games

Bohemia Interactive, after complaints from I believe the Red Cross, created a DLC called "The Laws of War", which deals directly with UXO, mines, the Laws of Armed Conflict and similar deadly things left behind after a war. They added anti-personnel mine dispensers, and updated the simulation of cluster bombs to leave behind deadly unexploded bomblets that could go off if a player touched them during the game. This was together with a mini-campaign focused on civilians in a warzone as well as efforts to clean up after the war was over. It was really unique as far as content in a shooting game goes.

ARMA had a huge role in influencing how I think about war. In more structured, accessible FPS games the artillery strikes are always scripted and land where they're supposed to, and there are never civilians on the battlefield. In ARMA, if the person game-mastering for the scenario includes them, there can be civilians mixed in with combatants, or armed fighters in civilian clothing. Most of the bombs, rockets, and artillery are player controlled instead of scripted, so missed shots going wildly off target is pretty common. And, what I saw, is that even when people were being careful, if they were in a fire fight and saw movement, they'd unload on a civilian. Or an air-strike is called in and the pilot drops the bomb off-target and it wipes out a civilian building, or maybe a hospital or school. It added a first-hand context to all the stories in the news about "precision munitions" that "accidentally" hit civilians and killed lots of innocent people. There's no such thing as a precision munition, if you drop a giant bomb in an urban area you're going to kill people. And in the case of urban fighting you're more or less just throwing bombs at random because who fucking knows where you're getting shot from?

Seeing things on the news, then experiencing similar scenarios in a military sim game, gave me context I wouldn't otherwise have - How you make decisions in a fire fight, how you choose targets in an urban environment. It's not the same as actually having been in battle, not at all (though my experiences in ARMA have been frighteningly helpful on the occasions I've found myself in the middle of someone else's firefight), but it's more context that I would have had otherwise.

https://arma3.com/dlc/lawsofwar