Are military video games effective propaganda?

The new of Call of Duty game is out, and critics are asking if the mind-numbingly popular shooting game serves as pro-war propaganda. As Richard Wordsworth from the Edge notes:

“It’s this unwavering and deluded portrayal of America as the underdog, the undeserving victim of unprovoked aggression, that makes these stories so uncomfortable…the goal of these games isn’t peace — it’s the restoration of the status quo, with America’s military dominance reasserted and its enemies utterly vanquished. That’s a disturbing message to propagate — the digital equivalent of the World War propaganda posters of caricatured, malevolent foreigners that can only be stopped by other caricatures of our brave, devoted men and women in uniform.”

The idea of games as brainwashing tools has come up before. Kuma Games, which has numerous historical war games, in 2012 has been accused of being a CIA front company. The Iranian and Palestinian governments have been making anti-Western video games for years. In fact, part of the Snowden leaks was been a 66-page report on the use of video games as propaganda.

The report concluded what I have suspected: It is really, really, really hard to overtly brainwash someone. As Liel Leibovitz notes,

Video games make for excellent educational tools when it comes to some skills—tackling math, say, or learning how to play the piano—but as a conduit for ideology, they are problematic. Belief, like every other product of the human heart, is riddled with ambiguity and nuance. Games, even the best ones, have no room for such uncertainties. They depend on a rigid and algorithmic progression. Couple that with an overt attempt at indoctrination, and you get the crudest sort of propaganda, the kind that appeals to none but the already convinced.

The report decides that the games serve most to “reinforce prejudices and cultural stereotypes” that already exist. In many ways, these games are propaganda in the same way a John Wayne war movie is propaganda: an appeal and reaffirmation to those already in the fold.

While it is true that 28% of those of play America’s Army, the military’s video game, enlistment, as this Guardian article notes, is overwhelmingly tied to history of military service in the family, socio-economic status and the current state of the economy.

The true propaganda occurs at the societal level, and it seems to me that that the popularity of military video games comes as a result of national acceptance of warfare, and not the other way around.