“War...war never changes” is the perpetually pessimistic opening of the popular irradiated wasteland romping video game “Fallout 3”'s dreary diatribe against humanity's predisposition towards total annihilation. What utter nonsense—war has changed fundamentally, from tribe against tribe with rocks and arrows to state against state with machine guns and artillery to bloc against bloc with nuclear missiles. The Neanderthals and homo sapiens could never have imagined 200,000 people could be incinerated in an instant, merely at the behest of a man sitting in an excellent suit behind a fine desk 10,000 miles away.

From Maxim's World War I killing fields to the systematic, expertly engineered Holocaust to the completely de-mechanized but nevertheless methodical extermination of Rwandan Tutsis, in the aftermath of war people have invariably tried to make sense of the devastation. Past atrocities inspired great artists and works of art fueled by angst and disillusionment. Today, as news cameraman Jack Daglish said in “Hotel Rwanda,” “I think if people see this...they'll say, 'oh my God that's horrible,' and then go on eating their dinners.”

Today, fine art that expresses real anguish and dread is for the sole perusal of snobbish “New York Times” art critics, who are relegated to irrelevance in the public eye while the Hoi Polloi subscribe to the mass media for endlessly regurgitated opinions about why people hurt each other.

But “we can all talk about war in the abstract, and about how it advances or distorts American interests, but we only occasionally get to see the faces and hear the voices of the people who actually do the fighting.” Rod Slemmons' words are the crux of why video games are the newest, most important medium for coping with war.

Developers are not taking full advantage of the opportunity to convey a message about war, preferring instead to subscribe to old methodologies of game-making that allow them to sidestep the issues that accompany the presence of war. While serious books, movies, and other art forms seek to address war as an aspect of human nature and its effects on the psyche, games overwhelmingly trivialize these questions while unrealistically portraying war as unambiguous and inconsequential. This is an unacceptable state of affairs, considering that the interactivity and audio-visual input of games equips them to address war better than any other current medium of art or entertainment.

Game developers have an obsession with war—one that easily exceeds Hollywood's, at least proportionally—if not because they seek to understand it, at least because their consumer base is equally obsessed. War in video games spans all genres—from shooters to strategy to role-playing—and the genre defines the way the topic of war is broached. Until a decade ago, a game's approach to war was restricted by the resources available to developers, which were in turn limited by the day's technology and the market's wariness of games as a profitable industry.

“Doom,” the seminal inspiration for shooter games, evokes no real connection between the player and the nameless, mute Marine that he plays as, much less the ceaseless combat that encapsulates his existence. He moves from room to room, one man against an endless tide of mutants and demons. All that is ever seen of him is the barrel of his gun and his grimacing face at the bottom of the screen, which is savaged into a brutalized pulp as the Marine's health is reduced by enemy fire. Health packs restore this one possible connection to the lasting effects of war to a pristine state, removing all the consequences of war, so long as the Marine wins—and he always wins, because if he dies he will just be back for more. But there are no respawns or saved games in real life, and the player is detached from the havoc he wreaks.

Meanwhile, the original 1997 iteration of the post-apocalyptic adventure “Fallout,” now just another cult classic with loads of critical acclaim and a weird sense of humor, is draped with a palpable sense of loneliness in the wake of war that breaks through the barrier of simplistic graphics. Players are given a wide variety of ways to react to situations—in fact, it is possible to win the game without firing a single shot—and the paths that players take shape their character and the plot in sometimes unexpected ways. “Fallout” teaches a lesson about consequences, both in the backstory of the nuclear war that preceded the game's events, and throughout the course of the game itself. The trade-off was the inability of the player to jump into the Vault-Dweller's shoes and gun down his enemies for himself, like the “Doom” Marine can. The player is given far more righteous motivation to kill some of his nemeses than in “Doom,” but all he can do is slog through a sluggish turn-based combat system instead of exacting his own vengeance with a succinct mouse click, giving both the player and his character the proper motivation to kill—while still leaving the option not to—but he is separated from the total impact of the consequences because the mechanics of the game divide player and character.

The ability to fully interact with the game from a personal perspective and to be immersed in the game through convincing plot development was rendered mutually exclusive, and developers had to choose between one or the other depending on what kind of game they wanted to make and what they wanted the game to say about the world. Alone, neither was satisfactory for addressing the totality of war.

Perhaps the first game to be universally lauded for successfully combining excellent storytelling and engaging gameplay is “Deus Ex,” from 2000. As the video game industry began to see the light of legitimacy and the rewards of exponential advances in technology, vast resources became available to game developers. They could now express ideas through characters that were more human-like than ever before, and could speak to the player through the sights and sounds of the world instead of a text box reading “it is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”

But instead of following “Deus Ex”'s example, the most popular video games of the early 2000's were the likes of the “Halo” and “Command & Conquer” series, which prioritized the “twitchy,” mindless fun that was the core of video games' mainstream popularity, without concerning themselves with a real story beyond providing immediate justification to shoulder an assault rifle. Today's abundance of technological and monetary resources, along with the acceptance of the game industry as an important market, allow characters to express emotion, worlds to come alive, and messages and opinions to be conveyed to the player through an extraordinarily interactive medium. Instead, video games have been putting entertainment value before artistic value when they no longer need to make a choice, thereby neglecting the opportunity to finally be popularly accepted and make a statement about war, which developers have relied on for so long.

“Half-Life 2” may have been the greatest exception to the norm, and it won much deserved recognition for its emulation of “Deus Ex”'s equal focus on storytelling and gameplay, as well as using a well-crafted physics engine to immerse the player. However, the real triumph of “Half-Life 2” was combining all of its innovative elements into understated instances that defined the world and conveyed a message.

When Gordon Freeman, the protagonist, first steps off of a train into the oppressive autocratic fiefdom of Doctor Breen's City 17, his—and the player's—very first impression of the city is a robotic scanner that curiously floats towards his unfamiliar face and snaps a picture of him with a brilliant flash. The feeling of being constantly monitored and controlled is compounded by myriad security cameras and gas-masked police as the player wanders outside into the twisted world he will have to fight against.

His world will come to be defined by war, but as a means to an end—the quest for freedom that is the real justification for Freeman's actions. From that flashbulb at the beginning to an antimatter explosion at the end, heavy-handed themes of totalitarianism, determinism, hubris, subjugation, oppression and rebellion are not merely present, but provide an environment and motivation defined in terms that people read and watch “the classics” to understand. All of this is conducted from a first-person perspective, meshing player and character and forcing them to come to terms with the irony inherent in a war waged for the sake of humanity.

The most direct input to the player is the character or characters that the player controls, and games of late—instead of relinquishing their reliance on war as a foundation—have put more effort into using those characters as a lens through which a player can get a better sense of the war that defines the game's world. Games with a first-person perspective that place the player inside of the character's head have seen the best use of this synthesis between story and shooting, character and player, but first-person games also have a long-standing tradition of mindless action to transcend.

Thought-provoking first-person games like “Half-Life 2” or “Deus Ex” are not the norm, which is why they receive such high marks in the critical sphere. But games like these are becoming less exceptional as each generation of best-selling games takes greater advantage of the opportunities that previous generations have passed over.

The fast track to making a character accessible to the player is making them feel like just another soldier. “Call of Duty 4,” the 2007 competitor for the affections of the “Halo”-obsessed gaming populace, places the player in the combat boots of a U.S. Marine and a British special forces soldier instead of the invulnerability suit of the Master Chief of “Halo” fame. By casting the player as a more average grunt, there is a more plausible sense of fighting for one's life in the randomness of war—the sense that someone out there is carrying a bullet with your name on it, and you could catch it in your head at any time. Even the next expansion to the “Halo” franchise, the upcoming “Halo 3: ODST,” features the player as an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, one of those poor saps that never survives the first 30 seconds of the mission in any other “Halo” game.

But while supporting characters and nameless footsloggers might genuinely die in droves, the player never truly dies—he either plays until he wins or stops playing, leaving the characters in limbo until he returns. Developers will never allow a player's character to actually die in their own games; instead, they will simply experience the softer death of temporarily losing, thereby protecting them from considering their own death in a video game.

Attaining unity between the story that drives the game and the actions that the player takes therefore holds video games back from fully addressing war in a different way. No matter how senseless the war and death in a video game is, the necessity of allowing the player to continue playing after getting killed mutes the impact. If the man walking point in a game steps on a landmine and gets blown into the canopy of a Vietnamese mangrove, he is dead, and the player sees that. Perhaps he even feels some sympathy for the man, or anger at his death—if the moment is particularly well constructed. A message about war is sent to the player through the sights and sounds of the game he plays. But if the player steps on the same landmine and dies a random death, he simply reloads a saved game from a few minutes prior and gingerly steps around the landmine the second time around. Nothing is learned, and the most powerful opportunity to say something about the brutality of war that compromises human nature and sensibility is wasted.

Games will not start killing their main characters permanently. Instead, players and critics that want games to say something more about war will have to satisfy themselves with the current trend of popular games away from the superhero complex, and wait for some unprecedented new synthesis of elements to allow video games to transcend themselves once again and deliver a purer message. In the meantime, the opinions about war that games hold will have to continually be teased out of their constrictive framework with academic language. Currently, thinking and talking about games cannot approach the experience of playing the game out of simple celebration of the most remarkable participatory medium ever. Because in the end, “Half-Life 2” is just a game about fighting aliens.