 Dazed and confused, you exit your downed helicopter into what seems like hell itself. A bright red, glaring and encompassing in its timbre violates your vision as the stale air of the atomic heat engulfs your lungs, starving you of what little oxygen you have left. The pain and disorientation you feel is quelled by your curiosity somehow. Your last steps will be to take in the destruction that humanity has wrought by a weapon that summons ingenuity and malice in equal measure. Nestled in the backdrop of collapsing buildings and steel stripped of its metal, and remnants of life that once was in the form of houses, cars and playgrounds, is a cloud shaped like a mushroom, an image now so iconic that it has been reduced to cliche. Famously, Robert Oppenheimer proclaimed, Now I am become death the destroyer of worlds after witnessing the destructive power of nuclear weaponry. Then the US would drop atomic bombs in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A scientist realized his work was not ethically neutral, but unfortunately, the revelation of complicity only comes after one commits a deed. These events now live in our cultural memory, in both victims and perpetrators. Art from Japan has been wrestling with the events of that fateful day for decades, whether in books, anime or even games. Akira conjures the imagery of the atomic bomb, of ravaged streets and science run amok and of the horrors that follows in its wake. But so too does Hideo Kojima in Metal Gear Solid. The backdrop is the anxieties of the nuclear age, kicked off by Fat Man and Little Boy, but carried through the entire Cold War. Metal Gear are mobile nuclear weapons, uniting Japan's love for mechs and the trauma of the past. The game's protagonists are asked to disarm these monsters. We are compelled to stop the proliferation of nuclear weaponry and bear witness to its contaminating influence. But then where does Call of Duty 4's scene stand in relation to this? Is it critical or fetishizing of nuclear weaponry? As it rips through wood and metal and human skin without discrimination? Or is there a perverse beauty here? Is it framed with a poetic cinematography that allows us to witness the brilliant achievements of atomic physics? Call of Duty 4 was a revolutionary shooter in many ways. It appropriates the haunting and conflicted iconography of war, the confusion, the camaraderie, the cacophonous symphony of destruction, but marries it with aesthetics, with the beautiful imagery of movies like Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan. However, it creates an aesthetic not out of the binary morality of World War II or the unjust savagery of Vietnam, but the complications and sociopolitical mess of modern warfare, of wars that still ravage to this day in some capacity. Old wars relied on art forms like photography and poetry and television and cinema, the picture of a flag hoisted amidst chaos, a flander's field where poppies grow, but now we have interactive entertainment to give life to our impulse for administering death. How can poetry exist after World War II, some said, to which some replied, how could it not? Out of trauma seems to come art, perhaps as a way to cope or perhaps as a way to glorify, but aesthetics has now gotten confused with representation, from the imagined image to an image that leaves nothing for the imagination. Representations of war can serve many functions, it can be propaganda or it can be critical. Some say an honest representation of war is inherently critical, that all an artist needs to do is to foreground that which already exists. However, is this how war media is really consumed? The strange thing about interactive depictions of war is that it synthesizes our modern consumption of war. It blends the cinematography of film and photography with the aesthetics of visual images, with the real way modern war is consumed, through journalism. There used to be war artists and war photographers, but now there are war journalists and correspondents, depicting war from the first and third person. Call of Duty takes on a new aesthetic dimension that it is a form of participatory embedded journalism, but instead of capturing the war, we are instead captured by it. On television, images filmed by war correspondents and their cameramen let us catch a glimpse of actually being there, amidst the bullets, the dusty terrain and the mechanized monstrosities of modern warfare. In game, we are viewing the world through the lens of a camera. In fact, blood and dust and lens flare and camera shake are all present. It is as if we are filming these horrors for others to see. However, interactivity and the way war games use it adds something else, fun. Levels in Call of Duty are carefully choreographed in edited cross-sections, never resting on one scene, mechanic or scenario. There is always a kind of pseudo propulsion in these games as NPCs berate you to keep pace with the rhythms of warfare. However, everything is expertly paced so as to never feel constraining. The first mission aboard a cargo ship, crew expendable, as you move through its drenched playground like you do a haunted house. There is an approach, a build-up, but also a climactic explosion, gunfight and narrow escape. We are participating in interactive cinema as members of an elite group of SAS soldiers. It is a glorious fantasy. All gillied up shows how entertainment can be sustained even during stealth missions, using the tension of wide open space and the thrill of an assassination mission to keep players vexed. Your squadmate guides you through a carefully manufactured Potemkin village. You crawl through a battalion of tanks and infantrymen, hoping not to be discovered. You navigate through the irradiated remnants of a Chernobyl turn to rust. You find a vantage point to assassinate a leader of an armed insurgency group whilst accounting for the Coriolis effect. This is beautifully rendered in edited interactive drama, with war as the aesthetic backdrop. What's funny about the tight editing and rapid character switches that characterize Call of Duty 4 is that it feels schizophrenic. It feels like a collage of experiences reminiscent of a hazy dream as much as they do accurate depictions of war. I could not tell you what the plot of any Call of Duty game was if I didn't read it somewhere. Experiencing the plot of these games feels like being inundated with exposition from a novel in Latin. It's just noise uttered by men in suits that have very little to do with the reality of war. I suspect this might be an unintentional effect of the way Call of Duty 4 is designed, but it creates a soldier's experience that makes you feel insignificant, disassociated, and disconnected from any kind of geopolitical machinations. Which is why this scene in Call of Duty 4 is so fascinating. It strips away entertainment, momentum, and jarring shifts in action to force us to meditate on the pure aesthetics of warfare, its final culmination. Interactive cinema feels more like photojournalism here. It is a first-person account of war's destruction, a soldier's expendability, and our inevitable disempowerment and forces beyond our control. There have been more explicit attempts at critiquing war and games, to use the language of interactivity to create procedural rhetoric. If Call of Duty is saving Private Ryan, Spec Offs the line is apocalypse now. It appropriates much of the same imagery, tone, and style of modern warfare, but adds tragedy and meta-fiction to it as well. American exceptionalism has turned into a digital diatribe by Noam Chomsky as he lectures us about the tyranny of foreign interventionism and the crass imperialism of modern empires. We murder and kill for the indulgence of an impulse disconnected from the implications of our actions. War is also not just experience from the perspective of a soldier, and to be at war is not always to be mired in conflict. Civilians in the Palestine-Israel conflict are caught in the crossfire, always living on a knife's edge. This war of mine places us as a civilian, as we scrounge for resources to survive amidst the moments of quiet that punctuate the chaos of war. The horrors of war brings out the best of us, but also the worst. We may be forced into stealing, manipulating, even killing. This has a psychological impact though. There are consequences to indulging our inner demons. It was only after we had global wars of unprecedented scale did we diagnose something we now know as pervasive in war, post-traumatic stress disorder. And because of this, war depicted in games can never be authentic because it is always protected by the magic circle of play. Some argue games like ARMA are powerful critiques of war. It is more grounded, more realistic. However, it is never fully immersive because it is always hyper real, a representation, an aesthetic mural of the real thing. This hasn't stopped people from using games both as recruitment as well as training. America's Army is a game sponsored by the US Army, not just to propagandize, but to advocate for enlistment into the military itself. The thing about video games though is that it is actually both a physical medium as well as digital one. There are consoles and computers and peripherals in addition to pixels on a screen. This side of games, the research and development of computational devices and software has always been embedded in a culture of militarism as much as the games they host. War has changed though, as Solid Snake proclaims, when technology blends with our impulse for destruction, new more impersonal and abstract tools of destruction start to arise. The AC-130 mission was another aesthetic revelation for the modern shooter. It portrays war stripped of its beauty and honor, its glory and purpose, its poetry. It is us casting bolts from the sky as Zeus did, incinerating ants on the ground. Strategic optimization whilst ignoring the fictional consequences, this is how we play most games, and this mission for grounds that essential aspect of playing any simulation of war. Was any of this intentional? Probably not. But to take a moment to reflect on what is happening here is always troubling. All the honor of fighting a fair fight is destroyed by the absurd asymmetry of an agent of destruction raining fire from the sky. War has become the domain of cowardice, where people sit in the comfort of safe places and press buttons to kill people. And so then, Spec Ops the Line tries to further foreground us. It forces us to walk through the valley of death, our distant weapons of war deliver. Chemical weapons and white phosphorus are banned by the Geneva Convention, perceived as inhumane ways to terminate someone's life. But our use of it here was necessitated by the fiction. We had no choice. I think it's safe to say this scene doesn't exist without the AC-130 mission. It is the antithesis to the thesis that is modern warfare. Regardless, a condor point naturally arises. How absurdly euphemistic is humane killing as a concept? Or something more pervasive, collateral damage? Killing civilians is framed legally as an unintentional consequence of the horrors of war. But I propose this question. Has there ever been a war where civilians were not killed? In fact, where they have not been directly targeted. This makes the no-russian mission in modern warfare too as subversive as it is tasteless and vulgar. This is humanity in its darkest and purest guise, without aesthetics or art. The thunderous machismo of helicopters rolling across the midday sky. The vicarious fantasy of embodying a special operative as you sneak through Russian fields at the break of dawn. The enrapturement of brilliantly devised set pieces and immersive vehicles of embedded journalism. And in many instances, earnest attempts at leveraging war to critique war itself are simply distracting from this one undeniable truth. Murder. This scene is then encompassing in more ways than just a nuclear bomb is. It revels in the aesthetics of modern warfare, appropriating destruction to appease our aesthetic sensibilities. But is also subversive, showcasing its stark and impersonal immorality. It forces us to experience war in the first person as both a journalist and a soldier, real and grounded and immersed in a fictional sensory world that is consumed as escapism. But it is also fake, a designed playground that is immune from the real vicissitudes of war. It is celebratory, but also critical, because this scene is both a novelty in a game about spectacle, but also because it encourages a moment of reflection, divorced from entertainment, from fun. However, its ultimate aesthetic lies in how it simply reveals what war is and always will be, a wasteland devoid of any life.