A popular video game begins with a small, tactical team of highly trained commandos on a delicate mission behind enemy lines. Two nuclear scientists have been kidnapped, and are being held in a hostile country governed by a cabal of crazed military maniacs. To prevent Armageddon, the commandos—chiseled, professional, and patriotic—must blow away hordes of faceless and murderous opponents, brutes as skilled in combat as they are devoted to their extreme ideology. The game is short—only eight levels—so play it through, and you’ll feel proud to belong to the greatest nation on earth.

Which is, of course, Iran.

The PC game, Special Operation 85, came out in 2007, and is virtually indistinguishable from any American-made, war-themed first person shooter. The only difference is that instead of being named Huxley or McCullin, your character is Bahram Nasseri, Iran’s top agent, and his enemies—portrayed with the same silly relish reserved almost exclusively for Bond villains—are nefarious Americans and Israelis. The game sold tens of thousands of copies, a tremendous achievement in a country where technology is not frequently accessible and copyright laws are not frequently obeyed.

The game’s success was encouraging. That same year, the Islamic Republic inaugurated the government-sponsored Iran National Foundation of Computer Game, which has proven to be instrumental in commissioning, financing, or otherwise supporting scores of games designed to promote the regime’s values at home and abroad. There’s Breaking the Siege of Abadan, which recreates one of the bloodiest battles of the Iran-Iraq War, or, for the more timid, Sara’s New Life, in which a young woman must “protect her morality" from carnal temptations. “The government,” as Vit Sisler, the world’s foremost researcher of the topic, put it in a recent talk at New York University, “believes in games.”

It isn’t hard to see why. From an authoritarian regime’s standpoint, video games serve two complementary purposes: They appeal to the young—about 70 percent of Iran’s population is under 30—much more intuitively than other forms of official communications; and they involve not just passive consumption of information but interactive, pulse-quickening engagement. Teaching kids about the great war with the neighbors to the west is one thing; making them relive it by gleefully slaying virtual Iraqis is another.