There's something not a little bit Orwellian about the state of the modern military shooter. In the novel 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, describes a night at the cinema. All the films on are war films. The one he ends up seeing centres around a ship full of refugees from one of Oceania's (which comprises Europe and North and South America) enemy continents being machine gunned to death by attack helicopters. Winston notes:

"Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank."

It's refugees being shot at, not soldiers. And no-one in the Airstrip One cinema is pressing R2 to shoot the helicopter's guns. But that's where the differences end.

I don't mind the act of killing people in video games. I'm not losing sleep over dropping shells on virtual people from a circling gunship, or trampling Pilots underfoot in Titanfall. Video game violence doesn't have to be anything more than silly competitive fun, and countless shooters – from Bulletstorm to Serious Sam to Painkiller to Duke Nukem – are enduring proofs that virtual killing doesn't need a message to be entertaining. What does bother me is when a nominal entertainment product has a message, and that message is, well, a bit scary.

The PS3 and Xbox 360 generation was defined by the realistic modern shooter. Call of Duty and Battlefield dominated the sale charts year-on-year and spawned more copies across all platforms than even the most hardcore fan had time to play. 'Realism' was the selling point for these titles: real guns, real vehicles, real world locations, and so on. CoD in particular made famous the formula of breaking up the traditional shooter hum-drummery by teleporting players into the cockpit of an AC-130, or giving them fleeting control of a Predator drone, or leaving out Javelin missiles for them to play with. All good, memorable fun – in isolation.

“ the idea that video games can't be used to propagandise is demonstrably untrue."

Usually, this is the point where somebody leaps in to say that these shooters are 'just games', and that to attribute them with any more significance is just tabloid-hackery and hand-wringing. But the idea that video games can't be used to propagandise is demonstrably untrue. America's Army, a first-person shooter developed by the US Army and distributed for free as a recruitment tool, is aimed squarely at teenagers and young adults who might otherwise be racking up kills in CoD or Battlefield. Its Steam page boasts that the game "has more authentic military elements including training, technology, weapons, and audio than any other military game." That's its premier selling point: graphically it can't compete with the triple-As, so what America's Army trades on is its association with the real-world military and its supposed authenticity, to the end of channeling shooter fans into actual shooting at real people. Put another way: if video games weren't a medium capable of changing how people – and young people especially – think about war, the US Army wouldn't have invested its money in creating one of its own.

To its credit, America's Army goes some way to presenting a more true-to-life view of service than its triple-A competitors do. There's no cackling master villain to hunt down and Europe emerges mercifully unscathed. During the tutorial, if you manage to injure your instructor, you aren't punished with blurry game-over screen, but instead appear inside a locked cell in Fort Leavenworth military prison, where you remain until you manually quit out.

But even if, at first glance, America's Army appears to be taking a more responsible view of modern warfare, when you get into the game's multiplayer familiar blockbuster tropes start to appear. You're dropped into different maps, told to fight and kill the enemy team with a variety of different weapon loadouts, and if you're killed, you respawn. As with its blockbuster cousins, America's Army purports to be a realistic representation of war, but the nastier realities – those of serious injury, depression, suicide, PTSD and actual, permanent death – are eschewed in favour of glamourised skirmishes with all the consequence of a game of paintball. Like its mainstream competitors, America's Army presents war as sport.

"I certainly agree that America’s Army is propaganda, and that its portrayal of war is highly sanitized, which puts the lie to the Army’s claims of 'realism'," says Cory Mead, assistant professor at the City University of New York and author of War Play, an in-depth exploration of the military's long and intertwining history with the videogame industry. "On a personal level, I would love to see both the military’s games and commercial first-person shooters be much more accurate in their portrayals of injury, death, and PTSD. But I have no illusions that that will actually happen, unless it could somehow be proven that doing so would increase the number of recruits and boost sales, which seems unlikely."

A game that showed the real cost of war – injured veterans, broken families, ruinous foreign relations for decades down the line – would surely be a harder sell thematically than another familiar save-the-day-hero story.

“ None of these things are true of real war."

But to look at blockbuster shooters, shrug our shoulders and conclude that 'that's just how war games have to be' is wrong-headed. The alternative to nationalistic setpiece shooters doesn't have to be a true-to-life soldiering experience – a European Truck Simulator, but with more camouflage (as Mead says, all the soldiers he spoke to while researching his book agreed that "a video game that accurately represented war would be, as one of them put it, 'boring as s**t'"). War-as-fun might have been the model that dominated the last console generation, but that doesn't mean there aren't other developers already trying to approach the subject in more meaningful ways.

"I’m definitely not a fan of the way war is portrayed in America’s Army," says Cory Davis, creative lead on Spec Ops: The Line, the 2012 military shooter widely praised for its Heart of Darkness depiction of the horrors of war. "A multiplayer game that portrays 'the enemy' in such stereotypical terms, and refuses to let you choose which faction to join, crosses a line into pure propaganda that I feel can be quite dangerous. I don’t think we should glorify, or fetishize the things that take place on the battlefield, but we have to find a way to discuss them."

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"From the start of development, we knew that we wanted Spec Ops to be a different kind of experience. We felt like there was a lack of action games (not just shooters) that did much of anything other than to celebrate violence from a hero's perspective. We did consciously choose to subvert those common tropes, and see where a focus on narrative would lead the development of a shooter. It wasn’t until we dove into the opportunities that arose from a focus on a meaningful, emotional narrative that the project really came to life."

At least at the surface level, Spec Ops: The Line deliberately didn't do much to differentiate itself from the big-budget shooters it was criticising. A third-person squad shooter, it had helicopter chases, gun turrets and segments in which you bomb targets from above via an in-game computer screen. But as it turned out, these familiarities were all a bait and switch, with some very nasty consequences for the game's main character, Captain Walker, who followed the game's linear objective cues all along the moral high ground into a terrible, terrible mistake.

“ I wanted the game to make people question the status quo, and for it to inspire a visceral reaction in them."

"Throughout development, we had an extremely difficult uphill battle," he says. "We had a whole myriad of reactions during our focus tests. We had angry focus testers, sad ones, bloodthirsty ones... I wanted the game to make people question the status quo, and for it to inspire a visceral reaction in them – whether or not they had 'fun'. I heard (and still do occasionally) from quite a few offended gamers and journalists, and was threatened with violence a couple of times. When we saw those reactions, we knew we were asking the right questions."

But critically, while some gamers looking for another pure entertainment product were disappointed, the response from veterans was different.

"I expected a much more varied response from actual servicemen and servicewomen," Davis says. "[But] the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Many veterans have contacted us to thank the team for its treatise on PTSD, and for presenting soldiers, enemies, and civilians as human beings. Family members of veterans have reached out to me with gratitude for the new understanding they feel they have gained of their loved ones emotional journeys."

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Spec Ops was also perhaps the first game of its kind to factor in the civilian presence in modern conflict. Civilians make war complicated. As players, we've been trained to see non-combatants in number of dehumanising ways: either as hostages in need of saving in Counter-Strike (for points) or as obstacles to avoid shooting in, for example, Modern Warfare 2's favela (to avoid losing points). Where civilians appear in games, we reduce them, essentially, to secondary objectives – plus or minus point tokens.

Which might be why most modern shooters avoid their inclusion altogether. Think about all the burning cities you've fought through in shooters, with their houses and civilian buildings all reduced to inaccessible set dressing. Who's living behind these picket fences? Who's organising the lawn ornaments? Where has everybody gone?

This War of Mine, from Poland's 11 Bit Studios, tackles that issue head-on. Its trailer pulls the same trick as Spec Ops' opening helicopter chase, showing familiar-looking soldiers trading rounds in a wrecked city street – before phasing through a wall to reveal the real heroes of the story: the city's cowering citizens. In the game, you'll be forced to scavenge for food, bring back medicine and make hard choices divvying up the limited supplies. All while avoiding the soldiers dug in just outside your front door.

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"It completely changes the [player's] perspective," says the This War of Mine's lead writer, Pawel Miechowski. "War as presented in the mainstream is a series of heroic missions to save the world. Real war is a festival of demons – a place where you have to save yourself, your friends or your family and to save your humanity, if that's at all possible.

“ Games are now at a point in their development as a medium where they can show war as more than entertainment."

"I expect players may be shocked by the kinds of difficulties real people face to survive a war. And I don't just mean physical difficulties, but also on a human level on which your morality is put to the test."

This War of Mine doesn't shoot for the kind of photorealism that defines the first-person shooter market, but along with Davis, Miechowski is a firm believer that games are now at a point in their development as a medium where they can show war as more than entertainment.

"I saw the landing of soldiers on Omaha Beach in Private Ryan and I was shocked," he says. "[It was] a masterpiece. There is a [place] for every good story. So long as a game is a good tool for you to create a story, there surely is a market for it. I think that [the gaming community has] grown up. We're ready to create and play serious stories in games."

This War of Mine and Spec Ops are perhaps as much products of their times as Modern Warfare was back in 2007. In the seven years since CoD 4 changed the direction of shooters on PS3 and Xbox 360, we're more critical of war and more aware of its costs. From a multiplayer standpoint, the big franchises are still unassailable. But when it comes to the stories shooters tell, the worldviews they ask us to adopt and the linear, unquestioning paths they ask us to tread, the lone Western soldier defending the motherland against nebulous foreign baddies is, happily, looking more and more last-gen.

Rich Wordsworth is a freelance games writer and is watching you through your Kinect. He writes regularly writes for Kotaku, GamesMaster and Red Bull. You can follow him onIGN,Twitter and the streets of London (but he'll always know).