How Video Games Change Us

The release of the game Battlefield 1 last month illustrates how video games contribute to this creeping unreality. The first-person shooter is set in World War I. All wars are horrors, but this particular war, the founding trauma of the 20th century, is widely regarded as nothing else. The Great War is known 100 years later for three things: its pointlessness, its lethality (57,000 British soldiers died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone), and the grueling trench warfare on the western front. Battlefield 1's producer, EA DICE, takes pains to acknowledge the unrelenting bleakness of the war, presenting the game's thinly drawn characters as average people caught up in tragic global events and left haunted by them.