During the Vietnam War major television networks regularly broadcast real-life images of fighting in jungles, cities and swamps. Just as television was becoming this country's dominant mass medium, Americans came to perceive through their screens at least a bit of the confusion and pain of the battlefield.
That's over now. By the Gulf War, television had mostly been reduced to retransmitting officially sanctioned images of precision munition strikes. These days, it is almost impossible to find scenes of actual ground combat on television.
Traditional fictionalized entertainment has hardly filled the gap, which may owe less to Hollywood's depictions of modern war than to the reluctance of modern viewers to see them. After all, television and film audiences continue to flock to re-creations of World War II while reflections of today's wars have fared poorly. (See Redacted and Over There on FX.)
So it may be simultaneously illuminating and terrifying to realize that an entire post-draft generation of young men has had its perception of war shaped in some measure by video games. Games are perhaps the final mass-entertainment medium that regularly includes portrayals of modern war; gamers may be the last audience ready to consume them.
The military figured this out a long time ago. Since 2002 the Army has developed and distributed a game called America's Army that is explicitly meant as a recruiting tool and which now has more than 8 million registered players. Three years ago I joined members of that game's development team on simulated winter maneuvers at Camp Guernsey, Wyoming.
Now comes Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the hit combat game developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision. Since its introduction in November for PCs, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, the game has sold more than 8 million copies. It won the Game of the Year prize at the annual Interactive Achievement Awards in Las Vegas last month.
In the game, Infinity Ward spins a sufficiently plausible tale about rebels taking over a traditionally secular Middle Eastern country that is near the Persian Gulf, but never named. The radicals find common cause with ultranationalist Russians, and together the two groups end up threatening the US with nuclear holocaust. Players take on the role of American and British soldiers who must, essentially, save the world.
The single-player version of the game is relatively short; I played through the PC version (on an excellent machine from Nvidia) in one nine-hour sitting. And while the sun-bleached Middle Eastern bazaars and misty wooden hillsides seem realistic enough, it is clear they are meant as part of an entertainment experience, not a documentary. If you are shot a few times, take cover for 15 seconds and you're back in the fray. Be killed by a grenade, and you just reappear at the last checkpoint. As gorgeously rendered as the game is, through all the running, jumping and crawling it seems clear that this is not in any meaningful sense an approximation of real war.
But there is one mission in the game that deserves to be in the pantheon of wartime storytelling, a level that chillingly, almost horrifically, reflects how modern technology has allowed both soldiers and civilians to detach from the reality of taking another human life. It is at once the most realistic scene and the mission that feels most like a video game, but only because for some modern soldiers, war really has come to resemble a video game.
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