There’s an old quote that goes something like “whatever world war III is fought with, world war IV will be fought with sticks.” to which I’d like to offer a brief and contemptible counterargument: whatever World War III is fought with, it will still be featured in Call of Duty: World at War IV. So inescapable is the texture of modern warfare with drones and DDOS attacks that whatever the sticks of the future look like, the costumes we dress them up in will come from how they felt to play with either a mouse and keyboard or a controller in our hands.

World War 1 is listed in history books as an event that has a starting and finishing date. That’s the way it’s explained to highschoolers and go be honest, most college kids doing their first tour of duty on their way to earn degrees and all of that (and all of that). Frank Buckles, the last surviving World War I veteran, died in 2018. Just soon enough to miss this current storm of misery that we’re embroiled in.

I do not consider, personally, the back of the box quote for Battlefield 1 to be a moral failure of any time: It’s actually pretty funny the american tribute to World War I is a game trying to sell me on the chance to see the birth of all out war. Our chief export anywhere appears to be military power, and what we really love to do is take all of that exported hardware and bring it home.

Who said the tactics we fight our enemies with are the tactics we suppress our people with? I want to hope it was one of those great photojournalists of the late eighties, mid nineties. Everyone who died in World War 1 was a hero, every great death and explosion that causes a respawn just happens to a videogame character: but what is war without heroism?

War’s got one goal, the way I look at it: I need to make sure regardless of what the menu title, the team that often on the map is RED to my BLUE needs to not win. That’s it. I will do whatever in my power necessary to make that happen. If I win, I get rewarded by getting to spawn on the other side of the map this time.

In conflict, we draw out trenches and routes and ways of passing each other by. Playing on the other side of the map is seeing the totality of confrontation: the sniper that killed me has to force their crow’s nest over, now. It’s my turn to play with all of the same toys.

Everyone who dies in war is a hero worth a photograph – a subtitle below their military photo in the newspaper or online. Countless fields of coffins draped in American flags. Outside of corn, it’s one of the USA staple crops that the entire world is dependent on.

There are 150 Veteran Memorial Cemeteries in the world where all of the assorted college-aged Now Heroes go when they die, one day if the number holds they’ll be forcing up on the borders of the towns and cities they’re located in. A wall of heroes encroaching on your town so thick that nobody seems to mind the smell of mulch and rot anymore, covered up by that always standing green crabgrass.

Now you can be a War Hero before you die, videogames are obsessed with them. Master Chief, Captain “Soap” Mctavish. Men who do what they need to to get the Job done. Every variety of hero a War Hero, from Commander Shephard to The Arisen in DragonAge – all heroes must toil under and raise a banner of war to be recognized. Suffer under these systems, but do not change them. Earn your place under a stone cross.

Multiplayer First Person Shooters are filled with heroes, too – little private hero narratives unleashing themselves all over the place. The chaos of deathmatch gives way to competitive capture-the-flag or Terrorists foiling various Counter Terrorist plot. We weren’t always heroes, you know, sometimes we were just kids playing with guns.

There’s the Hero Shooter, now, a genre so defined in what it’s trying to tell you that it puts it right there in the name. Two groups of people, representing various walks of life in armed-conflict come together to Push a Cart or seize an objective. Both sides clearly represented, indistinguishable from each other. Games in this Genre will have Yakuza fight next to French Assassins, American Superheroes – all featured as the last holdout between society and total anarchy.

Overwatch was the first one of these, catching paramilitary war-operators in superhero garb and exporting them to fantastic locales the American’s playing them might not ever be able to see. A broad cross culture of representation is always included, but that’s old hat. We know women can commit war crimes, but stripped from reality and handed over to fantasy: we want every person of color to fight, too, as long as the guns aren’t pointed at us.

Across the seas and abroad, finding out what the “rest” of the world thinks of United States Occupation seems like a hardline. Article after article of French, British, Spanish – whatever the soldiers say is taken as word and writ of law. The hardest working, the best equipped. We’re all Real American Heroes out here. There are about three ways to come back to the united states, all of them that start with “a hero” really mean dying or becoming part of the propaganda machine. An aimless, all encompassing toy factory that converts horror into pulp into shlock into bumper stickers. It’s not true that we export mostly war, we might start exporting Blue Lives Matters stickers too.

Police, Religion, War, Politics – all things I constantly hear aren’t allowed to be talked about at Bars, the Library, or in public. The Toy factory keeps turning out new bits of plastic, but none of us are allowed to notice. It would be too Impolite. Start pointing out the way the Pentagon invests billions of dollars a year into Superhero Movies and Videogames and people might start claiming you want to politicize everything. Who says government politics have to be politicized? They just want their Military Hardware – everything from Iron Man Suits to Military Battle Dress to be represented truthfully and authentically.

The Military industrial complex is the only business in the world that is always buying and always selling. Everything gets turned on its head – give it a reason, give it a gun and send it somewhere else. Whatever way it makes it home: the end of the round or in a casket, it’s a hero.

There are private little wars on terror happening all over the world on Game Consoles. Fantasy gives way to reality – I am a hero playing a soldier. Even the bright and colorful ones, well, those are still heroes. I sit knowing that the war will come home. The hero shooters are coming that take place in city centers Post Protest (but the protestors will be Robots or….), that the extraction missions might happen in homeless camps. Game Developers love talking to soldiers, they love talking to gun companies, and when the boots on the ground are at fucking home, who do you think they’re gonna love talking to?