The Gamification of Modern War in the Context of Violent Video Games
December, 2025.
It’s safe to say that video games have been around for the better part of a century now, and have come to influence many people’s adolescence. Maybe if not directly playing them, you’ve likely seen the influence of video games nearly everywhere: in advertisements, decorations, partnerships with companies, in the news, etc. Violent video games in particular have been pervasive since their inception in the mid-70s, causing controversy aplenty particularly among parents over negatively influencing children. Though most of this controversy has largely fizzled out in recent years, the question of to what extent video games influence us still remains. What this project has endeavored to look at specifically is how video games impact our ability to engage in modern warfare.
In the U.S., according to a relatively recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in May of 2024, 85% of teenagers play video games, and of that 85%, just over half say they play games that contain violence [1]. This is a substantial number of people, and considering the age that people tend to develop their moral compass, especially when concerning violence, is during teenagedom, this number develops a new context.
There tend to be two different arguments when it comes to defending violence (in video games, as well as in general): 1) this violence is necessary for progress and 2) this violence is carrying out a form of justice. This first type of justification, while prevalent in video games, is wholly unacceptable in the real world. Though you may need to enact some form of violence for the sake of game progression, there is no circumstance in which violence against other people in the real world is relevant nor necessary. The second type of justification is harder to assuage, however. The idea of ‘moralistic violence,’ or committing acts of violence in order to right a wrong, is a popular trope in the media (and as such, in video games too). Teenagers, it seems, who are repeatedly exposed to violence tend to see an increase in intention to engage in this moralistic violence[2]. Whether or not video games can be incorporated in ‘exposure to violence’ is arguably up for debate, however it must be stated that those who live in settings that are exposed to violence at an early age tend to match the demographics of those who enlist in the military in the United States[3].
The United States military Modern warfare has found a lot of ways to incorporate modern technology. Of course, one of those ways is through video games. Using the term ‘video game’ may, on the surface, seem inappropriate when discussing software used in warfare. I disagree with this idea. The software used in drone applications (in which bombs are dropped on weapons, equipment, camps, and people), though there are many similarities to video games, are not advertised as being video games. This does not negate the fact that they heavily resemble video game interfaces and systems. The U.S. military is known to use controllers identical to that of an Xbox system and train people on video games such as ‘Duck Hunt’[4]. One could assume that this surface-level similarity may lead to subconscious conflation between the two: of course you know that you are engaging in warfare, but doesn’t it feel so much like a game?
Rather harrowingly, the Ukrainian Military in its ongoing conflict with Russia has admitted to ‘gamifying’ its war to motivate soldiers. In late October 2025, the New York Times released a piece documenting this gamification. The game is simple: in order to get better equipment for your team, you must earn points. To earn points? Harm, kill, or capture an enemy soldier[5].
When asked if this gamification of war seemed dehumanizing, Mykhailo Fedorov, the minister of digital transformation (and the one in charge of the creation of this game) said that the act of starting a war (in reference to Russia) in this day and age was what was ‘inhumane.’ Though this response could be debated, the actual act of gamifying life or death scenarios is morally compromising. One might wonder how on earth could someone engage in something like this? To answer that, I ask you to look at the modern web.
There’s a level of anonymity that the internet provides its users: you make a post or a comment on some forum or social media platform with nothing but an IP address to identify you (and who has the effort or time to look up an IP address?). If you so choose, you could interact with the internet with no accountability whatsoever. Hiding behind a screen, many say. Your actions on the web are not you, they’re numbers and bits that act for you. That’s the shield a screen provides.
That same anonymity is pervasive in video games. Think about online game rooms—unless you are playing with your friends, very rarely do you know anyone there, and vice versa. No one there knows you, and they certainly aren’t going through the effort to find out. How easy would it be to say or do something that would never track back to you? Anonymity isn’t the only thing a continued exposure to a screen provides. As one becomes more and more familiar with playing a game, especially those with repetitive play like ‘First Person Shooter’ games, the less and less sensitive one becomes to their actions. This anonymity and desensitization due to prevalence cannot be overstated in the application of video game-like software in military settings. Those who grew up their entire lives playing video games, even if they were inherently violent, are going to be, on some level, desensitised when exposed to something that parallels a game-like simulation. It is why we must question the methods of which militaries train and operate their very real weapons in war. At what point will war seem entirely like a game?