So the latest Call of Duty sees fit to storm the beaches of North Korea, a digital invasion so reckless that even UK ministers have felt compelled to tut loudly from their leather-bound benches. One might wonder: has the gaming industry, in its relentless pursuit of spectacle, finally lost all sense of proportion? Or is this merely the logical endpoint of a culture that has forgotten the meaning of real war?
Consider the parallels. The late Roman Empire fed its citizens bread and circuses. We feed ours pixels and propaganda. Where once gladiators fought to the death for the amusement of the mob, now we have virtual soldiers slaughtering cartoonish caricatures of foreign enemies. The fall of Rome was preceded by a coarsening of public discourse, a trivialisation of violence. This ‘Call of Duty’ scandal is but a symptom of the same rot.
Let us examine the game’s premise: a full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation, approved by a fictional UN, complete with orbital bombings and commando raids. The game’s developers insist it is pure fiction. But fiction has consequences. It shapes perception. It normalises the idea that some states are beyond the pale and thus legitimate targets for regime change. We have seen this before: the demonisation of Saddam’s Iraq, the caricature of Milosevic’s Serbia. Once the enemy is dehumanised in the popular imagination, the bombs follow in short order.
The British government’s condemnation is welcome, if belated. But let us not pretend this is about protecting North Korea’s sensitivities. This is about protecting the fragile consensus that war is a serious business, not a theme park ride. The ministers who tut now are the same ones who approved drone strikes in faraway lands, who cheerfully sell weapons to the Saudis. Their moral outrage is selective, a convenient pose for the cameras.
The deeper issue is intellectual decadence. We live in an age of cultural exhaustion. Our stories have become repetitive, our myths stale. So we turn to ever more extreme scenarios to shock a jaded audience. Next year, perhaps, a game about invading the European Union. Or a holocaust simulator. The market demands novelty, and novelty demands transgression. Rome burned while Nero fiddled. Today, we fiddle with our controllers while real empires crumble.
What is to be done? A ban, as some ministers have hinted, would be a cure worse than the disease. It would give the game the oxygen of martyrdom. No, the remedy is education. Teach the young what real war looks like: the mud, the blood, the months of boredom punctuated by seconds of terror. Make them read Wilfred Owen, not just watch Call of Duty trailers. Restore the sense that some things are sacred, some boundaries not to be crossed even in fantasy.
But I suspect we have passed that point. We are too far gone, too addicted to our digital opiates. The Roman mob demanded ever bloodier and more elaborate games. They got what they wanted, until the barbarians were at the gates and there were no more games to play. The Fall of Rome was not an event, it was a process. And we are deep in that process now.
So by all means, condemn the video game. But condemn also the culture that spawned it, a culture that has lost the capacity for reverence, for restraint. Until we relearn those virtues, we will continue to slide into the abyss, one interactive firefight at a time.
