Back in June, Kate Cox wrote an article called “We Are Scared Right Now: What Today’s Video Games Say About The World We Live In”. In it, Cox discusses how videogame trends are mirroring our population’s greatest fears by living them on a fantastic scale, multiplying and magnifying them. She argues that as games continue to grow in popularity, the more we will see their presence in the national discussion. I agree with Cox’s conclusion that games reflect our own fears, but I think games are also showing us just how much we’re willing to give up to attain some prophetic notion of safety.

Western hypocrisy is our greatest weakness and our enemies’ greatest strength. Forged in some insoluble cauldron of chest thumping and bravado, we inform ourselves through well-trodden, circular paths of redundant illogic, building great temples of our might and right that fails to see anything that isn’t besotted with the promises of a democracy that even we have lost.

In Ghost Recon, I am the invisible terrorist — the impetus behind that crush of humanity running around me, trying to avoid the barrel of my gun.

In the US public school system, the British empire is more often than not considered the antagonist throughout. We learn of their subjugation of the Indies and Africa, of the Caribbean and the Americas. In our school system, the lesson is often that imperialism is wrong, but I can’t help but feel that the lesson I was supposed to learn was much more pointed — that British imperialism is wrong, but that our American exceptionalism is completely different. Colonialism, we like to believe, is a completely different ballgame from "nation building," that barely opaque euphemism often used for propagating the US's latest puppet-government. Where one is carried out by red-clad nannies in powdered wigs and bad teeth, Americans do it out of the graciousness of our hearts. We are there to help the disenfranchised, to free people from the ruthless rule of tyrants and murderers (the same that we usually have a hand in putting in power in the first place, mind). If you buy into what I am calling the “Clancy Doctrine,” the USA is like the equivalent to some sort of cybernetic Robin Hood, a paragon of democracy and of Being Badass. Having long abandoned Roosevelt’s doctrine of walking softly and carrying a large stick, we now strut around with a stick in one hand, and a dagger in the other. Videogames seek to emulate this — affirming American exceptionalism by glorifying the breaking Geneva Conventions and international law.

In Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, I romp through sovereign lands, invisible in a billion dollar uniform, apparently sowing seeds of justice and democracy, but all my actions really seem to make me into exactly the thing I am supposed to stop. In Ghost Recon, I am the invisible terrorist — the impetus behind that crush of humanity running around me, trying to avoid the barrel of my gun.

Perhaps this is what living in a post-9/11 world is for Americans. Perhaps modern military tactics have become so clandestine as to have become impossible to discern from the very thing we are fighting against. These are our military heroes in videogames: men who break international law with the same flippancy that you might jaywalk or loiter. Flash to E3 and watch as Sam Fisher rips information out of people before slamming his blade into their necks. Go back to Modern Warfare 2 and listen as the general tells you that “You will lose a bit of yourself, but you will save countless lives.” What we’re talking about here is brutality in the name of the nebulous demigod of democracy, beset by evilness all over the world. We’re inundated constantly with the message that anti-terrorism is fought by terrorism and torture.

I don’t mean to reduce this into some sort of “first-person shooters make you violent” white horse that some people enjoy riding into the battlefield of morality. Instead, I bring this up to point out the way in which we enjoy this constant deluge of images of western imperialism, pushing back the natives with superior technology and our undying belief that what we’re doing is the Right Thing. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is not the first game to feature this sort of battlefield of binary morality, nor will it be the last — if anything, E3 is a perfect example of this genre of preponderantly propagandized shooters is becoming more popular than ever.