Press F: Video Games and the Military

By Liam Salcuni,

Published June 11, 2026 at 11:00 AM PDT

A screenshot from a first-person shooter video game. — A player explores a non-combat area in *S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat*, with their equipped weapon visible in the bottom right of the first-person perspective.

Chat, are we cooked? Not quite, but today’s episode explores the action packed history of video games, specifically military-themed video games. We’ll chart the history of early war games, from the classic boardgame Kriegspiel, used in Prussian military officers training, to major blockbuster video games like Battlefield I.

Military themed war games brings up an important question: If we spend our free time immersed in online war games, does that shape our perceptions of or responses to news of international conflict? Do war games diminish the degree to which we’re able to approach war as trauma? Or are we overthinking here and it really is “just a game”? We’ll discuss on this episode of SNAFUBAR

Today's episode is hosted by Liam Salcuni, lecturer with the History Department at Cal Poly Humboldt, and our writer/researcher Roman Sotomayor, an alum of Cal Poly Humboldt who has worked on different research projects and on engaging with the local veterans community here in Humboldt County.

SNAFUBAR is regularly hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sara Hart⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, who Chair of the Applied Humanities Department at Cal Poly Humboldt, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jeff Crane ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠who is an Environmental Historian and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.Research and writing for the show is done by Liam Salcuni and Roman Sotomayor (who also hosted today's episode)

SNAFUBAR is produced by Abigail Smithson and brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.

Works Cited:

>> Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): You are about to embark upon the great crusade.

>>JFK (Archival Audio): The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.

>> Douglas MacArthur (Archival Audio): Only the dead have seen the end of war.

>> Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): We will accept nothing less than full victory. [ Music ]

>> Sarah Hart: You're listening to SNAFUBAR at Cal Poly Humboldt.

>> Liam Salcuni: Hello and welcome to SNAFUBAR. My name is Liam Salcuni, and I'm a writer researcher here for the podcast and a lecturer in the history department at Cal Poly Humboldt. And I'm joined today by my co-researcher, Roman.

>> Roman Sotomayor: That's right. I'm Roman Sotomayor, the other writer researcher for SNAFUBAR. I'm the proud great grandson of a World War II veteran and a Cal Poly Humboldt Humanities alum. And I'm coming to you from Geneva, Switzerland, where I'm now completing a master's program.

>> Liam Salcuni: Awesome. We're glad to be here on the show. And as you might have guessed already, our usual hosts are out today. So we're moving up to the front lines here to tackle a topic that interests us both, video games.

>> Roman Sotomayor: I feel decently qualified for this episode.

>> Liam Salcuni: Likewise, Roman, I too feel, you know, pretty decently qualified. And again, it's an honor to have you here on the show. In this particular episode, it's going to be part of yet another recurring theme that we're calling Home Fronts, where we tackle the way US military engagement hits us at home and meshes into civilian life. We explore this in our other episode on military lingo, which if you haven't heard that already, take a listen. It's a great episode.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, and we're probably better suited for this one than lingo, since Sarah and Jeff don't really know anything about video games, I don't think. Sara might know a lot about Minecraft because of her son.

>> Liam Salcuni: Oh, right, her kids play Minecraft, that's a good one.

>> Roman Sotomayor: That's about it.

>> Liam Salcuni: Right. And it's worth saying, I think Roman and I, you know, we really grew up during the golden age of video games. New systems were constantly coming out, whether it's the Nintendo 64, the Sega Genesis, Xbox, PlayStation. These were always something new and extraordinary developing. It was always something new to play, a new console to try. So war games, they're everywhere. We're going to discuss the emergence of war-based games, their popularity, and answer a few questions related to them. Those questions are, do these games make people more likely to enlist in the military? Does the military have any involvement in funding and/or creating these games? And finally, we'll reflect on the relevance of this topic as it relates to snafus by discussing how much they actually mirror real military service. How accurate or really inaccurate are these types of war games?

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yes, and today's episode is called Press F, which I wonder if we're going to regret one day, Liam, but I don't know. We'll see. And that's a reference to a scene in Call of Duty Advanced Warfare where you're prompted at a military funeral in the game to Press F to pay respects. It's a scene that was roundly mocked and later began an internet meme frequently used by gamers in chat.

>> Liam Salcuni: Pressing F, yeah. A little bit of that cheap grace that Andrew Bacevich talks about. F's in the chat for today's episode. Strap on your VR headsets and let's get to it. For starters, the classification of game genres is incredibly varied and quickly becomes convoluted. We consulted with other gaming nerds in our research, and it really is all over the place. We'll spare you all that. And for this episode, we'll stick mainly to real-time strategy and first-person shooter games or FPS games, RTS and FPS games.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, you can combine these with other games in the genre, like role-playing games, also known as RPG, and massive multiplayer online or MMO. So you could have, brace for it, a FPS MMO RPG game or a RTS MMO game and so on and so on. So stick with us everyone, Abigail, don't black out. So today, indeed, a mix of RTS and FPS games, primarily looking at games that are explicitly war themed.

>> Liam Salcuni: ROFL, ROFL to all those acronyms. Sorry, not sorry, Abigail. So where we'll start, folks, is with a short timeline of war-based games to show you the different ways those games hit our tabletops and our lives. And that timeline starts before any game consoles were around with tabletop games or board games, as most people know them. Got to love board games. We got to go way back before virtual reality to what? Just reality, I guess. There's no virtual reality, so we're just in reality with tabletop games. Strategic tabletop games have existed since early civilizations, Senate, for example, was a game from ancient Egypt, you know, dating to around 3100 BCE, simulating one's journey in the afterlife. Sounds interesting. However, we are focusing on games that were specifically designed for strategy in warfare, the earliest being an 1824 game called Kriegsspiel, or in the English translation, War Game. This game allows players to visualize troop movements on accurate topographical maps. It was revolutionary because unlike other previous games, it incorporated elements that let players suffer partial losses and continue fighting multiple rounds of engagement. There is also an impartial observer, who's sort of like a referee, who watches both players' moves, eventually declaring a strategic victor.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Sounds like a winner. Can we buy that on eBay today?

>> Liam Salcuni: Well, yes, actually, I think there are versions of Kriegsspiel or War Game still around. But this particular version of Kriegsspiel wasn't really available to consumer markets. The Prussian army adopted a version of this game and used it to train their officers. The Prussian army was no joke, a well-trained and organized fighting force feared for its maneuverability and adaptability on the battlefield. Kriegsspiel inspired Charles Roberts to create Tactics in 1954. This is where war gaming hit the commercial sphere.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And for war games, I suppose the rest, as they say, is history.

>> Liam Salcuni: The rest is history. There it is, literally. Now you could finally buy a game in a box with its own pieces, its own set, and play at home. The rules for Tactics would form the standard model for other tabletop war games, such as rotating turns between players. Roberts' success would lead him to start a company that would come to be called Avalon Hill. Avalon Hill would publish many other games such as Blitzkrieg in games based on real battles like one titled Midway.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And today games similar to these are common. Less accurate, slightly less complicated than Kriegsspiel models, for sure. But Risk follows a similar pattern, and Risk would come to inspire another famous game in 1981 called Axis & Allies. As the name suggests, Axis and Allies is themed after World War II.

>> Liam Salcuni: Everything ties back to World War II, I'm telling you.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Right. And in Axis & Allies, you and other players choose from an Axis or Allied country and battle for control over a spring 1942 map of Earth. My dad loves Axis & Allies, and I grew up surrounded by a lot of these games. That's tabletop war games in a nutshell, a very small nutshell. But what about computer games?

>> Liam Salcuni: Ah, I'm glad you asked. In 1952, British professor of computer science A.S. Douglas created the first graphical computer game that came to be known as OXO using an electronic delay storage automatic calculator, otherwise known as EDSAC or an EDSAC computer. Another acronym, sorry, Abigail. This game was a digital tic-tac-toe, OXO, one of the great, you know, titans of the gaming world. Tic-tac-toe, you got to love it. Douglas programmed OXO with the intelligence to attempt to outsmart the player, which made it a landmark in gaming. These days, games still use this type of intelligence to play against gamers and players. Think Dark Souls for all my fellow nerds out there stuck on a Dark Souls boss that learns your moves. This is the genesis of that. In 1958, William Higinbotham would adjust a Donner Model 30, originally designed to simulate missile trajectories, to simulate a tennis match in a game he called Tennis for Two. Higinbotham, a physicist by training, served at the head of the electronics division for the Manhattan Project between 1943 and 1945. In 1947, he joined the newly formed Brookhaven National Laboratory, a national laboratory for the study of nuclear sciences and related subfields.

>> Roman Sotomayor: So Tennis for Two is sort of like Pong, right? I mean, we haven't really started on war based video games yet. But it is pretty neat that this game came from a machine meant for military use and missile trajectories. I mean, that's pretty awesome.

>> Liam Salcuni: Tennis for Two, right. It's pretty awesome, surprising, also a little bit terrifying, but a really good point there too. And really, this interplay between the military and technology continue to influence one another in this sort of feedback loop. And this is where we're getting closer to war games and video games in this military aspect. Today, the military is using Xbox and PlayStation consoles for simulation purposes and Xbox style controllers for controlling real missiles. There's a real efficiency element to this. Service members may already be familiar with these controls due to gaming in their personal time, making using these new military design controllers come more naturally to them. The estimates I read put the total gaming population around 3.3 billion, or nearly two out of every five people. The world likes video games, and a lot of people play them.

>> Roman Sotomayor: That's a feedback loop. I mean, from using tabletop games to training military officers to using Xbox-style controllers for operations. I imagine VR technology now is also getting to a point where it's becoming incredibly useful, cheaper, and more practical for training troops too. Just like flight simulators, you no longer need giant machines where you can simply put on a headset instead from your, you know, living room or wherever.

>> Liam Salcuni: Wherever, you're absolutely right. And to your point, the Army and Navy use virtual reality simulators specifically for training purposes. In the Army, virtual reality goggles create synthetic environments and battlefield scenarios. The goggles are connected to a model 50 caliber machine gun or steering wheel, immersing the student in a simulation. The 50 cal is particularly interesting. It's nearly identical to the standard 50 cal, except it's kind of like one big controller, like one you'd see at a bowling alley arcade, you know, from one of those like hunting games.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Oh, I know it well. How many days spent at Mountain Mike's trying to get dad to give us money to play the hunting game.

>> Liam Salcuni: I know this well too. I know it all too well. I went on a high score run at the local bowling alley in my hometown on Big Game Hunter.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, right.

>> Liam Salcuni: Those were simpler times. Simpler times. The Navy's virtual reality simulation training program, code name Project Avenger, similarly offers students a virtual training environment for piloting a variety of aircraft. Not only does this offer a more hands-on training experience using data analytics, virtual reality simulators capture every bit of the student's progress, their areas of strength and areas of improvement. In this way, the training process can be tailored to each individual student in a flight simulator. So we discussed the emergence of digital games as primarily coming from computers used for military and scientific purposes. Now let's talk about video games that are based on war. We now turn to exploring the particular genre of war-themed video games. We're going to do a brief rundown of some common games. You may be familiar with many of these titles. We just want to give them a shout out. Then we'll spend a bit of time on Battlefield introducing the potential meanings of war-themed games. The first video game that made it onto multiple different computers, the PDP-1 computer specifically, was called Space War. So it fits our theme nicely. Space War hit the scene in April 1962 at MIT. In Space War, you and another player control a ship and engage in a battle around a star. The ships have limited fuel and weaponry, and their movements can be affected by the gravity of the star.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And you can look up Space War and see videos of it being played. It's pretty spectacular. I mean, think similar to the arcade game Asteroids, remember 1962. That's right during the Cold War space race. In the previous year, Alan Shepard had become the first American to travel into space. It's not irrelevant to our discussion here. It's just kind of fun too. But when I think of war games, titles like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor and Army of Two come to mind. And of course, we cannot forget to shout out the Wolfenstein franchise, which is a World War II alternate history game.

>> Liam Salcuni: Absolutely. Wolfenstein is a classic. Those games revolutionized FPS or first person shooters, and Wolfenstein specifically changed the game for the stealth genre. I have an interest in reading about warfare-related history, be it the Middle Ages or more contemporary stuff. Sorry, I'm going to have to, all right. Oh, okay, ready? Oh, absolutely. Wolfenstein is a classic. Those games revolutionized first-person shooters, and Wolfenstein changed the game, specifically for the stealth genre. I have an interest in reading about warfare-related history, be it from the Middle Ages or more contemporary stuff, but these games gave you something entirely different. For example, in Call of Duty 2 – this is the objective. Storm the beaches of Normandy as a US infantryman and secure a position for the allies. I mean like, what? For a history lover, this was insane. It puts you there and gives you an experience I think only virtual reality can top. It was just incredible.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, totally. And it's something that's not exclusive to first-person shooter games. I mean, the quality of a video game depends on narrative building and character development, but also on realism and graphics. This was for millions of teenagers across the country and, you know, for adults too. Their first immersive experience in a World War II video game. And maybe, but hopefully not, first time learning about World War II in more depth.

>> Liam Salcuni: For sure. These games provided more of an up-close and personal perspective to the historical battles of World War II, even if in truth it is quite limited and not always based in reality.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Right, though some big game narratives in Call of Duty or Battlefield take care to incorporate historical narratives throughout the game.

>> Liam Salcuni: For example, before each mission in Call of Duty 2, narrated video footage from World War II gave players a synopsis before each mission, detailing the belligerents and where the battles were taking place. It was like this contemporary historical snapshot that they inserted into each mission. The video footage came from the military channel, who entered into a partnership with Call of Duty developer Activision way back in 2005. The purpose of this partnership was multifaceted, but at its core, the aim was to provide some degree of reality and in turn humanization to the events depicted during World War II. I can imagine for audiences not as well versed in World War II history, you know, it's easy to pick up and play these games without much acknowledgement to the fact that these were real human beings who fought against one another during these intense conflicts. Also, how many of these players were teenagers huddled around their parents' living room, virtually jumping out of Higgins boats at Pointe du Hoc?

>> Roman Sotomayor: It's a great point. You know, the merger between entertainment and reality, it's really important, especially when we consider that these games use history as a means to immerse players into the experience. And for me, I learned about the Chernobyl disaster from another video game, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, where one of the missions and game maps takes place in Pripyat after it becomes part of the exclusion zone. Teenage me after this became obsessed with learning about nuclear disasters. I never thought of a ghost town from a nuclear event before, you know, so it's yeah, you know.

>> Liam Salcuni: And I remember that mission too. And what is also pretty striking is how realistic the recreated video game map is. I mean, the very eerie scene of the deserted city. There's also like the Ferris wheel.

>> Roman Sotomayor: The Ferris wheel, yeah.

>> Liam Salcuni: That is based on, like that is actually there at the Pripyat site. Like it's remarkable how accurate some of these maps are. It really brings you there. And we see more of this history meeting gaming connection through another major war game praised for its realistic play style. And this, listeners, is the Battlefield franchise. Battlefield 1, in particular, is a spectacular game. It has a Metacritic score of 88 for PC, 89 for PlayStation 4, and 87 for Xbox One. All of the big gaming reviewers rate it an eight or higher on a scale out of 10. It won the 2016 Game Critic Awards for Best Action Game and was the top selling game in the United States during the month its release.

>> Roman Sotomayor: A very popular game, and those scores are quite good for a game. I mean, gamers aren't the most generous raters of things. But for those unfamiliar with it, Battlefield 1 is set during World War I. It was the first major FPS’s that introduced larger audiences to the battles of this war. A newer game today in the franchise actually has dogfighting or warplane combat, which when that was announced, I think my dad and I just absolutely lost it. We were so excited.

>> Liam Salcuni: I can agree. And I remember before it was released, the anticipation.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah.

>> Liam Salcuni: And you're absolutely right. Battlefield 1 was really the first commercially successful World War I video game. The graphics and storytelling are incredible, especially in the opening mission of the game. The game starts with you as a soldier somewhere on the Western Front in 1918. You're dropped into the middle of the Western Front in the dark and dreary landscape. The mission objective appears. You're tasked with simply surviving a German infantry charge towards your trench position. The feeling is really, really grim. There is little to no light on the map, save for the vehicles and crude fortifications engulfed in red flames burning above the mud-soaked earth. When the character you're playing as dies during the playthrough, the real name of a World War I serviceman with a born and died date appears on the screen. It is a reminder for players that this, you know, quote, game, unquote, is actually based on real events. This might be a game you're playing, but war is not a game. War is real. It's not a joke or something to shrug off.

>> Roman Sotomayor: There's that added humanization. I think it injects some reality that's so necessary into these type of games. You know, war is reality. It's not a game, or at least maybe you and I don't perceive it as a game. There's something else we could think about, right. But either way, you don't simply get to respawn. You know, we can, you know, press F to pay respects, but is that the extent of our engagement beyond the world of the game? Is that really all we can give? Is that all we should give? I don't know.

>> Liam Salcuni: Totally. And it's like, yeah, pressing, it's again, that kind of like cheap grace, pressing F or something like that. You bring up an excellent point, Roman. And that's how many gamers and fans of these realistic first-person military games in this way are completely detached from this harsh reality. That's why I think it's important that franchises like Call of Duty 2 inserting this real wartime footage is so important. This is inspired by real events, Battlefield 1, Call of Duty 2. Real people fought and died. Pressing F doesn't do so much, you know, in this virtual situation. I think it's important to remember that. And again, there's also some additional features of Battlefield 1's opening scene that intensify the harsh nature and reality of World War I. As the first mission progresses, the names of the fallen soldiers appearing on the screen overwhelm the player. There are simply too many names to remember, one after another after another. This is a testament to the hundreds of thousands of unidentified soldiers lost during World War I. People who left their loved ones and families behind to never return, never to be seen again. It's truly heartbreaking and also a really powerful addition to Battlefield 1. We'll revisit memory and military memorials some other time in a future episode. But I think it's, I was playing this opening mission in Battlefield 1, this is something that stood out to me. It's the names of servicemen lost. It is a testament to this. It also just brings in more of this humanization and realism to this virtual, you know, game.

Hi folks, this is SNAFUBAR. I'm Liam Salcuni, and I'm joined by Roman Sotomayor. Today, we take on war-themed video games, their history, development, and social impacts. We are discussing the debut of more realistic war-themed video games. Join us as we continue looking at World War I themed video games, particularly Battlefield 1. Battlefield 1, intense game with a lot of violence and serious attempt to incorporate real history into the gameplay. Games like Battlefield 1 present us with a number of questions.

>> Roman Sotomayor: First being, we might wonder, do these games do anything to help military recruitment?

>> Liam Salcuni: Hmm, that's a good question. And one I never really thought about actually until before we started creating this episode. It's a question also that led us down an interesting deep dive into what is referred to as the Military Entertainment Complex or MEC.

>> Roman Sotomayor: No, stop.

>> Liam Salcuni: No acronyms, okay, okay. All right. This feeds into our follow up question about how much money the US military sinks into these types of games. Is there any sort of funding or stuff going on here in this regard? And here's the truth. Here are the numbers. Today, the US military is often faced with dwindling recruitment numbers. In 2020, around 148,000 people enlisted in the US Armed Forces. That's a 58% decline from 1980. Over that same time, the number of applications to the military has dropped 73%. But the acceptance rate has gone up from 46.9% to 72.3%. This means that in 2020, the number of enlistments reached a 40-year low, and active duty members in the armed forces have declined by almost 40% since 1954. Keep in mind that today the US military makes up less than 1% of all US adults. So targeted recruitment efforts are a must for the US armed forces, especially after the pandemic led to increasingly more challenges, which from the wake of COVID, we're still grappling with a lot of challenges to this day.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, less than 1% of US adults for a military that has around 750 overseas bases in at least 80 countries. And that's the low estimate there. Recruitment is therefore pretty necessary to ensure the continuation of our vast military engagement.

>> Liam Salcuni: Totally. That's where video games come in. It's where they enter, or should I say enter the chat. Video games have entered the chat here. But folks, it's not just video games produced by outside publishers. No, no, no. There are also games produced by the United States military.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Hell yeah.

>> Liam Salcuni: Check this out. In 2002, the US Army produced a free computer game called America's Army. In 2002, the US Army produced a free computer game called, drum roll, please, America's Army.

>> Roman Sotomayor: 2002, I mean, think about the year.

>> Liam Salcuni: Think about the year, think about, well also, you know, yeah, in the wake of 2001, 9/11, so 2002. The purpose of this game was to engage the public by allowing them to, through the game, explore whether military service was right for them through a part of the game titled Soldiers that let players navigate a virtual career in the Army. It includes in-game instructional training sessions. For instance, if you wanted to become a medic in the game, you had to actually pass a virtual combat life-saving course that instructs you on real life strategies for triaging and administering first aid, which is pretty remarkable. You stand, you know, in this simulation, you stand in a classroom and watch real US Army training videos projected on a screen by your in-game instructor. Then you practice what you learned on a medical dummy. So this takes, we've entered an entirely different realm here, right, in terms of virtual reality. America's army is going the distance in terms of that military experience or trying to recreate it at least we think.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Who says video games can be educational? Come on.

>> Liam Salcuni: Come on. And truly that's some crazy realism. Maybe we need more of this feature in video games today. Though I think the focus is on sales and getting people immersed in this like virtual world. I don't know how much of a blockbuster or a big, you know, sale sales, you know, what kind of a sales pitch a more educational video game would look like, but it certainly is that bridge between virtual reality, games, entertainment, education. So it's an interesting start. Oh, and listeners, there was also a parental control option in America's Army; Proving Grounds that let you change the bullets to paintballs. Though it's worth noting, the Army didn't focus on bloody realism for this game. Instead, they honed in on realistic weapons, physics, and engaged teamwork, right, trying to kind of replicate a unit's actions and movements in as much of a realistic scenario as could be created through this game.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Paintballs. I love it. It reminds me of when I would play Modern Warfare with my younger cousin with the sound off so he couldn't hear the death screams and the swearing by the characters. My aunt wasn't a huge fan of that one, I must confess. But with regards to America's Army, I must say that my favorite thing about it is in 2002, it received an acknowledgement from Computer Games Magazine titled, wait for it, best use of tax dollars.

>> Liam Salcuni: Best use of tax dollars. America's Army. I mean, it's trying to give that realistic element and that educational element, but also we have to remember that in the background, there's also this kind of recruitment strategy with the internet and other types of virtual games, video games. This is also a strategy to cultivate some sort of interest in a military career and offering this synthetic or virtual experience is this strategy. And you're absolutely right, as the Games Computer Magazine award for best use of tax dollars, yes. Originally meant to be around $7 million, a Freedom of Information Act requested by GameSpot found that America's army cost taxpayers around $33 million throughout its first decade of development. Whoops. And that is just the cost through 2009. So that's a lot of money, a lot of taxpayer dollars going into funding this type of game, this video game, America's Army. And I also think there was a catch here too, that it was free to play, right. Which puts it kind of ahead of its time. Now we see huge open multiplayer games like I think about like Fortnite or Call of Duty that offer this like free massive multiplayer online game format. America's Army, similarly to was this like online free thing. So it was ahead of its time in some cases, but $33 million throughout its first decade, taxpayer dollars, I think that's not going to probably didn't last too long. And this is true. The army announced in 2020 that they would be shuttering the game's online features, including the game's website. I know.

>> Roman Sotomayor: It's nothing worse than when a game forum goes down, you know?

>> Liam Salcuni: And they shut the server down. It's just like everything is gone. It might happen to Battlefield 1. Within 10 years, usually, some games can retain that audience and that interest. But I think as new first person shooter games come out, there's new maps and graphics and consoles are advancing and adapting stuff. Some of these older games just kind of lose that support. I think it was a big deal when the Halo games shut some of their servers. End of an era. Did America's Army, right, we'll pose this question here. Did America's Army help recruitment? It's difficult to say, really. As the game was released on the 1st 4th of July following the 9/11 attacks. Given how the US military has continued to engage in gaming, one has to assume America's Army did lead to success with recruitment and retention. Because of the way it showed military training and allowed players to engage in a virtual career in the military, players who signed up were now fully aware of what a military career looked like. The hope here was that it would lead to less people washing out after joining. And in some cases, it seems to have worked. Now maybe it wasn't the best sales strategy, but certainly video games and recruitment are a thing. For example, when eSports, and that is competitive professional gaming. This is a real thing. It's probably a multi-million dollar industry now. But when it first burst onto the scene, the US military began considering how they might include this in their efforts. How can they get into the eSports professional gaming world? In fact, in 2018, they founded their own eSports team. That's right. Today, the US Army eSports team is composed of active duty and reserve personnel who play big name games like Fortnite, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, the big, the mainstream, you know, multiplayer Titan games kind of thing. Through their channel on the streaming platform Twitch, which listeners you might know about, Twitch is a widely popular online gaming streaming platform. The US Army on Twitch has hosted giveaways targeted at teens that include redirecting them to military recruit forums. The US Marine Corps has also hosted eSports tournaments aimed at boosting recruitment numbers. So although America's Army is no more, this virtual recruitment strategy or video game recruitment strategy seems to be alive and well in the armed forces like eSports world.

>> Roman Sotomayor: I was just, I wanted to know now if they're playing Marvel Rivals.

>> Liam Salcuni: Oh, do they have a Marvel Rivals?

>> Roman Sotomayor: I don't know. I couldn't find it in the time you were talking. That's okay. I don't have to know.

>> Liam Salcuni: Okay.

>> Roman Sotomayor: So these streams, I mean streaming, for those who don't know, the streams include open mics. So the players, the military personnel are able to talk to their viewers, and it's largely unmonitored. So the players have the opportunity to tell viewers about their military service and what opportunities are available while their viewers watch them play the game, while their viewers can ask them questions in the chat, all these sorts of things. So it is very engaged with the individuals who are viewing it.

>> Liam Salcuni: Totally. And that's a great point, Roman. So you can see how gaming and especially live streaming are clever recruitment tools for the military. Viewers get what Matthew Payne in his article for the Costs of War project titled The Militarization of Video Game Culture calls a direct point of connection to the player recruiters. Payne states that this represents a shift from the militarization of video games to the militarization of video game culture. Again, tracking the success of these endeavors is fraught with difficulty. It can be a challenge to pin down whether someone is joining because of a game like America's Army or their connection to a recruiter via Twitch or another gaming platform. But in 2024, Pew Research conducted a survey that found that 85% of teens reported playing video games with 4 in 10 identifying themselves as a gamer. Boys tended to play and identify as gamers at higher rates than girls. So, gaming. It's no longer a rare pastime reserved for only the nerdiest of teens. Gone are the days of this or of this sort of like trope, I guess. Like everybody plays video games. Even, you know, listeners, you're like, well, maybe not me. I'm not on a console or a video game, Xbox or something like that, which might be the case, but you might catch yourself, I don't know, doing the crossword or a Wordle, you know, even if we don't think about it, we are still in a virtual, you know --

>> Roman Sotomayor: Candy Crush.

>> Liam Salcuni: -- Candy Crush. There's so many popular games. We like games. Games are fun. It's an impressive feat to develop some of these realistic games. But in terms of player engagement and keeping people locked to their screens and, you know, wanting more, things like America's Army really didn't make as deep of an impact as one might assume. So begs the question, how close do these games actually come to presenting a real picture of warfare. Payne warns us that quote, games do not reproduce the social realities of armed conflict. In most cases, these games have eliminated the harsh truths of real world combat. This includes the presence of civilian non-combatants, and the moral complexities of war. After all, you're often encouraged into seeing your player as the good guy. Never the bad guys but the good guys. That doesn't mean all US military members are presented as the good guys, as we see in Modern Warfare 2, where your player is betrayed and killed by his commanding officer.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, that was messed up. I didn't like that. I don't like that part very much.

>> Liam Salcuni: That was crazy. And I remember that scene vividly from the game. That took everyone by surprise, but I think that's a really good point here to kind of unpack too, is that there is so much uncertainty and chaos and an unfathomable amount of stress in real war scenarios. You know, the civilian populations surrounding certain areas, it's for starters, is already a harrowing and stressful situation to imagine. So that's another good point. And again, Roman, to your point, yes, weren't we all stunned by that Modern Warfare 2 ending? That caught us all off guard. We see enemies outside and within the US military in these games. But again, there's still a layer of nuance that's often missing. Popular media can only show us so much. This is where we see our snafu for today's episode. The snafu takes us back to the fetishization and exploitation of US service members and veterans. And by fetishization, say that 10 times fast, I mean setting an unrealistic degree of interest and importance on something while also not really providing the framework or networks of support so necessary for veterans of foreign wars or veterans more broadly in the United States. It isn't that war games inherently fetishize the troops or that players sort of always remain unaware of the real world context from which the games are drawn. But we're left wondering, a little bit, whether these war games might not make war look cool in a way that distances players from the culture and the nation that they're living in. If we spend our free time immersed in online war games, does that shape our perceptions of or responses to news of international conflicts, of war, of violence, both foreign and domestic? If we shoot enough people on the screen or watch enough people get shot and die and get back up in a game, does it diminish the degree to which we're able to approach war as trauma? Or are we simply just overthinking here? And it really is just a game. But these are some, you know, questions to consider here.

All right, listeners, we've reached the end of our mission here. We are leaving the SNAFUBAR. What we explored was war video games, specifically video games that recreate the military experience or a pseudo military experience. Our journey took us through the past and modern games relevant to the military. And we explored the direct involvement the US military has in gaming and still has. There's always more to say and more examples to give. But as we've shown, our main SNAFUBAR here was the societal disconnect or sort of cognitive dissonance between these games and the lived experience of military veterans.

>> Roman Sotomayor: I think it's worth noting, you know, these are forms of entertainment, right. Sometimes referred to even as militainment. And we're not condemning people who play these games because we also enjoy them very much. We're just spinning out the threads here. We're posing questions to you as the listener to consider because we don't have the answers ourselves. The grand scale of our military has embedded itself into the daily lives of civilians. And importantly, it's possible civilians don't give this much thought. and perhaps don't engage with the actual lives of service members and veterans as a result. We like to watch, we like to play, we like to cheer at the TV, but do we actually like to take action to support those whose lives we're living vicariously through?

>> Liam Salcuni: It's one thing to be playing these games, right. You're responding round after round, you know, you're kind of negligent to the fact that these experiences, these scenarios, these weapons, these synthetic theaters or situations that are being reproduced in a video game format. You know, they really, these events really involved human beings, real people. As much fun as these games are, we should remember that service members are put through incredibly challenging situations and uncertain situations when they're deployed. And after all, this is the truth, that war and warfare is not a game. The National Center for PTSD estimates that in 2024, 14% of male service members and 24% of female service members suffer from post-traumatic stress which overwhelmingly develops as a result of combat exposure from military service. Reality hits like a train. And in the context of video games, are we consuming and recreating war to play or as play in a game? And to kind of think about like, what is the significance of this? Is there an element of sort of like desensitized, you know, are we desensitizing ourselves to violence and trauma from playing, I don't know, playing these games. I've even thought it, thought about it too, as just a player. I don't know, as a younger kid, it's like, wow, a lot of these scenarios and situations, people lived through this, this actually happened. Think about World War I. And I'm doing this as entertainment and fun, but it pales in comparison to the actual experience. It in some ways is kind of desensitizing or maybe a little bit misleading, even if that's not the intention put forth by developers of these like bigger games and could be a little bit misleading for audiences recreating this experience. As we wrap up this episode of SNAFUBAR, we want to leave you with a few uplifting notes. For starters, some video game developers are outspoken supporters of the US military, proving that it's not all just fun and games. Activision, publisher of the Call of Duty franchise, Wolfenstein, Total War, and Battlezone franchises, is one of these major supporters. On May 22, 2025, Variety published an article by Jennifer Maz titled, how Call of Duty is getting more veterans jobs than the US government.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Which is like, there's an F in the chat. I'll wait for you.

>> Liam Salcuni: Yeah, so, but here's what we read in the article. Through their Call of Duty endowment, Activision has placed over 150,000 veterans in jobs by raising close to $100 million since 2009. We'll put a link in our show notes to Activision's page about their Call of Duty endowment. But what about actual video games? Moving aside from developers, where do video games fit into the veteran community? Do video games furthermore help the veteran community at all? Well, in fact, what we found current trends suggests that yes, they can. Video games have supported veterans and others through their vibrant online communities found throughout hundreds of different video games. Video game communities are actually extraordinary, particularly these like online multiplayer communities. You navigate and immerse yourself in a game and you chat online with a headset with total strangers, I and probably many others have done this. It's a way to connect and commiserate with people. And the fact that you're talking to total strangers really doesn't get in the way of having meaningful conversations. Oftentimes you're put into a lobby with random people. You have no idea who they are, but you're talking through a headset, you're strategizing. You know, here is some sort of camaraderie and commiserating to a certain extent that you get from these online gaming communities.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, I mean, contrary to what people think, you know, maybe we can learn from playing video games. I mean, there's always ways that you can go south for sure, you know, like anything. People can pretend to be someone else, whatever, you know. But yeah, connecting in real time with people, learning about them and who they are, you can learn some things.

>> Liam Salcuni: And that's right, veterans and active duty personnel are playing these games. It's not just recruiters. And yeah, that's kind of a no-brainer. But it's cool to think about how the games can also tie military and civilian members together simply through the vehicle of a game both parties enjoy playing. Stack-Up, founded by Army Captain Stephen Machuga, is a nonprofit organization that uses video games and specifically these online gaming communities to bring people, veterans, together with one another. Captain Machuga writes that when I was in Iraq, our infantry company received a crate full of third hand romance novels from a library. We used them for target practice on the confiscated arms range. But it was there I realized people wanted to help veterans, but they just didn't know what we wanted. In 2010, his driver in Iraq re-enlisted, deploying to Afghanistan. He contacted Machuga to see if he could get video games and consoles shipped to his base in Afghanistan. You know, something to take his mind off the war. Machuga reached out to a number of notable titans of the gaming industry about donating consoles and games. Consoles and games began arriving at Machuga's door. By 2015, thousands of dollars' worth of games and consoles were delivered to Machuga to send to soldiers overseas. As it turns out, video games are more appealing to soldiers overseas than romance novels. But who doesn't love Romeo and Juliet? I mean, come on. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Now, going a little bit more in depth on this, Machuga and his experience serving in the Iraq War never left him upon returning home. In Iraq, insurgents would leave bombs disguised as debris and garbage in nearby locations to his troops' position. This created a hyper awareness and fear. Survival instincts kicked in. Garbage wasn't just garbage anymore, or taking out the garbage for Machuga wasn't as easy as going to just bring it out to the trash can. It was a frightening reminder of the disguised explosives he saw detonated in Iraq. Video games like World of Warcraft, which has a huge online community, took up all of Machuga's focus and subsequently his anxiety, quelling some of his fears and helping him settle back into civilian life. Fast forward to 2018, Machuga's Stack-Up launched the Stack-Up Overwatch Program, dedicated to providing crisis mitigation for individuals in a variety of online gaming platforms. The Overwatch Program hosts weekly game nights connected to a discord server. It is a place for service members to connect with each other anywhere in the world and offer peer-based support.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, it might sound cheesy, I mean, and perhaps even weird to people who don't game online or who never have, but there's a strange bond that you can develop with these people you meet in the game and like you don't see their faces but thanks to voice chat you can talk for hours with them and you often create a community where you can meet up in game and play together for long stretches of time. There's a sort of disconnect, you know, between the people you know online and the people you know face to face that allows you to share and be more vulnerable than you might be with someone in your everyday life. I mean, after all, you can really lean on your anonymity if you want to. And from that, you can often get real, honest connections and conversations that might help you in ways you never anticipated in this Stack Overwatch Program, for example, through the peer-to-peer support.

>> Liam Salcuni: Absolutely, and these are weekly, still hosting, the Overwatch Program is still hosting these weekly game nights. And there's a number, a variety of different online games that you can choose from to enter into a chat specifically with other service members, other veterans offering this peer-to-peer based support. And it's also a testament to how remarkable it is that these games create an immersive experience that can also be shared between a group of people experiencing it at the same time. Adventure games, shooters, they're even vibrant online communities of farming games like Stardew Valley. Sorry for the Stardew Valley players. I don't know if it's a farming game. It looks like it is.

>> Roman Sotomayor: It is.

>> Liam Salcuni: It is a farming game.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And more.

>> Liam Salcuni: And more. Okay. Well.

>> Roman Sotomayor: It's a simulator, you know.

>> Liam Salcuni: It's a simulator, a farming simulator. If you're interested in connecting with the Overwatch Program, visit stackup.org where you can find their weekly gaming schedule. It's kind of a rotating list of games they got going. So today, we've highlighted some of the issues with war games, voyeurism and disconnection being the primary ones. We also discussed the ways the military uses gaming as a recruitment strategy. But there's good here too. Organizations like the Call of Duty Endowment and Stack-Up's Overwatch Program bring a necessary human element to gaming. It reminds us that we have to strive to hold two truths to be true at once, the good and the bad. That's where we'll leave you today, listeners. I'm Liam Salcuni. Thank you for joining us in another episode of SNAFUBAR.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And I'm Roman Sotomayor. And yes, thank you. Until next time, stay frosty out there.

>> Sarah Hart: You've been listening to SNAFUBAR, a Cal Poly Humboldt production brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Our team includes me.

>> Jeff Crane: And me.

>> Abigail Smithson: Abigail Smithson, producer.

>> Liam Salcuni: Liam Salcuni, writer, researcher.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Roman Sotomayor, writer, researcher.

>> Abigail Smithson: You can find more information about SNAFUBAR on khsu.org.

Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.