Did Today's News Make You Crave Hyper-Realistic Video Game Gun Violence? Call of Duty's Got You Covered.

It might not have been the best day to release a trailer for the latest Call of Duty: WWII downloadable content, but if you're in the business of selling simulated gun violence as entertainment, there's never really a good day. So here it is, the trailer for Call of Duty: WWII's new DLC pack, The War Machine. As you'll see, it lets players experience diverse gameplay modes like: Of course, with the exception of the zombie modes, these are not just random arenas to fire guns at other human beings, but semi-accurate recreations of locations where large numbers of human beings fired guns at each other in the past. So any distaste you might feel at digital images of a soldier burning to death needs to be tempered by the fact that players can learn historical facts about a great civilizational conflict (and one that video games have barely scratched the surface of). For instance, did you know the rate of fire on the German MG 15 was carefully tuned until it could keep a perfect triplet beat to accompany "This is my World," by Esterly, a song that wouldn't even be recorded until 2016? Did you know it was a bad idea to stand in the blast trench of a V2 launch site during ignition?