Most military shooters — a subgenre of video games with conventions so rigid as to seem ritualistic — try to have it both ways when it comes to their relationship with actual warfare. Players are clearly supposed to find the combat, and the real-world settings, a viscerally exciting way to connect to current events. At the same time, far-fetched plotlines reassure us that this is all just a game; have fun and don’t think too much about what you’re doing.

Spec Ops: The Line, a new game for PC, PlayStation and Xbox, takes the opposite approach. It tries to make the player uncomfortable by lingering on the immorality of the first-person shooter.

When terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, the frame of reference the nation turned to in the surreal aftermath was just about universal. The director John Landis observed last fall, “Almost everyone said, without guile — and it shows how pervasive film is — that it ‘looked like a movie,’ ” adding that film is our “contemporary mythology,” the “shared experience” for people to draw on to help explain the world.

And yet, not anymore. After 11 years of fighting, this frame of reference has shifted from the movies to video games. (This is especially true for my generation, men in their 20s and 30s, most of whom have not served in the military.) The wars are not “like a video game” in the sense meant by those who do not play them: sterile, vapid, devoid of emotion. No, they are really like a video game: sweaty, intense, full of death.