The month in games: Battlefield 1 leads the charge

Video games have always had an uneasy relationship with war. Using it as a setting is a shortcut to explosive action and easy-to-understand heroes and villains. Yet the fact that it's also the source of death and trauma to millions in the real world makes it an issue that needs to be tackled with a degree of thought and sensitivity, two things for which the games industry is not always known. As games get increasingly realistic and emotionally involving, it's harder to make excuses for their occasionally gauche attempts at representing human conflict. This Christmas's three biggest triple-A blockbusters are united in their desire to tell stories of internecine warfare, even if they can't quite agree on whether to whoop it up or get all Siegfried Sassoon.