The thing is though, Spec Ops beats you over the head with "OH YOU'RE SUCH A BAD PLAYER, PLAYER! YOU MURDERED ALL THOSE PEOPLE!" and it's just so... exaggerated and melodramatic to the point where I
can't take it seriously.
It's something all games that attempt to pull punches at the heartstrings do: They wall themselves in (like Spec Op's "choice") or do so much of it (killing in shooters) to where I
can't take it seriously.
Rape is a terrible thing, like Exodus says and I can see the terrible thing in it. But in a game if it's a "means to advance the story?" I'm sorry, I can't "feel"
anything toward that.
Let me take that further: I
"kill" hundreds of people in a day virtually for spending hours online in shooters. But I can still feel disgust and nausea and other feelings at "gore"/real-war pictures. I'm able to separate the two as "just a game," and "real-life and it's a terrible thing that shouldn't happen."
It's why the whole argument of "oh you're desensitized" is a bullshit (to me) argument. It's not that I'm "desensitized" it's that I'm not seeing real gore and stuff in my shooters to where I
don't feel bad for having fun in them.
To get back to Spec Ops: Even if they allowed me to go down the rope and kill hundreds of people only to find out they were civilian resistance or something, I probably wouldn't have felt bad. In the mortars case I'm like "damn, Collateral Damage. That sucks.

" But I didn't feel "horrible" for my actions. Because 1) it's a game and 2) "storyline-wise" you didn't know they had civilians in that area to where using a horrible weapon of war was a
terrible thing but tactically a "sound" thing to do.