We’ve all seen the rise and rise of the war-themed shooting game. The latest peak in this trend is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3officially one of the fastest selling entertainment products of all time, raking in over $775 million dollars in 5 days. It is estimated that over 25 million people have played the previous game in the series. Enabling people to play at war is big business.

In my memory, this type of game became really popular back in 2002 with the launch of the World War 2 shooter, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.It featured stunning graphics (at the time) and an amazing sense of immersion. The historical setting made a refreshing change from the run of the mill corridor sci-fi shooters of the day. Realistic weapons and locations made the action more relevant and immediate. Large numbers of computer controlled allies and enemies made you feel like a small cog in the machine of war.

So, I played the game, I shot the Virtual Germans, I had fun, I didn’t think much more of it.

It was my wife who pointed out that real people had fought and died in the same battles I was consuming as entertainment. This got me thinking… Is it right that I re-live their war by clicking at my computer screen in the safety of my home? Should I be enjoying and participating in the digital representation of the real deaths of hundreds of people? Is this an acceptable thing to do?

Other representations of war are already commonplace – in film, television,books, poetry. And it’s not hard to see why – war and violence get the heart pumping. Creative works about war are eternally popular, from The Iliad to Black Hawk Down.
General Overflow’s own Tom Hartley admits ‘I find stories of war, violence, and heroism exciting’.

There is often a lot of criticism of war video games in the media, however the other representations of war seem to be generally acceptable to society. A common defence given of film, TV, books etc is that they can give an insight into the realities of war, that they allow us to appreciate the bravery and sacrifice of those involved, lest we forget and so on and so forth.

So why am I worried about video games? It’s just another form of media, right?

Well, yes and no. Games are participatory – the player is responsible to some extent for directing the action, for firing the virtual gun, for triggering the visuals and sound effects showing the resulting death. It is a common argument that games are somehow more exploitative and tasteless than films because the player is taking part and having “mindless fun”. It is claimed that games are simply entertainment  - that unlike books and films etc, there is no impact or purpose to them, no magically imbued greater understanding of human suffering.

But it is clear to me that the enjoyment of books, TV and films about war is not just about achieving an understanding of human tragedy and misery, not by a long shot. Much of their appeal is due to the visceral excitement of war, and a human fascination with scenes of violence, many of which are just as gratuitous as any scene from Call of Duty. So, it could be argued that “mindlessly” playing war video games is no worse than “mindlessly” watching people get blown apart in Ramboor Windtalkers.

In fact, it has occurred to me that the participatory nature of war games may even serve to deepen the player’s understanding of the soldier’s predicament at that time. The Omaha Beach (D-Day) landing scene was the big set piece of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault inspired in no small part by the equivalent scene in Spielberg’s 1998 classic Saving Private Ryan.

The Omaha Beach level begins with you trapped in a landing craft full of allied soldiers, heading to the beach. As the door of the landing craft drops down, German machine gun fire rips through the landing craft. You have a few seconds to run out and plunge into the water. The rest of the level involves scurrying between what little cover there is, often “dying” to long range machine gun fire.

If that doesn’t sound like a fun way to spend your evening, well, it wasn’t. Even in terms of pure gameplay, for most of the level there is very little shooting to do as you can’t hope to hit the Germans in their bunkers. It is just survival, running from cover to cover, learning when the enemy reload their machine guns to time your next sprint. As a player, you don’t feel powerful and important (as you do in most games), or even capable and deadly as in the previous levels. You feel vulnerable, like a scurrying rat. It’s an unfair fight. You watch dozens of other soldiers die without a chance. I found myself “dying” again and again. OK, so it’s a game, you are lucky enough to be able to reload your last saved game and carry on. Even so, I found it tiring, hard, and not enjoyable.

You might say that it doesn’t sound like a good game, and you might be right. But I stuck with that level out of a grim sense of determination. And I like to think that in some small, pathetic way, this experience gave me some glimmer of insight into how it must have been for those men. To feel vulnerable and impotent in the face of unfair, overwhelming odds. To stay the course and finish the job. Another example is in the original Call of Duty game, another WW2 setting, but this time you are a Soviet Soldier in Stalingrad, in a scene inspired by Enemy at the Gates.