By John Constantine

The rule is that war is a given in video games. The second game ever made had the word right in its name. MIT's Model Railroad Club made Spacewar! to indulge their predilection for Sci-Fi pulp first and foremost, but that game nonetheless fired the medium's first weapons, and saw the first players trying to gun each other down in combat. Those guns have never left games, and they have arguably done more to define the art of making games than anything else. Video games have been more defined by humanity's compulsion towards armed conflict than any other cultural force. War and the instruments of war are the model for game rules and what a game program does when we interact with it. In turn, video games have, like any artistic medium, redefined the way we perceive war throughout the west.

You can understand why. The central pleasure of all gaming is manipulating a digital body, some shape outside of your own in the physical world. Making something on a screen move is the first hook in games, and changing the environment is the second. A gun, any projectile you separate from your in-game body, enhances your influence in the game world, intensifying your connection and response to it. War as game has been naturally proliferated by basic design impulses, as it was in the board games that preceded video games. By placing you in opposition to a threatening force, you are given a goal and control over the means to destroy or hamper that force guaranteeing your survival and dominance. Even beyond the nuts and bolts of play, war has provided the ideal aesthetic and emotional subject matter to engage a player. War entails dispassionate strategy but also complete emotional engagement, action as well as drama.