Warfighter, though, applies that familiar model of the escapist field trip to real, modern battles.Д«ut there's still something unreal here. But these obedient-soldier experiences have always been presented as fantasies involving aliens or the comfortably distant mythology of World War II.

This philosophy has defined the first-person shooter from simple vector-graphics games like 1980's Battlezone to the Doom and Quake games from the mid-'90s. Soldiers do not deviate from their path, and they do not question orders. You're not supposed to think about what you're doing or who you're doing it to you're a soldier. But those effects fade into the background while the mission objective draws players forward down a tightly confined and linear path. The environments in the game simulate depth and openness, with collapsing walls and waves of water rushing over a flooded city. It's unclear just what those were, but the game's closing level is a night invasion of a mountain compound in Pakistan that seems to have been inspired by the bin Laden raid. According to a CBS report just after the game's release, four of these consultants are currently under investigation and face possible disciplinary action for having revealed military secrets. Its development was supported by seven Navy SEAL consultants, six of whom are active-duty, and one of whom fought on the mission that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The game is indeed filled with genuine details, from the operational language soldiers use on a mission to the convincing animations as soldiers climb over walls. Respecting the soldiers and telling the story from their point of view.' ''s everything to us,' Rich Farrelly, senior creative director, told the games website CVG.

Danger Close, the studio that developed the game, says it's meant to honor soldiers by translating their experiences into entertainment draped in realism. Warfighter tells the story of a group of Tier 1 Operators chasing terrorists who have a new kind of chemical weapon, stopping in the Philippines, Somalia, Bosnia, Yemen, and Pakistan. But a separate issue is that when taken together, these two titles create just the kind of fantasy one would conjure from a worldview where mistakes cannot happen. In the wake of Newtown, critics have renewed their questions about the violence these games portray. Two of 2012's most popular games, Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Call of Duty: Black Ops II (which had the best first-day sales in the history of entertainment) take an old genre of video game and places it into real-world, present day (or not-too-distant future) conflicts. This political tendency has migrated into art in some peculiar ways, most visibly in videogames where military shooters are among the most profitable entertainments in the world. The Obama administration treats inquiry into its worst abuses with victim blaming, as when asked about the drone murder of 16 year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki Robert Gibbs suggested the American citizen should 'have had a far more responsible father.'Д«ehold, the First Video-Game About the Millennials Mitt Romney made a hosanna of this pathology with his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. The Bush administration trained us to expect no admissions of wrongdoing.

The victims of these endeavors have been overwhelmingly civilian. This inability to be wrong, to pervert an apology into a reaffirmation of one's self, is familiar after 11 years of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a drone attack program that kills without due process. Obama confessed it was 'thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right.' In essence, the president's biggest apology was for not being good at explaining how he wasn't wrong. In an interview with Charlie Rose over the summer, Barack Obama was asked what his biggest mistake had been during his first term.

Call of duty realism