It is called Death From Above, and in it the player is aboard an AC-130 gunship high above a nighttime battlefield. The screen presents only the black-and-white infrared screen displaying the ghostly images of combatants below. The player's job is to shoot the enemy from on high, to watch the little silhouette images of their bodies fly apart while hearing only the whine of the plane's engines, the whir of machine guns and the exhortations of the fire commander: "We got a runner here! Nail those guys by the building! There's a guy by that car. Light 'em up!"
The most penetrating element of the mission is that it looks and sounds almost exactly like real-life videos that have been posted on YouTube of AC-130 missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. One of those videos now carries an addendum in its description: "Note: This is not Call of Duty 4!"
As Vince Zampella, Infinity Ward's chief executive, put it: "We certainly based that mission on the real-life YouTube videos people put up because the Internet is really the only place you're going to see those images. You kind of get that feeling like you're playing God, but you realize, 'Hey those are human beings down there.' For these guys a mile over the battlefield looking at a screen, it's just like you're playing a game."
Of course, it's not like that for most soldiers. Sergeant David Lee of the New York Army National Guard knows the difference. A couple of weeks ago Lee, 28, sat in uniform at a computer at the gaming parlor Neutral Ground in midtown Manhattan, playing the multiplayer version of Call of Duty 4 on the Internet. He said he had spent a year on the ground in Iraq, had lost friends in action and had returned home to Manhattan in 2005.
"It's really not like real life at all," he said of the game. "If people are getting their impressions about war from a game, it's just wrong. In real life you realize that once you squeeze that trigger, you are responsible for that bullet until it lands. Here you're just clicking a mouse and running around like Rambo."
But Lee added that in the real war zone, war games provided an invaluable outlet.
"That said, sometimes it feels really good to just be able to click the mouse or hit the buttons as a way to relieve stress and not worry about the consequences," he said. "They would sell Xboxes at the PX in Iraq, and we would play Halo 2 or whatever just as a way to escape the horrible reality of being in war. Sometimes we would ignore the simple things like going to sleep, and being able to just get into a game was a great release."-NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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