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For decades, video games have strived for cultural relevance. Cultural identity struggles instigated by spats with politicians or critics from other media have led to a complex among many gaming hobbyists as well as designers and developers in the gaming industry - that this medium has serious potential and deserves the same level of respect and critical scrutiny as any other. At the same time, there's a rise of game development programs and degrees at universities across the world; professorships, residencies and long-form game criticism are helping games through their adolescence and into adulthood.Killing is Harmless is perhaps one of the first attempts to boil down the essentials of a single game and provide focused long-form examination. Its subject, Spec Ops: The Line, darkly satirizes military shooters, games dominated by extreme death and destruction on positively ridiculous scales. The stakes are always tremendous and often involve terrorism nuclear warfare and old Cold War tensions trigger new variants of last century's conflicts. Spec Ops: The Line takes heavy cues from classic, secondary school literature and approaches these games with skepticism. It doesn't say anything particularly unique, but it does so in a new way and specifically targets the demographic that mindlessly consumes the latest Halo or Call of Duty.
Brendan Keogh, the book's author, is a doctoral student from Australia. Along with his other project, Press Select, he's started something that he hopes will become the new norm for game criticism. "I used to go into book stores and go to the 'Culture' section and there would be books on a single film or books on a single music album. I used to always look for books on a single game because surely that existed, right? Except it didn't. "Keogh wants to change that, move away from "objective" reviews that simply scroll through a checklist of must-haves; totally divorced from the culture that spawned them.
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