War Video Games

Earlier last month, the newest iteration of the Call of Duty series came out. I personally have never had any interest in any of the Call of Duty games, or Battlefield, Halo, Gears of War, or any of the many different war video game franchises. However, I know millions of people play these games every day and I can’t go long without a clip from one of these games showing up on my youtube or tik tok feed, and I have to say personally that I don’t really understand the appeal of these games.

These games glorify the concept of war and can provide a very pro-military perspective. They can also provide non-historically accurate story lines as seen in the Call of Duty: Cold War. It also paints a weird sort of perspective that war is fun and a game. This brings in the issue that It is very difficult, if not impossible, to try and portray the horrible, violent, and distressing environment of real war and active battlefields if the player isn’t really there.

It also is disturbing how video game companies want to glamorize the feeling of being in an active warzone by having the character you play take on a heroic war. This is just unrealistic, but that’s the thing, if war games made their gameplay realistic, then nobody would want it. These games are formatted to take advantage of the player’s need to be the hero at the risk of potentially being disrespectful to those who were unfortunate enough to experience real war.