Killing Is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line

Killing Is Harmless is a close critical reading of Spec Ops: The Line, the 2012 military shooter that asks its players to reckon with the violence they commit. Brendan Keogh looks at how the game builds its story around killing, and at the ways it draws attention to the player's own choices and complicity. Rather than treating the game only as entertainment, the book examines it as serious work about war, morality and the act of pulling the trigger. The analysis is aimed at readers who play games and at those who study them, and it considers what the game asks of its players and how it asks it.