The ultra-realism of war-based games prompts Jon Honeyball to ask some disturbing ethical questions

Writing this in the middle of March has proven to be extraordinarily difficult. The horrifying news from Ukraine fills our daily news cycles with stories that are hard to comprehend. I am always loath to resort to the clichés of “the worst atrocity of the century” and such drivel. War is a terrible thing, and there is no league table that seems even vaguely appropriate for the human tragedy that is unfolding.

That such a thing could happen in a modern European country, where the towns and cities are similar to Romford or Sheffield, is impossible for me to understand. It’s not that I haven’t tried; it’s that the situation is so far away from my life experience that it makes me stop and freeze up.

The closest I think I can get to understanding is to recall my meeting with a family friend back in the late 1970s. She had been at Auschwitz, and had lost most of her family there. She was happy to talk to me, a teenager, about it. I still remember the almost faraway voice as she described what had happened.

Today communication is better than it has ever been. Smartphones allow everyone to be a citizen journalist. If you really want to always be in contact, a satellite telephone will get you that connection from almost anywhere on the planet. When I was young, I remember TV companies having to book satellite time for a live interview from somewhere outside of the UK. Today, the capability can be carried by every reporter. The use of drones for video capture is a new democratisation of technology, too.

I’ve even seen Twitter feeds analysing photos of Russian pilots, working out who was where and at what time, based on facial recognition algorithms. If it’s deemed appropriate for there to be war trials, then the sheer quantity and quality of video data might be almost overwhelming.

Given the enormity of the horror, it might seem almost churlish to mention an experience that made me quite upset, sitting in my living room on the edge of the Fens. There I saw the reporting of an ITV news team caught in their car, under sniper attack. They managed to get out of the car and to safety, although several were wounded in the process.

This in itself was profoundly upsetting. But what really jarred was how realistic it looked. You might think that this is a somewhat stupid thing to say – it was the very definition of “real”. But I suddenly felt quite queasy at the thought of all of those shoot-em-up games on consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox. The rendering quality has improved out of all proportion in recent years. I used to enjoy the early days of games such as Doom and Quake; they not only had a context that was clearly off-planet, but the image quality was so obviously “not real” that it was possible to clearly differentiate the game from reality. Compartmentalising things is something we do, it’s human nature.

Today, I’m not so sure. It’s an off-told joke that you can’t trust anything you see on screen, because of the capabilities of rendering and compositing software to build any sort of reality that you wish to show. However, this footage from inside a car on a street in Ukraine was not in any way false or constructed. It was a cameraman with a camera.

I wasn’t, and still am not, able to rationalise my upset between the realisation that we have created a generation of games players who revel in their skillset in such games, and the abject horror of seeing it for real from a news team. I am sure many games players will say there is no link, that they are two separate things, and that the comparison is both fatuous and offensive. But there is no excuse of “it’s clearly not real” when presented with the astonishing capabilities of a modern game on a console. This will become even more true in the coming years.

I confess that I haven’t spent hours playing the latest such games as I pretty much lost interest in firstperson shooters after the Doom/ Quake era. I didn’t have the time to expend on such gaming, and I prefer simulations such as Flight Simulator.

But I wonder how many people will watch the news, then pick up the controller for their Xbox and fire up some battlefield game, often played with friends, where taking over a city is the ultimate goal. And I wonder how many of them will be struck by the extraordinary discomfort that this should be generating in their heads and their hearts.

I am no fan of censorship, outside of the obviously unacceptable images, but I worry how a significant portion of the gaming industry works, and where it will go with increasing image quality and virtual reality. I have no answers for this. But the similarities between the profoundly upsetting reality and the presumed pleasure of gaming have taken me to a dark place.

I wonder how many people will watch the news, then pick up the controller for their Xbox and fire up some battlefield game where taking over a city is the goal