Of course different people can have different interpretations of the same thing, but I’d like to defend mine:

When someone says eat the rich is it that they intend to practice cannibalism or do they mean something else? Similiarly, when a video game questions the morality of its players for actions it made them do, does it intend to make the players feel bad for playing or does it have other intentions? I think they’re both ways to shock people out of their preconceptions like the rich are superior or military violence is justified.

The media we consume doesn’t have a real world impact on our actions or character.

This is just false. Media, just like real world experiences, absolutely impacts how we think. It might not have a “guy plays terrorist side in a game” -> “guy decides to be a terrorist” kind of causation, but it might have a “guy stops associating terrorists with terror and instead just the people soldiers fight” type of effect. Edit: It also can’t be denied that what we consume is based on who we are. One might not play Spec ops the line because they like making virtual people suffer, but they might play it because they like military aesthetic and want to experience being in a badass heroic situation. Or they might play it because sandstorm dubai looks cool. But either way it’s not removed from the real world.

Spec ops the line wants to make people stop associating “solider” with “hero” and instead associate it with “hero?”. What better way to do that than asking the player directly? I think putting bad npc soldiers in an ordinary video game to get the same point across would be ineffective, as it lets players disregard those soliders as pure evil. Putting the player character in that position lets them see that you don’t need to be inherently evil to do bad things, but they’re bad nonetheless.