further
victimizing the civilian population whom Konrad wished to evacuate.
Finally, Walker also loses his team: Lugo is killed by civilians and
Adams sacrifices himself so that Walker can go on. When the player
character finally confronts Konrad in his tower, we find out that Konrad
has been dead all along, and that the voice heard over a (defective) radio
found by Walker must have in fact been Walker’s delusion. A final flash-
back sequence of key moments in the game clearly marks Walker as
an unreliable focalizer (for lack of a better term)—a suspicion that has
grown as Walker “loses it” more and more, and begins to experience re-
peated hallucinatory sequences. This sequence not only retrospectively
throws what has happened into question, but also rules out any possi-
bility of a defense of Walker’s choices that assumes that the end justifies
the means—arguably an unwritten assumption of the shooter genre.
While there are occasional explicit intertextual links, such as the
ones discussed above, these are not the major way in which SOTL
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 South Atlantic Review
adapts Conrad and Coppola. Neither is there the direct transfer of char-
acters or plot structure, which adaptation scholars often focus on in
their readings. Indeed, during its development phase, the game tran-
sitioned from an adaptation that was fairly close in its narrative setup
to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now to one that adapts the af-
fective and ethical responses that both texts call for in a contemporary
reading.4 Furthermore, the adaptation, in effect, captures—whether
inadvertently or not—the ambivalence in Heart of Darkness’s treat-
ment of imperialism, whose self-conscious narration Edward Saïd de-
scribed as “leav[ing] us with the impression that there is no way out of
the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power
of a system representing as well as speaking everything within its do-
minion” (26). By choosing twenty-first-century Dubai as its setting,
SOTL continues Coppola’s actualization of Conrad’s novella from the
late nineteenth century Congo to the Vietnam War. The game there-
by resonates with contemporary geo-politics in which Dubai holds a
special place as the part of the Middle East that seems most compre-
hensible and most accessible to Western capitalism (cf. Keogh 12). Its
tie to recent US military engagements is emphasized by a shared past
between Walker and Konrad in Kabul, a connection that is mentioned
repeatedly but never elaborated upon. The game thus ties its narrative
to the war in Afghanistan, suggesting a reading in which an imperial
“West” subjects non-Western Others to its dominating gaze and, more
importantly, attempts to subjugate it with its military and economic
power: the colonization of Africa with its Black Other in Conrad’s and
the proxy war in Vietnam with its communist Asian Other in Coppola’s
texts are updated to a time in which the US has constructed an Arabic
Other as part of its so called “War on Terror.” This transtextual connec-
tion, however, suggests that the mechanisms of these acts of violence,
epistemic as well as military and economic, are very similar.
In another form, the ambivalence identified by Saïd in Conrad’s no-
vella is also present in Apocalypse Now and other “anti-war” films that
set themselves the somewhat paradoxical agenda of creating movies
that, through ultra-violent depictions of the brutality of acts of war,
attempt to undermine these acts and highlight the despicability of
the wars they depict; a strategy whose supposedly cathartic value has
been thrown into doubt by empirical research (cf. Prince 19–25). Just
as Conrad’s text dramatizes the systemic stability of imperialism as in-
corporating all aspects of life into a totalizing discourse, a rhetorical
move reflected in the textual construction of Heart of Darkness, so too
does the video game, in its own genre- and medium-specific way, stage
the systemic logic of war and imperialism. It does so by first coding the
player’s action as seeming reactions to the game’s and the storyworld’s
239
 Johannes Fehrle
situations, then bringing them to clash with Walker’s increasingly lu-
dicrous attempts to find someone else to blame for his actions and his
stubborn, repeated insistence that he had “no choice,” a protestation
occasionally upset by Lugo’s contradiction that there always is a choice.
A cognitive dissonance effect similar to that experienced by the
character is replicated on the level of the player by confronting her
with the ethics of her actions as an actant in the storyworld and off-
setting these with clear morally evaluative statements.5 Ironically, for
the player the point is precisely that there is no choice within either
the game’s narrative or its rule system. In fact, the game becomes the
“system representing as well as speaking everything within its domin-
ion” by at once limiting the player’s options to having the character
perpetrate the atrocities it lays out before him and then blaming the
character (and implicitly the player) during the gameplay through
Lugo; later, the player receives blame more directly, during the loading
screens through another voice speaking from a higher (the game’s? the
developers’?) level of authority—this voice seems to directly address
and confront the player with questions and statements such as “Do you
feel like a hero yet?” and “If you were a better person, you wouldn’t be
here.” And, most ironically and self-referentially, the voice says, “To kill
for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for
entertainment is harmless.”6
The key to the moral dilemma the game raises is interactivity, but
it is not interactivity in the sense of the player making or even having
real narrative choices, but rather interactivity in the sense of the player
advancing the game through her actions (controlling the character in a
way that makes him kill other non-player characters in order to prog-
ress in the game). The only action the player could take to not have
the character perpetrate the atrocities depicted is to stop playing the
game; which is a much more radical choice than other games confront
their players with and one akin to the 1960s peace movement’s slogan,
“suppose they gave a war and nobody came.” If the player does continue
playing, however, her options in terms of influencing the plot develop-
ment are virtually nil, a situation which mirrors both Conrad’s and es-
pecially Coppola’s depiction of external pressures seemingly eradicating
the choices of actors in a colonial war and ending in death and madness.
There is another layer to this puzzle of limited choices, however.
As an adaptation within a certain mode, genre, and culture, the game
likewise finds itself within an intertextual web of influences that in-
clude not only the novel and its most famous film adaptation but also
the producers’ and consumers’ generic lexica of the war movie and the
shooter game, as well as the game mechanics dictated by the genre;
the Unreal engine (a software framework developed for the ego shooter
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 South Atlantic Review
Unreal and commonly used by other video game developers); and, on
the most fundamental level, the ergotic and rule-based nature of video
games.7 In its own media-specific fashion, the game attempts to answer
a challenge that Gene Moore, focusing on Kurtz’s emblematic final
words, has identified as central to all adaptations of Heart of Darkness.
According to Moore, these texts “can be understood in terms of where
‘the horror’ is located and how it is defined: whether its meaning in a
given adaptation is more specific and narrow than in Conrad’s story—
horror applied to a particular form of savagery, or to a specific ‘dark
place’—or whether man’s capacity for horror is seen in more general
terms” (207). While the word “horror” is not explicitly iterated by any of
the characters in SOTL, it can clearly be identified in the protagonist’s
descent into madness and the player’s realization through the game’s
constant reminders of her avatar’s (and through the necessary inter-
active, ludic engagement the player’s own) actions, which are despi-
cable by most ethical standards. As such, the game as a descendent of
Coppola’s movie adaptation, shares both the benefits and problems of
the film’s “militarization of Conrad’s tale,” which Moore describes as “a
brilliant stroke . . . that lays bare the aggression at the heart of colonial
exploitation,” but at the same time a choice that “invokes all the stereo-
typical expectations associated with war films” (210). The second part
of Moore’s observation seems particularly relevant for SOTL, since the
problems of a “militarization” become even more pronounced in a video
game adaptation that necessitates the direct participation of the player.
The generic lexicon of the war movie indeed shapes Coppola’s film, but
it could be argued that the shooter genre shapes SOTL to an even stron-
ger extent. After all, the player is (and in fact needs to be) informed by
the game’s interface and the range of her possible interactions, and she
needs to perform these for the game to progress.8 The most important
actions in a third-person shooter are movement and the use of various
weapons against (non-player) characters coded as enemies, a range of
actions quite obviously at odds with an anti-war agenda.
The respective attempts by films and video games to deconstruct
the voyeuristic pleasure of regarding, and in the case of the video game
“causing,” in Susan Sontag’s words, “the pain of others,” is a slippery
slope at best. Debates about both media resonate with questions of
whether there are moral and cathartic ways of depicting violence that
mark it as negative rather than arousing or dulling for a viewer or player;
an issues that has been studied and debated particularly in social sci-
ence approaches to film and video games studies for years (cf. Prince;
Berkowitz; Felson; Buckley and Anderson; Weber, Ritterfeld, and
Kostygina; Lee and Peng). Both Apocalypse Now and SOTL try to prob-
lematize the effects of violence by making its viewers/players aware of
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 Johannes Fehrle
what they stylize as the randomness and insanity involved in acts of
violence and by confronting the viewer/player with the effects of this
violence both on its victims and its perpetrators. At the same time, and
contrary to their attempts to problematize violence, both films and
games as commercial entertainment media also need to make the con-
sumptive experience appealing and pleasurable. This is particularly rel-
evant in the case of a video game adaptation, which as a result of the er-
godic nature of games requires “nontrivial effort . . . to allow the reader
to traverse the text” (Aarseth 1). The seemingly paradoxical nature of
this task of making the act of killing both enjoyable and simultaneously
coding it as troublesome only becomes truly visible when taking into
account not only the generic rules and expectations of the shooter genre
but also the double nature of most games, as narrative and ludic texts.

The Double Nature of Games and the Interplay of

Ludic and Narrative Elements
After partisan debates between self-described ludologists and narra-
tologists sometimes inspired and sometimes held back the discipline
of game studies in its early years, most critics today agree that the ma-
jority of popular video games are both rule-based or ludic and narra-
tive or representational in nature. While there can be games (almost
entirely) without narrative elements (Tetris or Chinese checkers, for
instance), there are no games without rules (cf. Juul 6; 13; and in greater
detail 55-120). This is particularly prevalent in electronic games where,
unlike in games involving no computation, these rules cannot be al-
tered on the spot—not even by those users capable of writing modifi-
cations and hacks which extend and modify the rules in a likewise pre-
determined fashion. Indeed, by engaging with a game text, the player
may engage to a greater or lesser extent with the game’s narrative but
must interact with its rules in order to play at all. For example, whereas
it is possible to play while largely ignoring the narrative arc (by killing
every opponent and jumping all the cut scenes in SOTL, for instance),9
it is impossible to play a video game while ignoring its rules, since these
define not only the objective of the game (which could theoretically be
ignored at the cost of never progressing) but, even more basically, the
possible actions of the player by, for example, limiting the character’s
movement within the game space representing the fictional world. It
is, in fact, the combination of rules and narrative that shape the “play-
er’s experience of the game” as players “use the game world to make
inferences about the [hidden] rules” (Juul 177, 176).

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This double nature of games lies at the heart of Yager Studio’s
project of adapting the moral ambiguity of the imperialist venture in
Conrad’s and Coppola’s texts. While games such as SOTL try to acti-
vate their players as what Miguel Sicart calls “ethical agents” (4), they
face the challenge of being engaged by players as both narrative- and
rule-based. In this “dilemma,” as Felix Schröter convincingly argues in
his article on the (im)possibility of incorporating moral ambivalence
into video games, strategic playing choices often outweigh moral de-
cisions built into a game’s narrative, when, for example a strategy in
which a player chooses to play a completely “good” or completely “evil”
character becomes a more effective playing strategy—one that unlocks
certain skills—than one based on individual ethically-weighed deci-
sions. The ludic strategy of the most effective playing style, i.e., the one
that unlocks the most narrative content or ludic options, thus cancels
out the moral questions built into the narrative. Since this is a general
problem of games that try to stage moral dilemmas while leaving the
player a choice of action, SOTL chooses a different route.
While, as mentioned, playing the game necessarily involves interac-
tivity (the character will not move without input from the player and
the narrative will therefore not unfold), there is no decision the player
can make that changes the larger narrative arc of events until very late
in the game, despite the fact that there are a number of points at which
the player is given the impression of having a choice. However, in con-
trast to other video games, SOTL makes only very limited attempts to
hide the fact that its narrative is largely linear and pre-determined.
Instead, it employs the narrative, characters, and loading screens to
question and ethically label the player’s actions. There are two points
in particular in which the player must make decisions clearly marked as
morally questionable. One is the choice Walker is confronted with by
the imaginary Konrad of determining which of two men to shoot, one a
water thief and the other the soldier sent to apprehend the thief, a man
who ended up killing the thief’s entire family in the process. Both men
hang from street signs unarmed and unable to defend themselves, cov-
ered by snipers who will kill Walker and his team if the player/charac-
ter does not make a decision. Konrad’s rationale is that both men have
caused innocent deaths, since they were unable to control themselves.
Nevertheless, as Keogh points out, “It’s ironic that Walker, a man caus-
ing death because he is unable to control/restrain himself has to judge
men for causing death because they could not control themselves”
(89). This irony is only heightened, of course, when we later learn that
Konrad, whose voice challenges us to make this decision, only existed
in Walker’s imagination to begin with.

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 Johannes Fehrle
The other scene is the central moment in the game. Here, the player
uses white phosphorous on his opponents. Whereas Walker sings his
old song of having no choice, Adams again emphatically objects that
there is always a choice. Hence, the game, in a fashion, dramatizes an
argument that Miguel Sicart has made about computer games as “ethi-
cal objects” that activate their players as “ethical agents” by involving
them in situations that call for an ethical decision and an action (1; 4).
The irony in SOTL is exactly that: like Walker, the player has no choice
as long as she stays within the rules of the game (in Walker’s case the
rules of war, in ours those of a shooter game). We can “choose” to allow
ourselves to be drawn into the game’s storyworld and to respond emo-
tionally to the events Walker causes/faces or to ignore them and simply
focus on the ludic goal and the mechanics of the game, or we can
choose to stop playing the game. We cannot, however, end the use of
the white phosphorous until we have destroyed all the tents that house
army units, including the one we know houses civilian refugees when
replaying this sequence, because the rules of the game do not allow us
to exit the screen in which we guide our companions’ fire until we have
destroyed each target set for us by the game. On top of this, while the
“decision” to use the white phosphorous is marked as a choice, it is in
fact impossible to beat the challenge set by the game, since opponents
re-appear if they are killed by other means, and thus to proceed if the
player tries to avoid the use of the chemical weapon.
As the game progresses, Walker’s limitations, as well his participa-
tion in the acts of violence to which he initially objects and for which he
continues to deny responsibility, are represented by the game on vari-
ous levels, serving to underline Walker’s slow descent into madness. As
Grant Howitt describes, the representation of all actions undertaken by
Captain Walker shift throughout the game from professional and even
compassionate (e.g., when Walker heals a teammate) to violent and ag-
gressive: “Things that started out as violent—for example, highlighting
a target for your squadmates to shoot - are stripped of euphemism, as
‘Take out that sniper!’ becomes ‘Kill him.’ Same act. Different words”
(cf. also Schröter and Thon 56-57). As the euphemisms of war and vio-
lence are stripped away, the violent essence of these acts becomes visi-
ble. This essence is further reinforced by the design team’s increasingly
bloody depiction of executions which highlight the victims’ pain and
the victimizer’s inhumanity rather than the heroic act of killing those
previously de-humanized by being labeled as evil and Other. As writer
and narrative designer Richard Pearsey points out, “the design sup-
ports the overall narrative approach and vice versa [since] [t]he narra-
tive and the mechanics were designed in tandem with narrative being
part of the core design team” (qtd. in Howitt).
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One particularly interesting and unusual instance of the integration
of narrative development, game design, and the ethical affect for which
the game aims can be seen in the white phosphorous scene. We enter a
different screen that depicts a laptop used to give the other members of
our team targets on which to shoot the white phosphorous. The hyper-
mediated highlighting of a laptop, a device we as players use or at least
could be using to control the character Walker, brings us closer to the
events of the storyworld by hinting at our complicity.10 It is the simu-
lation of a reflecting function of the laptop screen, however, which is
most haunting, as it occasionally makes a ghostly image of Walker’s face
appear and disappear as we maneuver across the abstracted map of the
camp laid out below (see Fig. 1). The abstraction caused by the double
(re)mediation of the map on a laptop screen used to give the commands
to destroy a camp devoid of representations of human beings in its in-

Fig. 1
Screen shot, Spec Ops: The Line. 2K Games.

game remediation stands in stark contrast to the diegetic reality of the

people dying below as a direct result of the player’s actions. That we see
a reflection of “ourselves” as Walker in the laptop screen, which haunt-
ingly overlays the abstracted map, drives home the agency behind the
act; an act with whose consequences the game will confront us in the
next sequence.
After the white phosphorus strike, Walker and his team descend
into the camp they have just bombarded. In a move decidedly atypical
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 Johannes Fehrle
of the shooter genre, but reminiscent of the game’s two major ante-
texts, Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, we are confronted with
the results of our actions. In a haunting, nightmarish scene, we walk
through a camp of dead and dying soldiers, many still burning and
begging to be released from their pain, until we arrive at a shelter for
civilians who have likewise been burned alive by our actions. The cen-
tral image dominating this scene is that of a woman clutching a small
child, a cruel parody of a tradition of Christian images depicting the
Madonna with child, and an image that will later reoccur when we en-
counter the imaginary Konrad who has painted the scene.
The trajectory of the game is clear: Walker has failed, and by exten-
sion, the player has failed, not in maneuvering the rules of the game
but in upholding the ethical code with which Walker entered the desert
of Dubai; this message is driven home by the now increasing confron-
tations through the game’s loading scenes discussed above. Brendan
Keogh reads SOTL in the context of video game history as what he calls
a “‘post-Bioshock’ game,” a game in other words that does not high-
light the player’s lack of choices resulting from the rule-based nature
of video games, as Bioshock had self-referentially done, so much as it
“reacts” to this lack and Bioshock’s reaction to it. The game “agrees with
Bioshock that the player, for as long as they choose to play the game,
doesn’t really make any choices that the game has not already made for
them. However, unlike Bioshock, it insists the player is still responsible
for these actions because of the one choice the player did make: to play
the game in the first place” (7, emphasis in original). When read within
an adaptation perspective, the game also replicates a statement implicit
in Conrad that Coppola made more explicit still. This statement is two-
fold: acts of violence are despicable and senseless, and—as long as you
stay within the rules of a system, be it the rules of war or of a formal
system like the video game—you play by that system’s rules. Your hands
are tied and there is no right decision, only survival. In effect, the only
way to stop the war is if no one attends.

Conclusion: Rethinking the Narrativity of Interactivity

of New Media
The case of SOTL confirms Siobhan O’Flynn’s claim that “adaptation
via interactive media often necessitates the identification of a core
theme or experience associated with the original that then functions as
the organizing principle for designing the adaptation as an individual
principle” (84). Whereas, as O’Flynn observes, the “spatial narratives”
of interactive media “do not necessarily incorporate a fixed chronologi-
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cal narrative” (85), they can, as SOTL demonstrates, offer their “experi-
ence” along a linear narrative without becoming less interactive or less
participatory. While it is thus true that the “audience . . . is an active
participant whose choice can affect the unfolding of the story and,
hence, the experience of the story,” the idea that “[i]nteractive adapta-
tions . . . are not fixed in one iteration of the plot and often shift control
of the narrative’s unfolding to the ‘user’” (88) is paradoxically both an
oversimplification and an “overcomplexization” of digital games. It is
certainly true that the text hands over some control over the unfold-
ing of the narrative by its ergotic nature (there is no narrative without
the interactant’s “nontrivial effort” [Aarseth 1]), but at this point in the
development of digital games, there is only a very limited number of
choices available to the player, and these are (almost) never choices
that have not been predetermined by the rules of the game, the design
of its plot, and its mechanics.11 As SOTL demonstrates, these choices
may in fact be almost non-existent in terms of changing the unfold-
ing of the narrative, and even in games that allow for more choice and
offer various paths through the game-space, these have always been
pre-determined by the game design. This does not cancel out the in-
teractive nature of the game, however. Interactivity changes the game’s
experiential nature and the affective responses a text can produce,
which, as SOTL demonstrates, can be different when one partakes in a
character’s action rather than simply watching them. Games can thus
open up new ways of ethical involvement (as Sicart shows in his mono-
graph). Whereas even in a second-person narrative the character never
really becomes “you,” in a video game—at least for the duration of the
interaction—the gap between the interactant’s and the character’s ac-
tions can temporarily be smaller since certain actions carried out by
the player determine the actions of the player character (if I press a
certain button, the character jumps) so that the character’s failure be-
comes, at least to an extent, also my failure as a player; the lessening of
the gap thus introduces what Aarseth terms “the risk of rejection” (4)
into the text.12
In this fashion, the most direct interaction with a video games is not
one with a narrative but rather with its mechanics, and thereby its rule
system. When we interact with a digital game, we interact with that
game’s rules; even when our interactions have narrative representa-
tions, they are taught to us through the narrative, and although our af-
fective response may at times be primarily to the narrative (as is the case
when we are disgusted by the ethics of Walker’s actions in SOTL), they
are never wholly and exclusively to a narrative. For instance, a player’s
anger over her character being killed is directed at a ludic feature, since
in most games her death has few or no implications for or effect on the
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narrative—one simply respawns or restarts at some point in the game—
and, vice versa, a response to the narrative may be intensified, dulled,
or completely canceled out by the pleasure of having mastered a ludic
challenge to get to a certain point in the game. This is an important
point to keep in mind when studying video game adaptations, particu-
larly since adaptation scholars by and large tend to come from disci-
plines that focus on examining narrative or representation rather than
the ludic elements that are important in video games.
What makes SOTL such a rich text for an examination by adapta-
tion scholars interested in new, interactive media is that it uses its nar-
rative features to dramatize its ludic elements in order to reinterpret
in its own way an affect also at the heart of the narratives of Heart of
Darkness and Apocalypse Now. As such, the seemingly oxymoronic at-
tempt of the game makers to create an anti-war shooter game, a game
in which killing is not fun, although the act of killing lies at the core
of the shooter genre’s goal structure—as one journalist puts it, “killing
equals winning” (Smith)—resonates strongly with Coppola’s attempt
to make an anti-war war movie whose scenes are intended to shock and
Conrad’s at least partly anti-colonial colonialist exploration, in which,
as Marlow states, “[t]he conquest of the earth, which mostly means the
taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly
flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it
too much” (10).
As I have argued, in order to grasp fully what SOTL and other games
are doing and how they are doing it, it is necessary to consider the
position of the game as a system containing both ludological and nar-
rative features, taking into account both the effect of game mechanics
and the rules (in the case of SOTL you have to kill in order to win, since
these are the rules set by the game), as well as the narrative and nar-
ratological elements. If you use the white phosphorous, as you must
in order to progress, for instance, it has certain consequences in the
storyworld: which character and player will then be confronted, both
in the diegetic world and in the loading screens via an extra-diegetic
voice that addresses the player as an ethical agent. In SOTL, this results
in an ambiguity between the moral and ethical implications of the
deeds enacted by the player character; in places, this ambiguity takes
the player’s enjoyment out of both the killing that the player character
commits (or shifts that enjoyment to a more abstract level of admiring
the artifice of the game’s narrative design) and the emotional rewards
of overcoming difficult ludic challenges, a pleasure that is at odds with
the clearly marked moral transgressions perpetrated in overcoming
these challenges. As such, SOTL translates Conrad’s/Coppola’s Heart of
Darkness, texts that are as fascinating as they are ambiguous, for a new
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century and a new medium while—from a critic’s perspective—open-
ing our eyes to the challenges of studying new media adaptations that
can take much more interesting routes than merely giving the player
some control over how a multi-directional plot may unfold.13

Notes
1. As Liv Hausken notes, “non-linearity” is an imprecise and somewhat prob-
lematic term resulting from what she calls “text blindness,” since even so called
“non-linear narratives” are always experienced sequentially and thus in a linear
fashion (401-02).
2. The helicopter scene when it reoccurs is, in fact, not the final scene of the
game. Walker survives the crash and, depending on player choice, even the end
of the game: there are four possible endings, two of which see Walker surviv-
ing—at least bodily.
3. There are, in fact, a number of such disembodied voices. While we start by
seeing Konrad and hearing Walker, the roles are soon reversed; as we follow
Walker we soon hear not only his companions, Lugo and Adams, but also a
voice identified as “the radioman,” an announcer playing 60s rock music who
seems to watch the team’s actions, calls in enemy forces, and comments on the
player’s actions. Later Konrad also enters the cacophony of voices that Walker
answers to: his enemies’, his own, Lugo’s, Adams’s, the radioman’s, Konrad’s
and, for a brief time, also that of CIA operative Riggs.
4. Cf. writer and narrative designer Richard Pearsey’s remark: “Originally,
the story was much more straightforward and called for the Delta Squad to
be sent to assassinate Konrad who had illegally led his battalion out of a war
in Iran and was looting a recently destroyed Dubai” (qtd. in Howitt); this
arrangement sounds like a geographically transposed version of Apocalypse
Now minus the river.
5. On the concept of cognitive dissonance and its use in SpecOps: The Line, cf.
Schniz.
6. Loading screens are those screens shown when the computer has to access
and transfer large amounts of data, usually to display a new level or parts of a
new level. In game studies they have been theorized as an “interruption of play
time” which “is simply a consequence of technology: the player has to pause—
for a few seconds or a few minutes—while the console loads the game’s many
levels. The inevitable wait is considered a negative player experience by some
game designers” (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca 121). As a consequence,
many game developers try to keep players engaged by, for example, giving
them tips on game play or further background information on the fictional
world. In either case, the loading screen is not part of the diegetic world per se,
and if one sees it as possessing a narrative voice that voice should be placed on
an extra-diegetic level.

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 Johannes Fehrle
SOTL begins by following the conventions of the shooter genre by providing
information on the strengths of particular weapons or by reminding the player
of her current objectives before it gradually shifts and aligns with the game’s
affective agenda by confronting the player about her actions in the game.
7. Espen Aarseth who has coined the term “ergodic literature” explains its
Greek origins, ergon and hodos as “meaning ‘work’ and ‘path’” (1). The ergodic
combines these two by having the player/user ‘work’ through a path.
8. This is not the case in a movie where progression is predetermined not just
in terms of the narrative arc (which is also the case for video games in most
genres to a greater or lesser extent), but also in terms of the exact temporal
unfolding of this narrative (which is not the case for video games). While there
are short films called cut scenes that are akin to movies in that no direct inter-
action with the game takes place and the player becomes a spectator, there are
also other passages that involve a more active engagement. Felix Schröter and
Jan-Noël Thon establish a distinction between “rule-governed simulation” in
the played sequences and “predetermined narrative representation”—e.g., in
cut-scenes, whose “complex interplay” leads to “the presentation of a video
game’s storyworld” (47-48). The result is, I would argue, for many games the
same: a fairly consistent larger story arc or a variety of possible pre-determined
story arcs along which the narrative can unfold. This point is also discussed by
Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, who point out that “video game design-
ers have generally allowed for moderate branching while implementing plot
bottlenecks, through which all players have to pass in order for the story to
advance” (205). In SOTL, an example of what Jesper Juul calls a progression
game, there are many such bottle necks and an extremely limited amount of
free movements due to the unidirectional level design. As Egenfeldt-Nielsen,
Smith, and Tosca point out, in such a game “the player is solving a story instead
of creating it” (206, italics in original).
9. As anecdotal evidence, Keogh cites a “Let’s Play” video on YouTube, in which
the player seemingly played non-narratively, or without the ethical response
the game calls for according to both Keogh’s and my own reading: “The player
that produced these videos spent much of the time trash-talking the NPCs
and reveling in the violence with hardly a moment’s reflection. As he gunned
down civilians towards the end of the game he shouted, ‘Die you faggots!’ over
his mic” (10).
10. Here and in the following sentences I draw on Bolter and Grusin’s concepts
of remediation and hypermediation.
11. This point marks an important distinction for non-computerized, non-digi-
tal games such as pen and paper role playing games, those role plays performed
by children, or even board or card games in which the rules are, at least poten-
tially, always up to a process of debate and re-negotiation by the players before
or during play.
12. The aspects of immersion and player involvement hinted at here are a large
research field in their own right; I would like to direct the interested reader to
Gordon Calleja’s In-Game for an introduction into this debate.
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13. I want to thank Philipp Fidler for renewing my interest in Spec Ops: The
Line, as well as for providing discussions about the game and articles on it in
the gaming press. I would also like to express my gratitude to Felix Schniz and
Wibke Schniedermann for reading and commenting on versions of this article
in earlier stages and to Su Montoya for proofreading the final paper. Finally I
am indebted to Felix Schniz for sharing the bibliography of his MA thesis on
metamodernism in Spec Ops: The Line.

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About the Author

Johannes Fehrle is Assistant Professor (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) for American
Studies at the English Department, Mannheim University. He is author of a forthcom-
ing monograph on revisionist Western novels in US and Canadian literature, and co-
editor of Herausforderung Biologie (with Rüdiger Heinze and Kerstin Müller), as well
as Rethinking Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence (with Werner Schäfke; forth-
coming). He has published articles on film, comics, and literature. His current project is
a monograph on adaptations in US cultural history from the American Revolution to the
twenty-first century. Email: fehrle@uni-mannheim.de.

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