Every hour of every day, wars are raging all over the globe. Thousands upon thousands of soldiers are falling to the dirt, sliced down by gunfire, rent asunder by missiles or unseamed by bayonets. Their corpses disappear immediately and their souls are reborn in another body, ready and armed to fight again. And again and again. After each battle ends, another begins. The two opposing forces are magically transported to a different warzone: a fetid jungle, a snow-capped mountain range or a desert littered with rusting, marooned ships. The scoreboards are reset, the bombed-out buildings are rebuilt and the dead are reanimated. If only real warfare was like this virtual one, where everybody dies, yet nobody really dies. Welcome to the casually brutal world of war-based videogames.

“War,” intones the battle-weary voiceover for the introductory cinematic to Fallout 3 (Bethesda, Multiformat), “war never changes.” As the screen fades into snapshot after sepia snapshot of broken cities and irradiated white picket fence towns, the voice – the grizzled bass of Sons Of Anarchy actor Ron Perlman – continues: “Since the dawn of humankind, blood has been spilled in the name of everything, from God to justice to simple psychotic rage.” Lifted out of context and shorn of the unsettling imagery which accompanies it, this monologue appears overblown and pious. Yet, it is absolutely correct – in the gaming world, at least. As long as videogames have existed, so too has the ability to kill things. The central tenet of Space Invaders (Midway, 1978) was to shoot all alien gremlins that get in your way. In Missile Command (Atari, 1980) the player had to prevent planetary cities from being obliterated by nuclear bombs. While we will always have our cutesy moogles and inky, blinky ghosts, the vast majority of games are rooted in death and destruction.

In his book Trigger Happy (2000) Steven Poole describes “a new world to explore, a strange place to pit your wits against the dazzling inventions of others. The pixels dance to your tune. You’re not watching. You’re doing.” This rule most certainly applies to first-person shooters, in which the action is viewed from your character’s perspective. The gun barrel extending in front of you recoils with every shot and judders from side to side as you run. When a shell detonates nearby you see your character’s hands stretch out as you sail to the ground, the speakers ringing with tinnitus, the controller pulsing to mimic your heartbeat. First person titles such as Homefront (THQ, Multi) and Killzone 3 (Sony, PS3) present ‘no guts, no glory’ combat in such hi-def, surround sound detail. While the former captures the intensity of an arena recognisable from rolling news and the latter one from a far-flung universe, both pitch the gamer into the thick of battle and let them play an updated version of toy soldiers.

Games designer James Law argues, “The military shooter has risen in prominence to now reign supreme amongst gaming. Its popularity, oft-maligned, seems nevertheless bulletproof. The secret lies in the crossbreeding with another genre entirely: the role-playing game. All games offer the chance to fulfil a role, but the military shooter is a special brand. Here, the player gets to participate in history itself, subverting or upholding fact with equal pleasure. And the key to any role play is authenticity: environment, atmosphere, setting, context. Contemporary gaming at last offers a canvas on which battles can be waged with accurate room for strategy and realistic depictions of the devastating results.”

The all-conquering Call Of Duty franchise (Activision, Multi), which Charlie Brooker pithily called “The Citizen Kane of repeatedly shooting people in the face”, epitomises how authenticity is crucial to the impact of war-based games, and that doesn’t solely refer to the recreation of historical operations in World At War or the allusions to foreign policy in the Modern Warfare timeline. Rather, it’s the sense of breathless panic you experience when cold-cocked with all manner of military atrocities: severed limbs arcing across the screen, wounded comrades wailing like babies and burning aircraft slamming into the scenery.

A similar sonic and visual bombast is at work in the Battlefield series (EA, Multi), wherein the player is surrounded by rocket vapour trails, lens flare from rifles and, if you are unfortunate enough to be knifed by an opponent, your own blood-bubbled gurgles as your dog tags are stolen. Then there are the destructible environments, thanks to developer Dice’s powerful Frostbite 2 engine. There’s nothing quite like hearing a decimated apartment block groaning like the kraken as its floors sandwich into one another. The noise, especially when combined with choirs of alarms, barked orders and gunfire, is unbelievable.

Admittedly, not everyone is comfortable taking this tour of duty. Californian writer Jon Barr posits, “First-person shooters make me nauseous so I’ve only played one of these titles: Call of Duty 3. After basic training, I found myself thrust into the battlefields of France during World War II, shrapnel and debris raining down around me. True to form, I was soon sick to my stomach. Head spinning. Heart racing. But the first-person POV wasn’t solely responsible. I was reacting to the extreme realism of the game’s environment. It felt like I was there. And that terrified me.”

Arguably, the most notorious example of this nausea came with the release of Modern Warfare 2 two years ago. In the level entitled No Russian, you play an undercover CIA agent investigating a sleeper cell of ultranationalist terrorists who have been given a directive to attack a civilian airport and kill everyone inside. It was a sequence of astounding crassness, not only because its representation of genocide forced the viewer into an ethical corner where being affronted was the only logical response but also because it deliberately evoked the Mumbai attacks from the previous year. Players were offered the option to skip this offensive content but let’s be realistic: if a menu screen suggests that there is some really nasty stuff up for grabs, how many people will say no? The issue was made thornier by the ability to join in with the massacring. As the Russian people cowered in fear and crawled along the floor of the departure lounge you were free, should you desired, to gun them down.

If developers Infinity Ward wanted to blag some cheap publicity then they achieved their goal. MP Keith Vaz and his permanently piqued acolytes decried Modern Warfare 2 as insidious trash, but it sold over 20 million copies worldwide nonetheless. These moral dilemmas will continue to surround the war-based genre as long as it exists. Some will argue that it’s pure fiction while others will point out the similarities between videogame villains Khaled Al-Asad and Vladimir Makarov, and real world tyrants like the late Colonel Gaddafi. The parallel is confirmed by the lynching and execution of separatist leaders which pepper the Call Of Duty games.

The aforementioned Homefront, written by Hollywood stalwart John Milius, goes as far as to imagine an alternate future in which after the death of Kim Jong-Il – which must have come as quite the surprise to the still-breathing Supreme Leader – North and South Korea unite and America’s position as a superpower declines. The plotline, which somehow manages to find room for bird flu and WMDs, is gonzo stuff yet elements of this ‘speculative fiction’ echo actual international tensions, just as the portrayal of Afghanistan in Medal Of Honor (EA, Multi) is a touch too familiar for comfort. Further, the ill-fated Six Days In Fallujah (Atomic Games, Multi), another account of marines versus Iraqi insurgents, remains locked in purgatory after several publishers have refused to market it. It’s likely that it will never see the light of day given its close proximity to battles on which it is based and the ongoing suggestion that this particular war was mishandled.

There is, of course, the argument that videogames in general should not shy away from problematic subject matter, just as cinema is entitled to exploring any theme the director wishes. All art, and videogames should be classified as such, functions as a mirror for societal ills. The Silent Hill series (Konami, Muli), for example, revolves around a disquieting storyline of child abuse, occultism and infanticide. Bioshock (2K, Multi), meanwhile, is informed by Ayn Rand’s objectivist approach to human existence. The difference is that games, unlike cinema, let you control the action to a limited but still powerful extent. With a digital gun in your hand, you can pick off snipers, blow up petrol tanks and, it seems, slaughter innocent civilians. It might not seem that different from wee boys running through the woods holding sticks and making rudda-dudda-dudda noises but whether developers choose to acknowledge it or not, there is a potentially dangerous political edge largely absent from Star Fox or Sonic The Hedgehog.

Other avid gamers have expressed concern over the treatment of such sensitive material. “All of my positive video game experiences stem from a love of fantastic storytelling. There is nothing quite like playing the hero, saving a princess and vanquishing evil,” writes Seattle blogger Jessica Dobervich. “From Mario to Zelda to Chrono Trigger, the depth of narrative creates a world full of emotion, rewarding the player with the highs and lows that follow such a commitment. And all of it based on fantasy, taking the player to a place they could never take themselves. But the more recent popularity of war games worries me because it creates a bridge where I don’t believe one should exist, making videogames not only more akin to realistic worlds, but ones in which those with less benevolent motivations could use to subtly engage and manipulate the players into believing certain truths when they are nothing but crafty representations using realistic elements.” Again, the sticking point here is the realism, the emulation of blind terror real soldiers presumably experience, the act of immersing oneself in the horror of war without the post-traumatic stress.

There are, however, more grievous fears surrounding war-themed games. “Lately, I have noticed an increase in armed forces recruitment booths at video game conventions,” continues Dobervich, “offering up mediocre shooters set in a generic desert location and calling them ‘videogames’ while giving away promotional material, including t-shirts and stickers labelled US ARMY. The line between fantasy and reality used to be obvious, but the current trending war games sitting on the bestseller lists are starting to blur that line, and I worry that the underlying message being conveyed to impressionable minds night after night in Call Of Duty is not necessarily a positive or enriching one but rather a continual drive to achieve a higher kill-to-death ratio.”

The debate over the pernicious influence of too much gaming has seethed since Doom was accused of inspiring the Columbine Massacre in 1999 yet it is both intriguing and perturbing that the chalk lines between the medium and the real world are blurring. “I find their realistic depiction of combat preferable to the sterilised war propaganda that used to exist in this world,” argues Barr. “Should these games serve as an enlistment tool, at least the recruits have a better sense of what they’re getting into. Minus the ability to respawn.”

One question keeps arising: what is the appeal of titles like Brothers In Arms (Ubisoft, Multi)? Is it an act of escapism similar to the moments in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), where players become one with the gaming experience by plugging an umbilical lead into a living, breathing console? Games designer James Law contends that the draw is “online, where the player becomes part of a unit and maintains a persistent career mapped across tangible statistics and unlocked upgrades. Today’s shooter rewards time invested, turning it from wasted pastime to a genuine skill that is, again, tangibly rewarded and visibly proven. These games are now more than just shooters; they are war rooms spacious enough and brave enough to offer tactical victories, the chance for teamwork and the stage for heroism.” On Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, gamers from all corners of the world clock up hundreds of hours on rounds of rounds of multiplayer deathmatch. Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that we are living in a global village is true, but we are razing that village to the ground.

This month the videogame world will witness a war of a different kind, namely the scramble for chart supremacy, as Battlefield 3 goes boot to boot with Modern Warfare 3. Both releases have already shifted millions of copies and both have collectively accrued thousands of hours of play time. Those wishing to be heroes, and in some cases villains, will be in their element. Battles will continue to rage. Thousands more soldiers will fall.

War… war never changes.

Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 are both available now on multiple formats.

This article first appeared in AU78, November/December 2011.

Illustration by Mark Reihill