Paul Rouse: Treating war as a game is nothing new
Man wearing a virtual reality headset with two soldiers appear in the background as part of the immersive game the man is playing.
In the first week of the Iran war the White House posted a video which intercut missile strikes on targets in Iran with footage from the popular ‘Call of Duty’ video game.
It not clear how many – if any – people died in the missile strikes that were lifted from actual footage shot in Iran.
What was unmistakeable was the violence on display.
The video was immediately condemned by some Americans, including veterans of other conflicts. One of those veterans commented: "They think war is a video game. Inappropriate, juvenile and unacceptable."
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In some respects, this was a piece of war propaganda that was rooted in three basic truths:
1. The war in Iran has been, from the beginning, uniquely unpopular with ordinary Americans.
2. People spend hour after hour on their phones and this was an attempt to get them to see the war in a positive light.
3. Gaming – the playing of video games – is an immensely important cultural phenomenon and becomes more so every year.
There is no point in exploring the morality of the creation and dissemination of the White House videos. The Trump cabal is rotten beyond words, steeped in cruelty and ignorance, devoid of dignity and decency.
Similarly, it is a mistake to think that mixing the footage of video games with the explosion of real bombs reveals something new about the White House, about the people who control it and about their unfitness for serious office.
That has been, for a long time, a simple and obvious truth.
What it does underline, however, is the cultural preferences of those who work around Donald Trump and the generational shift that is at play.
Trump may be an old man, but his foot soldiers are young.
This was apparent from the very first days of the administration. The extent to which gaming and gamers had moved to the mainstream could be seen in the approach of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) run by Elon Musk after Trump reassumed power in the United States in January 2025. Musk’s office at DOGE had a gaming rig – he is an avid player of various games, including ‘Diablo 4’ – and many of the people he brought with him into government were young gamers.
Musk used the language of gaming (‘speedrunning’, for example, which involves completing some or all of a game as quickly as possible on a livestreaming platform as a spectator sport) when setting out the rationale for his approach and policies in office. This ‘gaming as governance’, the impulse to play life with the levers of state, was a destructive failure on every level and ultimately saw Musk leave his formal role and DOGE was neutered.
The temptation is to restate the arguments of critics who are opposed to gaming, of which there have been many. Video games have always been looked down on as a waste of time by those who frown on their relentless growth in popularity.
As Simon Parkin wrote in his book, , they are seen instead as impoverished or depraved or infantile.
On top of that, gaming is usually fingered as one of the causes of loneliness and antisocial behaviour in the modern world.
Finally, it has been routinely claimed – usually with the most unimpressive of evidence, or none – that violent video games are the cause of multiple shootings either by the delusions fostered in shooters or in the training they are purported to offer to those who wish to commit crimes. This is whim and personal taste dressed up as plausible explanation.
It would be convenient to add ‘And used to glorify Trump’s Iran war’ to this list of indictments of gaming.
The implication is that there was a time before video games emerged from the computer research projects of America’s universities and institutes that was somehow better.
This is a moot point.
Look at the relationship between sports and World War I, for example. As Professor Tony Collins has written, "The idea that war was a football match writ large was commonly expressed in Britain during the First World War".
This was a notion particularly associated with rugby. And it operated on different levels.
You had the nonsense spouted by Admiral Lord John Jellicoe, one of the Britain’s military leaders, who believed that rugby was vital to the making of “good fighting men”.
That was bad enough, but when you read newspapers or other documents (including letters from the front) there is the regular reference to war as being similar to a rugby match.
This is partly a matter of language. One rugby player remarked of the start of war that it was “the game for which they had been preparing for so many years.”
In January 1915, the magazine compared the subtleties of trench warfare to that of a rugby scrum. Two months later, a soldier who seriously injured at Neuve Chapelle, recalled playing a rugby match even during the battle: “Our boys out yonder will have their game of football under all sorts of conditions”.
Perhaps it was also a matter of presenting their fright in as flippant a way as possible. Jack King, an English international, wrote in his last letter home in 1916, that “so long as I don't disgrace the old Rugby game, I don't think I mind.” He died that August.
Another rugby player who died in action was Paul Jones, who also wrote in a letter home: “In my heart and soul I have always longed for the rough and tumble of war as for a football match.”
The problem was not the game; just as the problem now is not gaming. Instead, what matters is the willingness of those who rule to spend the lives of others as they see fit, in death as in life.
